County Planning Commission gets look at Wilder’s second phase

DOW raises concerns about conflict with elk

Developers of Wilder on the Taylor took their first steps toward expanding the subdivision to span both sides of the Taylor River with a proposal to improve a road on the south side of the 1,000-plus-acre property.

The Gunnison County Planning Commission heard the request for road improvements to serve four home sites on 185 acres in Phase II of the subdivision east of Almont at a work session Friday, November 19. The proposal was presented by Julie Ann Woods of the Elk Mountains Planning Group and engineer Jerry Burgess from Schmueser Gordon Meyer.
Concerns about home site placement and especially wildlife migration corridors quickly came to the forefront of the discussion.
Once the planning commissioner’s review of the proposal is complete, and the Board of County Commissioners votes on their recommendation, Gunnison County planners won’t get another chance to say how the nearly 30 lots will be laid out on the ground or where the building sites will be located on each.
It might have gone differently, planning commissioner Richard Karas pointed out, if the developers had made their initial proposal as a two-phase development, since phased subdivisions are sometimes subjected to a higher level of scrutiny.
Since all of the proposed lots are more than 35 acres, state law allows the developer to subdivide without county regulation and with only a minor impact review, at least until county building permits are required. And the county staff has been working with Woods and Burgess to place the roads where they’ll have the least impact.
But the lack of county oversight beyond reviewing improvements to the road raised some concerns for commission chairperson Ramon Reed, who saw the potential for long driveways meandering through the meadows and possibly houses being built in places with known or potential rock fall and wildfire danger.
At a site visit following the work session, Reed and four other commissioners, along with county planner Cathy Pagano and Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW) staff, took a tour of the proposed Phase II of the subdivision to see how several switchbacks would replace a steep and rocky mountain road and where the four homesites would be.
With two home sites planned for either side of the drainage just opposite Jack’s Cabin Cutoff, or County Road 813, with the largest being nearly 80 acres, the commissioners talked about a nearby area with an elevated wildfire danger, a cliff band that could produce tumbling rocks and the herds of elk that migrate through the area.
In a letter to Julie Ann Woods, CDOW area wildlife manager J Wenum expressed some serious concerns about how development in that particular drainage could disrupt a massive elk migration and push herds that travel through the area into conflict in other parts of the region.
In Wenum’s letter, he points out that as the amount of planned development at Wilder on the Taylor expands, the impacts the subdivision will have on the area’s wildlife—as well as the wildlife’s potential to affect residents—has grown substantially.
Along with concerns raised about the introduction of domestic pets into the area and impacts on Big Horn Sheep and other animals in the area, Wenum writes, “The Wilder on the Taylor development is likely to have significant impacts on elk… The proposed development outlined in the original Wilder on the Taylor failed to make any mitigative efforts toward preserving the integrity of the north/south elk migration corridor.
“‘Phase II’ confounds this concern to an even greater level by adding four more home sites in the narrowest section of the corridor, and constructing a serpentine road that will meander the width of the corridor through the greater part of its southern end. It is probable that this intensive amount of development will result in the abandonment of this corridor by migrating elk.”
In his letter, Wenum goes on to say that the result will cause a “domino effect,” toppling already stressed habitat in the surrounding mountains and valleys and further aggravating ranchers in those areas.
“The BLM and the Forest Service, primarily, have serious concerns about the impacts, habitat-wise, in the Almont Triangle and the south end of Flat Top Mountain because of the sheer numbers of elk that are wintering there and staying there for a prolonged period of time,” Wenum wrote. “We already have significant conflict issues there and it’s become a huge wintering area.”
But Woods told the planning commissioners that she “would take exception that this is an intense development,” and ranch manager Don Sabrowski made the same case to district wildlife manager Chris Parmeter, who explained how hundreds of elk from the Raggeds and Elk Mountains congregate to make the southern migration through that corridor.
“How much of an impact will the homesites in question have on the migration of elk?” Sabrowski asked, comparing the development of the two home sites directly in the migration corridor to the more intensive development of nearby subdivisions.
“That’s the unknown,” Parmeter said.
As the tour continued up into Phase Two of the development, Parmeter gave Woods some suggestions on how to position future building sites on the lots so they would have the least impact on the elk’s preferred path through the drainage, saying the  elk would likely stick to the thick timber on the north-facing slope.
And while neither the CDOW nor the county has any power to say where the building envelopes on the lots will be, Woods said the development’s planners would take the CDOW’s wildlife concerns into consideration talking to potential buyers about building.
The commissioners also had a few things they would like to see addressed in the proposal, like the developer’s Development Improvements Agreement with the county; keeping development out of danger zones; comments from emergency services on access to Phase II; more input from the county’s Department of Public Works; and concerns about wildfire and wildlife.
Once the commission is satisfied with the proposal, it will be opened up to a public hearing before a recommendation is made to the Board of County Commissioners.