This story has been updated.

The state House of Representatives on Wednesday passed with a 90-56 vote a replacement for the broad housing bill that the governor vetoed in June, a moment that has been months in the making for many Democrats.

The bill requires towns to create housing growth programs, changes minimum off-street parking requirements, expands fair rent commissions and incentivizes towns to take steps to allow more housing, among other measures.

Lawmakers drafted House Bill 8002 as a compromise with local leaders and Gov. Ned Lamont after Lamont vetoed the housing bill passed during the regular session. The House of Representatives debated the bill for most of the day during a special session Wednesday, and six Democratic lawmakers who voted against the old bill voted yes on the new version. No Republicans voted in favor of the measure.

“We’ve done a lot of compromise,” said Housing Committee co-chair Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport. “We’ve come together and talked about a lot of the things that were in former House Bill 5002. Here, we’re talking about what really is at the heart of what we were doing here and what we are doing now, and that is housing growth.”

Democrats passed House Bill 5002, a sweeping housing bill, during the regular session. Lamont, whose staff had worked on the bill with lawmakers, vetoed the bill weeks later. The governor said he wanted to get towns on board, and called for a special session to pass a negotiated version of the bill.

On Friday, several town officials, including some Republicans, stood alongside House Democrats and Lamont to announce the new version of the bill.

Republicans and some moderate Democrats voted against the measure. Much of the debate focused on the shortened timeline to debate the bill during a special session and arguments from Republicans that the bill would ultimately hurt towns.

Republicans argued that the bill hadn’t been released with enough time for the public to review it and hadn’t gone through the public hearing process. Concepts in the bill got public hearings during the regular session.

“I’m super disappointed in the lack of transparency in Democratic level from the top all the way down,” said Housing Committee ranking member Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe.

Felipe rebuked criticism of the process Wednesday, saying that claims “that we sit here in the dead of night is not indicative of what we have done, what we have done together.”

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said during a morning briefing that support for the bill was clear at Friday’s press conference, when groups that opposed the bill in the last legislative session showed up in support, including members of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and the Council of Small Towns.

“On the floor, people throw things, it’s bombastic, that’s the world we live in. There’s theater to it,” Ritter said. “But you just take a step back and go, look who got there. It truly is a compromise.”

But House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, said that local leaders at the conference were supporting a bill they hadn’t read, because copies had not yet been released.

“We have one-party rule in the state of Connecticut,” Candelora said. “So I’m guessing these individuals didn’t feel like they actually had a choice, and they had to try to get something for their communities, because the alternatives were much worse.”

Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, said that there had been a bipartisan effort to find a solution that included Republican leaders at the municipal level, and that the bill supports local control.

“People have a choice. We can either work on policy and advance the interests of people or we can engage in politics and do a disservice to people,” Rojas said. “What this bill is going to do for us today is to formulate really good policy. We’re going to be planning better. We’re going to be implementing better. We’re going to be collaborating better.”

CCM executive director Joe DeLong said town leaders with his organization as well as COST had worked on the legislation for months and offered multiple updates and presentations about the progress.

“Municipalities were in no way kept in the dark on any of this type of work,” DeLong said. He added that while there are some towns that would have preferred no bill pass, the issues raised were “systematically resolved” in the new bill.

COST executive director Betsy Gara said in a statement that there have been several improvements to the bill. 

“The bill is certainly not perfect, but it makes more sense from a planning standpoint. Our municipal leaders, as board members of their respective COGs [councils of government], have already been discussing ways of promoting housing development, including affordable housing, in their regions,” Gara said.

“The reality is that given broad support in the state legislature for a housing bill; something was going to pass. COST worked hard to mitigate some of the most onerous provisions in the bill to develop a more workable, balanced framework for addressing local and regional housing needs,” added Gara.

Still, some lawmakers opposed to the measure said they feared the bill would wrest power away from municipalities. Rep. Tina Courpas, R-Greenwich, said it was a “declaration of war” on towns.

“That destroys our longstanding tradition of home rule. It establishes an adversarial relationship between Hartford and the towns, which I do not think is beneficial to our communities, and it abrogates all of the local considerations and essentially sacrifices them at the altar of affordable housing,” Courpas said.

Supporters, as well as the organizations that represent towns, said local officials worked with lawmakers and the governor to develop the bill. Rep. Aimee Berger-Girvalo, D-Ridgefield, voted no on the old bill. She said the first selectman in her town, who spoke at the governor’s press conference last week, is now on board.

“I am grateful for the movement forward and for the opportunity to vote yes,” Berger-Girvalo said.

The bill says municipalities must either create a housing growth plan or participate in a regional housing growth plan. It includes specifications for what the plan must include, such as: what strategies the town will use to improve access to affordable housing, an inventory of developable land in the town and housing goals.

If towns do not create these plans, they are not eligible for temporary pauses from being sued by developers whose affordable housing plans are denied under the state’s affordable housing statute 8-30g.

The bill eliminates off-street parking minimums for residential developments with up to 16 units and allows towns to exempt two contiguous zones amounting to not more than 8% of the land.

In those zones, towns could require a parking needs assessment and developers would have to build no more than one parking space for each studio or 1-bedroom apartment and two spaces for each unit with two or more bedrooms, or the number recommended by a parking needs assessment paid for the developer. The requirement would be for whichever number is lower.

For towns that participate in certain types of zoning that increases density near transit hubs, the conversion of commercial to residential must be allowed for up to nine units, but the town can require that the ground floor stay commercial.

The bill also allows towns to access new state money if they comply with the housing growth plan requirements, meet specifications to allow more housing near train and bus stations or join the Connecticut Municipal Development Authority to increase density near public transit and downtown.

It says that towns with populations of 15,000 or more must create fair rent commissions or join a regional commission. Current law says towns with 25,000 or more residents must have these commissions. 

It establishes the Department of Housing as a statewide housing authority that can develop affordable housing on state land and in towns. It also bans “hostile architecture,” or tools such as armrests in the middle of benches or spikes that make it hard for people experiencing homelessness to rest or lie down.

“I just want us to remember — as we are casting our votes tonight — all the people that are not with us in this room, whether it be the unhoused, the seniors, the people with disabilities, the young families, the older families, everybody in between that could use a break,” said Planning and Development co-chair Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, D-Avon. “If we could just build some more units, and if we could be open to the possibility of welcoming people into our communities instead of closing the door to them.”

The Senate is expected to convene Thursday to vote on the housing bill and other measures.