After two years of battles at public meetings and in the courtroom, the fight over The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ new temple in Cody is over.

The City of Cody’s planning and zoning board approved the project in 2023 and construction began last fall, but a legal challenge from a group of neighbors opposed to the temple’s location remained pending until Friday. That’s when the Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed that the suit from Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods was filed too late in the process and dismissed the case. 

For local Latter-day Saints, “it is a significant day and another step forward to the completion of the temple where we can practice our faith in a House of the Lord in this area,” Andy Jacobsen, president of the church’s Cody Wyoming Stake Presidency, said in a statement.

As for Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods, the group called the ruling “the final decision.”

“We fought the good, hard fight and have no regrets,” the group said in a Facebook post, thanking its supporters.

Friday’s decision concludes a tumultuous planning process that divided the Cody community — and was marred by confusion.

An accidental approval

In its ruling, the Supreme Court effectively held that the city’s planning board approved the temple’s plan by mistake.

The board’s initial June 15, 2023 gathering ran for nearly six hours and drew a few hundred attendees. Toward the end, the five board members present believed a motion to approve a site plan for the temple had failed, because it didn’t get a majority of the votes of the full seven-member panel. However, both a district court judge and the Supreme Court found they only needed a majority of those present, so the plan had actually passed.

Additionally, although the board members thought they had postponed a decision on the most contentious part of the temple design — its 100 foot, 11 inch-high tower — the courts held they inadvertently OK’d the height when they separately voted to approve a conditional use permit for the project.

The circumstances surrounding that accidental approval were a big part of the neighbor group’s appeal.

Then-City Planner Todd Stowell, who is an active member of the church, believed the tower was exempt from the 30-foot height limit in that residential zone in the same way a radio antenna would be. The city building official and the county fire marshal agreed with Stowell, but a majority of the board members did not, voting to table a special exemption for the tower.

Board member Matt Moss texted Stowell the following day and said he knew his colleagues weren’t going to accept the planner’s interpretation, records later obtained by the neighbors show. However, Stowell said he’d realized that his proposed findings for the permit included a statement that the temple complied with the height limit. Since the board didn’t remove that language, they approved the height along with the permit, Stowell wrote in a subsequent report to the board.

“When I finished [doing the report] I had goosebumps from feeling the Spirit,” Stowell wrote to Moss, a fellow parishioner.

However, at least two other members of the board were angered by Stowell’s stance, with then-chair Carson Rowley calling it “complete and utter bulls—” in a later email to city leaders.

“… in the past he [Stowell] has ALWAYS asked for clarification at the meeting (before we vote) or shortly thereafter (and we reconsider) if we may have unintentionally conflated our vote. ALWAYS,” Rowley wrote, saying it was clear the board hadn’t accepted the planner’s interpretation.

Conflict of interest?

Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods used that email and other communications to argue Stowell biased the entire process.

“The planner, zealous for his faith — I don’t knock into that — but he should have recused himself,” group attorney Deb Wendtland argued at oral arguments before the high court in February. “He should have never been in this position to have to choose between his faith and his job.”

However, Supreme Court Justice John Fenn said he didn’t think Stowell “necessarily had this sinister behavior” as alleged by the neighbors. Church attorney Brad Cave also disputed the idea that the planner “sandbagged” the board.

“The city planner was very upfront about his membership in the church,” Cave said. “He was also very upfront about the steps he took to be sure that other city employees were reviewing his work.”

Still, outgoing City Administrator Barry Cook recently told the Cody Enterprise that he wishes he’d removed Stowell from the project. Although Stowell said he would remain neutral, “after the process got going and at the tail end, I could see very clearly that he was very biased,” Cook told the Enterprise.

‘A great deal of confusion’

During oral arguments, the church’s attorney said Stowell’s staff report clearly said the planning board wouldn’t need to consider the height if it adopted the conditional use permit. But multiple justices appeared unconvinced that things were so clear.

“It seems to me, there was a great deal of confusion in the process,” said then-Chief Justice Kate Fox, and Justice Kari Gray said the board “clearly … made a mistake.”

However, Gray ultimately concluded last week that the board knew what would happen if it adopted Stowell’s findings; she noted he’d read all of them — including the one about the temple height — into the record. Stowell told the board they could adopt all of his recommendations and findings “unless of course you disagree with [any],” and Gray said that belies the neighbors’ claim that his actions were a “gotcha tactic.”

“Even if some Board members may have intended to reserve the height issue for future action and mistakenly believed that they had done so, these assumptions do not override the clear language of the motion …,” Gray wrote.

Although the board members later attempted to revise the findings at a series of subsequent meetings, state law didn’t allow them to do so, Gray wrote, and their June 15, 2023 vote was final. Since the neighbor group didn’t file their challenge until late August 2023 — after the board finished their efforts to revise the permit — they were too late, the high court found.

The unanimous ruling affirmed a similar decision made by retired District Judge John Perry last summer.

“The Church follows the law,” Jacobsen, the local church president, said in his statement, and the Wyoming Supreme Court decision “demonstrates the approval process for the Cody Wyoming Temple followed the law.”

Moving forward

In the wake of the controversy over the temple, the Cody City Council made several revisions to its planning process, including having the elected council handle contested permits instead of the all-volunteer planning board. Another change clarified that the city’s height limits apply to all “roof top projections,” including church spires and steeples.

As for Stowell, he left his post in the spring of 2024 and, according to a social media post from his wife, they began serving a church mission in Kenya. The city promoted longtime staffer Utana Dye to fill the planning position in April.

Meanwhile, the church has continued working on its new 9,950 square foot temple off Skyline Drive. When the church broke ground in October, it expected construction would take 24 to 30 months. A public open house will be scheduled when the temple is completed.

(Editor's note: This version of the story has been corrected to reflect that it was the temple site plan and not the conditional use permit that was incorrectly believed to have failed a vote at the June 15, 2023 meeting.)