PHOTO: The Fred C. Harman Justice Center, winter, 2023.
Although this editorial series ostensibly concerns a $100,000 rooftop screening structure requested by the Town of Pagosa Springs Planning Commission, to hide from view the HVAC units installed atop the Fred C. Harman Justice Center, the issues are more complicated, and more expensive than a mere $100,000.
On January 17, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners rejected the demand from the Town Planning Department for the screening project, in essence declaring their independence — under cited Colorado law — from municipal control. The BOCC asserts that the Town does have the right to specify where the Courthouse could be built, and how large it could be, but that the Town’s legitimate authority ended there. According to County Attorney Todd Weaver and the BOCC, the Town has no right to require screening of the rooftop devices.
We don’t yet know how the Town will react to that claim.
As a Daily Post reader suggested yesterday in an email, we don’t know if the $100,000 figure is an accurate estimate. We only know it’s the number the County has publicly claimed.
In Part Three, I shared an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence that — depending on your political beliefs — may or may not be relevant to the decision by the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners to overrule a decision by the Pagosa Springs Planning Commission, which denied the County’s variance request.
Granted, the ‘Declaration’ quote is taken out of context. Reading the entire document is always to be preferred. But for simplicity’s sake, I’ll once again quote that short section:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
As I understand it, the authors of the Declaration, in 1776, were unhappy with certain laws and enforcement actions being imposed on the English colonies, and part of their strategy for achieving independence from Great Britain was to deny the supposedly ‘divine’ legitimacy the the British king, George III, and to deliver to the common citizens their own ‘divine’ rights, among which were Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That delivery process has been a bit of a roller coaster. Two steps forward, and three steps back, in some cases.
Some of the backward movement — which some will argue has been ‘forward’ movement — is documented in the Town of Pagosa Springs Land Use and Development Code.
The LUDC was written to protect citizens from dangerous or annoying situations perpetrated by adjacent or nearby property development and usage, and reading through the document, we can see than most of the requirements established by the Town seem reasonable. One example of seemingly reasonable rules is ‘setbacks’. I cannot build a structure right on my property line; I must leave a five-foot space between my building and my neighbor’s property. This makes sense, because it creates a 10-foot space between buildings (my five-foot space plus my neighbor’s five-foot space) for firefighting access, and a potentially defensible space in case of fire.
Of course, none of the downtown commercial buildings on the main commercial block were built with this kind of set-back. They were built physically attached to one another.
Which might explain why the downtown suffered a couple of catastrophic fires during Pagosa’s early history, until the property owners started building concrete and brick buildings. But still physically attached to one another.
I would estimate that a good 90% of the requirements in the LUDC relate to ‘health and safety’ concerns. But requiring a building to hide HVAC units on its roof has nothing to do with ‘health and safety’.
Below are a few samples of requirements written into the LUDC, which — in my humble opinion — have nothing to do with the health and safety of the community. In other words, these requirements are purely aesthetic. Some folks at the Town decided that buildings ought to look a certain way, or have certain dimensions, and were prepared to enforce those aesthetic opinions with police action, if necessary.
For example. If you want to build a ‘mother-in-law’ unit in your back yard, either attached to your home or detached, you must follow these aesthetic rules:
All accessory structures shall be consistent in design and appearance as the principal structure on the property, including color, materials, roofing, orientation, etc.
An accessory dwelling unit shall be no more than seventy-five percent (75%) of the gross floor area of the primary residential dwelling unit structure and a maximum of eight hundred (800) square feet, whichever is smaller.
So let’s just say that my house is 120 years old (which my house is, actually) and I want to build a modern, energy efficient Accessory Dwelling Unit using modern building materials, design, and techniques.
The Town LUDC tells me I can’t do that, because my building has to be ‘consistent in appearance’ with my 120-year-old house.
This requirement has nothing to do with ‘health and safety’. It’s a purely aesthetic choice. In fact, it’s a requirement that might prevent me from building the most useful, cost-effective, energy-efficient structure, in the name of a certain dream of ‘consistency’ or ‘style’ that doesn’t currently exist within this working-class town. Someone or some group decided, back in the 1990s, that a certain architectural ‘look’ would make Pagosa Springs more vibrant and economically successful, and that certain types of functional buildings and equipment ought to be hidden from view.
There’s a cost to this kind of government intervention, and it’s not merely a monetary cost.
Apparently, the Archuleta BOCC believes they can say to the Town Planning Commission, “Sorry, your rules don’t apply to us.”
Do the rest of us have the same power of refusal?
The Town is currently working — haltingly — on an update to their LUDC. The progress is slow, and the community involvement, at the moment, is non-existent.
If I were the king, I would direct the Town staff to remove the purely aesthetic rules from the LUDC, and restore the citizens’ right to pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness without getting wrapped up in bureaucratic red tape.