The Pagosa Springs Town Council and staff may have come to the conclusion that an update to their Land Use and Development Code (LUDC) should be high on their list of priorities for 2020-2021, when a member of the Town Planning Commission (me) raised an official protest… claiming that Town Planning Director James Dickhoff was encouraging the Planning Commission to ignore certain sections of the LUDC to allow local developer Jack Searle to create a new Town subdivision without a single public street. Instead, the River Rock Estates subdivision would have been served — in the plan approved by Mr. Dickhoff and a majority of the Town Planning Commission — by one single, private street.
From the current LUDC:
7.4.1. STREETS – All street rights-of-way shall be dedicated to the public.
Instead of questioning the behavior of their Planning Director, however, the Town Council fired the Planning Commissioner who had filed the protest. I guess that makes sense, from a bureaucratic perspective. It will never do, to have an appointed volunteer commissioner raising questions about the ethics of a well-paid employee.
But maybe there were other reasons why the proposed LUDC update received considerable support from the Council at their July 31 “Strategic Planning” retreat? The update has been “planned” for the past three years, with no obvious forward motion.
The idea of an LUDC update was vigorously promoted by newly-elected Council member Rory Burnett, who (coincidentally?) is one of developer Jack Searle’s key employees. Before we hear from Mr. Burnett, however, here’s a bit of conversation between facilitator Yvonne Wilcox and Council member Mat deGraaf.
Ms. Wilcox posed a question to the Council and staff concerning the LUDC:
“Is the Town not developer friendly because of confusing or overly cumbersome regulations?”
Council member deGraaf:
“Maybe. Probably…
“Regulations, in and of themselves, can be confusing — especially within a society where the exploitation of loopholes is encouraged, whether it be on your personal tax returns or otherwise. So when you are faced with [regulations] and you want something, you’re going to try and go around them to get what you want. So, just by virtue of [the regulations] being in the way, that’s just going to viewed as confusing and/or cumbersome by whomever chooses to view it as such. The LUDC is telling you what you can and cannot do, and a lot of people don’t like that…
“I don’t have direct experience as a developer — I think Rory might be the only one here who has direct experience with it — but, yeah, I can see very easily how people would say that. That the regulations are confusing or cumbersome.”
Mr. deGraaf, here, presents a certain (very accurate?) assessment of our present reality — that reality being, the (necessarily burdensome) government control over the uses of private property. People who disagree with those attempted controls will often do their very best to circumvent the regulations.
Or get them changed?
But it’s not only “developers” who find the Town land use codes frustrating. Those of us are not developers, for example, but who still perceive Pagosa Springs to be headed the way of many other already-gentrified mountain resort towns… Vail, Aspen, Telluride, Durango… We foresee a community where working families can no longer hope to find affordable homes within Archuleta County. We are already in that situation.
And whether the Town Council wants to believe it or not, the current LUDC is contributing to that dismal future, due to the enforcement of certain LUDC regulations.
But before we get into that discussion, let’s hear from Jack Searle’s business manager, Council member Rory Burnett, sharing his experience around subdivision development:
“If we can adjust the LUDC to be as simple as possible, and make sure all the [necessary] information is available right up front… What it’s felt like — I will just tell you my honest experience with having to go through a lot of these processes and policies — it feels like… When you start, it’s all good, no big deal; you just check these items off and you’re going to be good to go. So you start checking the items off, but [unexpected] things keep coming up… and what it turns into, is — it feels like the Town is viewing you as their personal piggy bank, to get items done that they see fit. Now, that’s not the actual case, but that is absolutely how it feels on the other side of the table.”
We assume that Mr. Burnett is referring here to the payment of established Town fees, and requirements to provide public infrastructure — streets, sidewalks, trails, lighting — as part of the development process.
“We have to see development as, ‘This is our city.’ We regulate the people who own private property all around town, and it’s not like they are coming in and doing their own thing, and we just want a piece of the pie and walk away. It’s still our city. So [the Town] needs to come in as strategic partners, and that’s something I’ve hear from several developers — it hasn’t felt like the Town is partnering, in a lot of ways. It’s just, ‘Here’s what we need,’ and they go on their merry way.”
Mr. Burnett then blamed the “holes in our community” — the numerous undeveloped lots, located here and there — on the way the Town has managed the development process. Of course, many of those vacant lots remain undeveloped because they’re owned by investors, rather than by developers. But Mr. Burnett is clearly referring to “holes” that are owned by discouraged developers.
One of the largest of the developer-owned “holes” would be the vacant 27 acres immediately adjacent to the Springs Resort on Hot Springs Boulevard, owned by Mr. Burnett’s employer.
“So instead of waiting for developers to come to us [the Town government]… because what happens is, developers, they have a vision. They see a plot of land and they say, ‘Man, we can make that into something great!’ But a lot of times, what is brought to the Planning Department is not what should be in the city. So instead of waiting for people to come to us, we need to go to them and say, ‘This is our Comprehensive Plan; these are all these things; this is our vision for Pagosa. These are the things you need to do, to build in our community. We need sidewalks for commercial, we need lighting. We need all these things. How can we help you?'”
The obvious question posed by this comment is, “Does the Town Council have a vision for Pagosa?” And if they do, does it align with what the tax-paying citizens want?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.