The folks who end up making the rules for all of us to live by — land use rules, public health rules, smoking and drinking rules, highway rules — are sometimes experts in their field, but very often, they are ordinary citizens like the rest of us who’ve somehow landed themselves in positions of power.
In those positions of power, they might find themselves spending our money for us — the money collected by various taxes and fees — for our own benefit.
The Town of Pagosa Springs recently decided to hire a Fort Collins-based consulting firm LoganSimpson to update the municipal Land Use and Development Code — the LUDC, 450 pages of rules which legally control what you and I can do with our privately-owned land. The price tag for this rule-book update? $120,000.
LogaSimpson project manager Jen Gardner introduced the meeting by mentioning that her company had launched a questionnaire to obtain community input on the update. As we see from the PowerPoint slide she shared, 44 people responded to the questionnaire… out of a community population of 14,000 people.
20 of the respondents — less than half — claimed to be ‘Somewhat Familiar’ or ‘Very Familiar’ with the LUDC.
The Town’s current Planning Commission has expressed a desire to be involved in this update process… hoping, I suspect, to keep the LUDC from getting worse than it already is. To that end, the Planning Commission held a joint meeting, on March 25, with the Town Council to discuss the goals of the LUDC update. The meeting lasted two hours. I will not transcribe the entire two hours, but rather, will share the comments made by one of our Town rule-makers. Local activist Shari Pierce garnered the largest number of votes, of the three Town Council candidates elected, when she was running three years ago.
Ms. Pierce appears at the very bottom left of the Zoom meeting below.
“My biggest comment is, I would love to simplify the LUDC. I feel like maybe it’s made some unintended consequences. The one that comes to mind, and I’ve mentioned this before at meetings, is — you know, I’ve talked to Clifford Lucero, who’s part of the group building the Rose Mountain townhomes, and he said, in trying to meet our guidelines, that it drove the cost of that project to over $300 a square foot. And that was before all the increases in lumber prices and everything else. So I just feel like that’s really not a good thing. And we have to overcome that, so we can address these affordable housing issues. And that may mean that we simplify what our structures look like, so that we can help bring some of those costs down.
“And I think we can trust the people who are building to want to build something that looks nice, and allow the appearance of our town happen kind of organically? I think a lot of people here like the quirkiness of the town’s character. So, just kind of looking at that…
“And I like the comment that [Council member] Matt DeGuise brought up, about the consistency in the code. That’s so important. And I like having things more cut and dry, where ‘it’s going to be this way’. And if they can’t do it that way, then they need to ask for a variance, with a really good explanation of why…
“If we include too many parameters, then we leave a lot to interpretation, and I think that’s when we can get in trouble, in trying to make defensible decisions as a Council, and as a Planning Commission, for that matter.”
Two days earlier, Ms. Gardner had conducted a meeting with the Planning Commission, by itself, and had listened to commissioner ideas about the LUDC update. I found myself in general agreement with one particular commissioner’s comments.
Commissioner Mark Weiler considers himself an “outlier.” Perhaps that’s why I found his comments particularly ‘on target’.
“I’m kind of an outlier, so I’m going to be outside the mainstream here. Frankly, consultants writing LUDC codes — they feel they’ve done their job only if the code is massive and onerous. That’s been my perspective; whenever we’ve hired a consultant, we as a community have suffered increased costs, increased time, without regard to what it does to our community.
“When I sit here, as a Planning Commission visionary, I believe our biggest problem is work force housing. That’s the biggest problem in our community. We have no coherent plan for work force housing. I’ve only been here 20 years, and we’ve talked about it every year for 20 years. We have engaged consultants to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we’ve gotten nowhere.
“And frankly, I think our Land Use and Development Code should be supportive, accommodating and vibrant towards work force housing. You may ask, ‘Well, how would you do that, exactly, Mr. Weiler?’ Remove the complexity and all the rules for design and so forth, and allow the market to try and fix itself, instead of placing more financial and administrative burdens that make it impossible to build work force housing in our community.
“We, as the visionary leaders of our community, have an obligation to that. There are other communities here in Colorado — and I’m sure you’re aware of all of them — that have developed wonderful work force housing programs… What I’m most interested in is, how can this [LUDC] be streamlined, cost-effective, so that we have builders lining up at the Planning Director’s desk with plans for work force housing. We’ve hads a couple of people try, and they just can’t make it work financially. They can’t.
“One of my colleagues is a school teacher in Telluride. Telluride has a robust program for work force housing. She has a one-bedroom condo in Telluride that was priced under $200,000 — and they provided mortgage assistance for her, to be able to qualify for it.”
To put that last remark into perspective. The current median sales price of a home in Archuleta County appears to be about $400,000. According to Realtor.com, the median sales price for a home in Telluride, Colorado, is $1.9 million.
Mr. Weiler continued:
“You have a variety of communities that have solved this problem. And I think the only real value consultants bring, is understanding the entire market. So we’re going to pay you to do research into best practice for work force housing… and the LUDC is bureaucrats creating layers of complexity without financial consequence.”
I believe Mr. Weiler means, “without financial consequence to the bureaucrats, personally.” Because land use rules always have financial consequences for the larger community…
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.