The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Witches’ spell?
After watching slow progress in bringing the Buckhorn Ranch subdivision’s infrastructure and amenities up to standard, the Board of County Commissioners voted to take over. Now, as problems persist, the county has no one but its own contractor to look to for an explanation.
The Board of County Commissioners voted to pull $175,500 from a security fund that it holds with Buckhorn developer Dick Landy to pay Lacy Construction and engineer Schmueser Gordon Meyer (SGM) for work completed.
Two items remaining on the Development Improvement Agreement (DIA) between Landy and the county were completed, including the chip and seal surface on the roads in the subdivision filings of 1 and 2a. In all, the work Lacy finished at the subdivision south of Crested Butte is still substantial and expensive, costing $155,000.
Then county attorney David Baumgarten told the commissioners at a meeting on Tuesday, October 19, “After that, we have gone back a couple of times to make sure that work is ‘completed’ and acceptable to us. And some of the work, I’m sorry to tell you, is not completed or acceptable to us.”
Specifically, some road patches weren’t done or weren’t done to the standard required by the county, and failed to stick. The cost of the chip and seal over the road patches was quoted at $14,000. SGM is working on an estimate for what it would cost to clean up the pavement and start the patching over.
Baumgarten then warned the commissioners, “Lacy may also be seeking additional money owed for roadwork that wasn’t approved by [the county]. I’m suggesting that you not pay it until you actually see what it is, watch it be done and completed.”
Since Baumgarten didn’t know what the work would entail, he told the commissioners to hold off on the payment, in part because he didn’t want to start a fight unnecessarily with Landy over withdrawing additional money from the security.
“So far he has authorized us to pay for all of the various things that we are withdrawing from his security and I want to make sure that that continues to track,” Baumgarten said, adding that the county had already paid nearly $8,000 to SGM from the security, which was higher than the original $6,000 estimate.
Baumgarten asked if the commissioners wanted staff to continue working with Lacy on the remaining projects at Buckhorn Ranch or try doing the work in-house, with Department of Public Works staff and equipment.
Public works director Marlene Crosby hadn’t given the idea much thought, but before Baumgarten could shelve the idea to another time, commissioner Jim Starr doubted doing the work with county staff would pay dividends at all.
“My initial thought would be to support out-of-house so we don’t run into liability issues or warranty issues or things like that,” Starr said.
And there are contracts signed for the work that still needs to be done on the Buckhorn Ranch ball field and the trail leading to it, as well as on a pedestrian bridge in open space and some wetland mitigation. The only two items from the DIA that still need to be completed involve the subdivision’s street signs and some remaining reclamation.
