High Court Hands LDS Church Win On Controversial 101-Foot Cody Temple

When the city planning board for Cody, Wyoming, permitted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to build a temple that will reach 100 feet in height with its steeple in a residential neighborhood, that decision was final, and a group of concerned residents didn’t file their court challenge early enough to change it.

That was the decision by the Wyoming Supreme Court on Friday, which upheld District Court Judge John Perry’s August 2024 ruling denying the group Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods (POCN) the ability to challenge the temple’s conditional use permit in court.

The temple, now being built on a 4.7-acre parcel of land the church owns within Cody, is designed to stand 24 feet tall — with a 76-foot-11-inch steeple topping it.

The church approached the Cody Planning, Zoning, and Adjustment Board in May 2023 for permission to build the temple in a neighborhood zoned as “rural residential” — where a 30-foot building limit governs.

The board scheduled a special meeting for June 15, 2023 to consider the church’s special exemption request, site plan, and conditional use permit application.

People had until June 8, 2023, to submit public comments — and hundreds did, both in support and opposition to the temple.

Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods opposed any grant of exceptions to the zoning ordinances. The group raised concerns about the temple’s lighting, its height, and impacts it would have on residents’ views of the night sky and scenic surroundings, the high court’s order recounts.

Passing The Smell Test

Then-City Planner Todd Stowell (who stepped down in 2024) had prepared a 42-page staff report for the board ahead of the meeting. His report noted that under the city’s zoning code, building height refers to the distance between the average finished grade and either the highest point of coping on a flat roof, the deck line of a mansard roof or the height of a point midway between the eaves of the main roof and the highest ridge line of a gable, hip or gambrel style roof.

Stowell contended that the proposed temple didn’t exceed the maximum building heigh of 30 feet because it has a flat roof – and the average finished grade to the highest point of the coping of the flat roof was fewer than 30 feet tall, the order says.

Since the steeple wouldn’t block rain and snow from its 100-foot peak, and no one could live in it, Stowell concluded that the steeple didn’t count for overall height.

The planner recommended approval of the church’s plan, subject to 15 conditions, and asserted that the seven factors the board had to consider for the permit had all been met.

These factors are:

• Whether the building meets the use and dimensional standards of the zoning district.

• Whether its use is compatible with other nearby building purposes.

• Whether its operational characteristics would harm those around it.

• Whether it would include necessary facilities to its use.

• Whether it would drive living costs up.

• Whether it would destroy a scenic or historic feature of significant importance.

• Whether it fits the Cody Master Plan.

Just How Many?

The board considered the church’s site plan and moved to approve it.

Three of the five board members present voted in favor of that motion. One abstained from the vote, and the fifth opposed the motion. Two members weren’t present at the meeting: one having self-recused altogether, and another having gone out of town.

The board believed that the church’s site plan approval had failed since three aye votes didn’t comprise a majority of the whole board, though only five members were present.

Next, the board moved to approve the conditional use permit – with the staff findings Stowell presented, including the finding that the height was legal.

Four members voted in favor. One member opposed the motion. One board member had self-recused from the meeting altogether, and the seventh was out of town.

The Cody city attorney had advised that the building height interpretation and the church’s request for a special exemption (which the board had tabled) would remain separate applications, for discussion at a later date, the high court’s order says.

That’s A Hiccup

Six members attended a June 27, 2023, meeting of the planning board.

When going over the minutes from the June 15 meeting, four members opposed a motion to acknowledge the proposed temple’s height as lawful. 

And the board chair explained that there’d been “a little bit of a hiccup in the procedural side of things” during the June 15, 2023, vote, where the board hadn’t meant to accept the building’s height as lawful – but had done so inadvertently by accepting the city planner’s findings via a vote.

Someone made a motion to reconsider the previously-approved permit – and to condition that permit on the approval of a special exemption pertaining to the temple’s height.

And the board tabled the site plan.

Church Says Nope

The church on July 27, 2023, challenged these actions in the district court, saying the board didn’t have the authority to reconsider the findings it had adopted prior, and the board didn’t have the authority to table a site plan it had already approved.

Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods asked to intervene in that challenge but didn’t file a counterargument of its own, the Wyoming Supreme Court’s order says.

The church on July 21, 2023, withdrew its request for a special height exemption.

And four days later, six board members held a meeting, discussed the site plan and again voted to table it. The board then made various findings, saying that the roof did in fact fit the neighborhood’s height limit.

It had the church’s conditional use permit – with amended findings – recorded in the Park County Clerk’s Office on Aug. 29, 2023.

On Aug. 21, 2023, Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods filed a challenge in the district court, saying the board’s passage of the permit at the July 25, 2023, meeting was “arbitrary and capricious, contrary to the law and unsupported by substantial evidence.”

These are terms found in the law by which people can challenge board actions: if they can show the board’s actions weren’t well grounded in law and were, rather, random or impulsive.

But people have a tight, 30-day window in which to make those claims against a board’s actions and get a court to review them.

The church also lodged an issue with the court: saying the board didn’t have the power or authority to amend its findings on the already-passed permit, at the July 25, 2023, meeting.

Broke The Church’s Way In The End Anyway

On Aug. 8, 2023, the board approved the church’s site plan — subject to 15 recommended conditions and two more conditions related to the lighting and site.

Two weeks later, POCN filed another court challenge, saying that meeting wasn’t well-grounded in law or evidence either.

The church, once again, lodged its own issue with the court, saying the board didn’t have the authority on Aug. 8, 2023, to revisit a decision it had finalized two months prior.

None Of This Belongs Here

The district court lumped these challenges into one court action, and found that the board’s June 15, 2023, site plan approval had been binding.

While a Wyoming law requires that a majority of the board’s members vote in favor of an action in order to pass it, that law refers to votes on zoning ordinances – not building ordinances, the Wyoming Supreme Court’s order notes.

So while only three members of the board voted to approve the site plan, their presence comprised a majority for that vote. This also fits with a Cody ordinance on the topic, says the high court’s order.

The court could still have reviewed all that under the “arbitrary and capricious” language – if not for the fact that the challenge was filed after the 30-day deadline.

So the judge concluded that he lacked authority to hear that challenge.

We’re Going To Cheyenne

Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods Appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court, saying its challenge wasn’t past deadline, because the June 15, 2023, vote – in the group’s view – wasn’t final.

The group contended that the “final agency action” it was challenging (and within deadline) happened at the Aug. 8, 2023, meeting.

Acknowledging the same statutes and city ordinance regarding vote majorities that the district court judge had interpreted, the Wyoming Supreme Court likewise concluded that the group lodged its challenge after the lawful deadline.

“Nothing in Wyoming law or in the city of Cody ordinances allowed the Board to reconsider its approval at the subsequent meetings,” says the order.

That makes the contested June 15, 2023, vote final, the high court wrote. And that places the citizens’ group’s August court challenge outside the 30-day window.

Confusion Doesn’t Make A Mulligan

That meeting was, POCN noted on appeal, fraught with confusion – including the city attorney’s advice that the board could still revisit the topic of “building height.”

It is not clear whether the city attorney knew, when offering that advice, that the board would be adopting all the staff findings, including the one on the height requirement.

Stowell also warned that if the board “agreed with” his findings in a vote, it would be adopting those findings.

“Even if some Board members may have intended to reserve the height issue for future action and mistakenly believed that they had done so,” says the high court’s order, these assumptions do not override the clear language of the motion and are not grounds for the Board to modify a previously approved (permit).”

SCOWY Didn’t Go There

One of the major allegations from early in this case did not surface in the Wyoming Supreme Court Order.

POCN in its legal challenge had claimed that Stowell, a member of the LDS church, had a conflict of interest. One of its filings showed that multiple members of the planning board believed Stowell had conflicts of interest with the church that influenced the advice he and the city attorney gave to the board.

After announcing his determination that the site plan had been approved, Stowell told a planning board member, who is also a member of the church, via text that he had “goosebumps from feeling the Spirit” after making this determination, Cowboy State Daily reported prior from a court filling.

Around this time, Glenn Nielsen, a prominent member of the Cody community and LDS church member who donated the land for the temple build, also texted Stowell and told him that if he ceases to be employed at the city he would be welcomed as a real estate manager or project manager at his business the next day, the records show.

Numerous residents emailed city staff to express concern about Stowell’s actions on the temple approval process.

Yeah Maybe Shouldn’t Have, Says Admin

Barry Cook, Cody city administrator, told the Cody Enterprise this week upon his retirement that he wishes he’d handled the temple approval differently; and he regrets “not taking a more aggressive role as far as disqualifying the city planner.”

“I could see very clearly that he was very biased” toward the end of the process, Cook told the outlet.

Stowell could not be reached via his listed number. 

He wishes the community, and the church had come to a better resolution regarding the steeple, Cook added.

To Debra Wendtland, lead counsel for Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods, that admission is too little, too late.

“In light of the admission of the city administrator – that he was wrong to not have removed the planner, and that that planner was biased and was not impartial, it’s even more difficult to read the Supreme Court’s decision today,” said Wendtland, who also noted that the high court didn’t address the reported conflict of interest.

The decision is “unfortunate,” she noted, “but we respect the decision of our Supreme Court.”  

The church did not immediately return a request for comment submitted via its lead attorney Matt Micheli.

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.