The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Carbon neutrality, directing growth next on docket
It was a final look back at a big year for the Gunnison County Planning Commission Friday, December 18, and an opportunity to set the groundwork for some pretty big undertakings in 2010.
One project dominated much of the past 12 months for the planning commissioners, who spent the equivalent of several days discussing the final details of the Special Development Project Resolution (SDPR). The SDPR is a revised regulatory document, adopted in August, that will set the standard for exceptionally large projects proposed in the county.
The planning commission wrote the regulations for much of the year under a cloud of threatened legal action that could have rained on them when they were done. The Mt. Emmons Moly Company told the commissioners they were infringing on constitutional rights and Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) challenged the County’s authority to regulate projects on Federal land.
CBMR started 2009 attending Planning Commission meetings and fighting for concurrency between the county’s SDPR process and the federal review process, only to end the year knowing a federal review of its proposal to extend lifts onto Snodgrass Mountain might never happen.
This year is the first time in three years that the Planning Commission’s annual “to do” list doesn’t include an item concerning the SDPR.
Along with the standard work of the Planning Commission—reviewing plans and making recommendations to the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC)—a lot of time in the last year was spent rewriting definitions and writing amendments for the Land Use Resolution (LUR).
Definitions, like those for “neighborhood” and “agricultural land,” are important because they help ensure that the commissioner’s intentions are understood when the regulation is read in the future and they can change the way parts of the LUR are interpreted.
And if some of the projects taken on in 2009 were a chance for the county to flex their regulatory muscle in its planning, the next year will be a chance to put the planner’s vision for the future into regulation.
“My number one priority is the Strategic Plan result describing location of growth near municipalities,” commissioner Rich Karas said. “We’ve been getting a lot of pressure on that, but we have no really consistent approach to it.”
The idea of focusing new growth in the county toward existing infrastructure and central services, like water and sewer, has been a priority of the BOCC for several months and was revisited at their joint meeting with the Planning Commission on Tuesday, December 15.
Part of the process of writing regulations to encourage growth near municipalities is engaging the municipalities in conversations about their respective three-mile plans, which gives Crested Butte, Mt. Crested Butte and Gunnison a chance to comment on proposed development near their boundaries.
Karas said he would like to start a dialogue about the three-mile plans before looking at ways to “guide growth, deal with impacts and perhaps deal with the listing of the sage grouse [as an endangered species]. All of these things go together to make one very large issue that we all can’t ignore anymore.”
Planning Commission Chairman Ian Billick, who will be stepping down at the end of this year, hopes they can get some perspective before reviewing project applications by looking at overlays of the county map that identify approved building lots and where sage grouse habitat needs to be considered.
The overlays aren’t the only resources the Planning Commission is waiting on before taking on its most controversial tasks next year. There is still an entire discussion to have before the commissioners can put a carbon neutrality policy into planning regulation, which the BOCC has indicated they want in 2010.
The commissioners also agreed that finding a way to review applications for alternative energy projects would have to be part of the county’s regulatory scheme, if county-wide carbon neutrality were ever going to be feasible.
The Planning Commission also saw some projects come across the table last year that they weren’t prepared to deal with. They struggled with an application to grant Special Geographic Area (SGA) status to an area near the town of Marble that was ultimately denied by the BOCC.
Next year, a modification in the rules for establishing an SGA is high on the Planning Commission’s priority list, along with clarifying the distinction between a minor impact and a major impact proposal.
Several of the Planning Commission members were still looking for more communication between the commission and the county planning and legal staffs. The commission will have a chance to smooth out the lines of communication between the parts of the county’s planning mechanism at a retreat in March.
