The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Housing Authority to help with financing for Paradise Park completion
The Crested Butte Town Council and the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners sat down for a joint work session on Monday, November 15 to talk about the overlapping issue of affordable housing at the north end of the valley and an impending intergovernmental agreement between the two entities.
But the hot topic was affordable housing and the ways the Housing Authority, as a cooperative effort between the governments, can increase the inventory of affordable units as well as the financing opportunities to finish one of the town’s affordable housing projects.
One way the county has raised money for affordable housing, although it has raised the hackles of some in the community, has been through a linkage fee associated with new development that goes into a pool of money for affordable housing.
Crested Butte mayor Leah Williams said, “The council is very supportive of the [linkage fee] idea. The details we will work out with the public. But it can really get us someplace with affordable housing.”
And affordable housing is something that the town of Crested Butte has appeared to be on top of since efforts in the late 1980s started what would become a pool of more than 130 deed-restricted units in town.
Commissioner Paula Swenson acknowledged as much after looking at a map of the town’s Paradise Park neighborhood, telling the council, “That’s a pretty good land bank you have there.”
In Paradise Park, which sits on land the town acquired during the Verzuh annexation, the town has a plan for a total of 85 deed-restricted units of all shapes and sizes, from single-family homes to triplexes.
“That’s as much density as we thought was appropriate to have in town and be compatible with the rest of town, so as you’re walking through that part of town you don’t necessarily realize that you just walked into an area that has a hundred and some deed-restricted homes in it,” Crested Butte town planner John Hess said.
The town is close to completing its Affordable Housing Strategic Plan that sets a goal of seeing Paradise Park through to build out 25 units in the future. “As a community we would like to maintain 70 percent local population and we believe that will be done through affordable, deed-restricted housing,” Williams said.
Although the plan is complete, the amount of remaining development is relatively small and the land values in the area are relatively high, making it difficult to find a financing program that will work to help the town pay for the remaining construction.
The town still needs about $500,000 to complete the infrastructure, like sewer, water and electric, before the town could start building the final phase of Paradise Park. Previously the town had borrowed money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pay for the infrastructure in another part of that neighborhood, but had to sell some of its lots to pay off the loan.
“We’d like to, in this case, not have to have to sell the lots to pay back the infrastructure costs,” Hess said. “We’d like to use that infrastructure to make lot sales and put that into building affordable homes.”
The money the town has in its linkage fees fund—just over $100,000—goes to pay the town’s contribution to the Housing Authority and other costs associated with selling deed-restricted homes.
And with affordable housing goals in mind, the town is looking for ways to finance them, through grants, loans or any other money available.
While grants through the state’s Division of Housing might be available to pay for some of the infrastructure, another opportunity for financing is through the Colorado Housing and Financing Authority (CHFA), a legislatively mandated organization aimed at financing affordable housing projects, and which was one potential financier of the Paradise Park construction.
“The sweet spot on the CHFA tax credits doesn’t start until 22 units, but we could maybe do a combination of acquisition and rehab, as well as new development… So far we haven’t identified 22 that we could do up front,” Housing Authority director KT Gazunis said, adding that the CHFA representative wouldn’t be able to meet with the town to discuss any other financing options for another three weeks.
However, there are time and scale constraints that make CHFA financing difficult, since it also requires that all the homes the organization pays to have built be occupied in two years, limiting the number of building projects the town can take on at one time.
“That’s been a problem for us because we don’t have enough staff to put something like that [25-unit development] together,” Hess said. “Plus we’ve all not wanted to see a development like that where all of the buildings look alike because one entity built them all at once. We’ve been successful in the first half [of the development] because everybody had their own design.”
Councilman John Wirsing asked if the town could move the timeline for construction along by having “half a dozen different people working on different buildings at the same time.” But the idea still left the town short of staff to take each project through the process.
The possibility of using more mutual self-help programs—which teams the homeowner with a building supervisor for the construction of the house—to get local people into affordable housing was also considered.
Already there have been 30 mutual self-help homes built in the county, a dozen of which are located in the north end of the valley.
But the brevity of the building season was again said to be the major barrier to more of those projects.
Finding dead ends everywhere, mayor Leah Williams said, “What are some of the things that we really can do together to make our strategic plan work? What are some of the ways we can partner with the housing authority to get these things accomplished? Is it possible? Our population is low, our land values are high and our [average median incomes] are too high.”
One way Gazunis said the Housing Authority could help the town is by taking over the maintenance of the deed restrictions, since the Housing Authority is already equipped to do that task with time-saving computer software.
Since the inception of the Housing Authority over a decade ago, the town’s financial contribution has grown modestly, from $15,000 to $25,000 annually, which goes to help the authority administer programs like those involving rental vouchers and the senior home as well as actual deed-restricted units at Stallion Park in Buckhorn Ranch.
As for the council’s concerns about the future of financing for the affordable housing projects in the county, Gazunis said, “We need to meet with two of our finance resources [from CHFA and the Division of Housing] to sit down with our staff and work out some ideas and some options.”
The council asked Gazunis to work with those financing to get an advisor to meet with the town as soon as possible, and asked her to look for other ways the town and Housing Authority could collaborate in providing affordable housing in Crested Butte.
The intergovernmental agreement
Town attorney John Belkin also gave the Town Council and Board of County Commissioners an update on work that has been done on an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) between the two entities.
The agreement, when complete, will allow the county to consider effects on the town of large projects that have to go through the Special Development Project Resolution approval process.
“The issue here is that if there are impacts to a town because of a project that is located outside of a town, the county doesn’t have any authority to look at those impacts and work on mitigating those impacts, unless there’s an IGA with the town to allow those impacts to be considered,” commissioner Jim Starr told the council. “This agreement will allow that to happen.”
But Belkin said there are still a few details involving termination rights in the agreement and the extent of the SDPR’s powers within town to work out before the IGA is ready for the council or the board to consider for approval.
“Like any deal in any context, it takes a certain amount of time to get comfortable with the terms,” Belkin said. “It’s allowing the county to consider those impacts felt within town. So it’s not a bridging, or taking away, of the town’s powers. But it is, in fact, giving power to the county that it wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Belkin said he expected the agreements to be available for review within the next couple of weeks.
Future county growth?
Mayor Leah Williams eventually turned to topics the two governments will be dealing with in the future, and broached the topic of bringing medical marijuana grow operations to the unincorporated county.
“People would love to see the growing of medical marijuana in either town or the county,” Williams told the commissioners. “What are some of the issues and is this something that we could talk about in the future?”
Commissioner Jim Starr said, “As I see it the main issue is the fact that the constitution as it was amended forbids public entities from disclosing the location of grow centers. So that runs headlong into our performance-based Land Use Regulations [LUR]. With those regulations, you can do anything anywhere, but you’ve got to notify the public of what you’re doing and where it is.”
With the conflict between the constitutional amendment regarding the use of medical marijuana (MMJ) in the state and the county’s LUR, the county commissioners have resigned themselves to waiting for the direction from the state before making a decision of their own.
The county has passed a moratorium on medical marijuana grow operations and other kinds of MMJ production facilities that will expire next summer, unless the Board of County Commissioners decides to lift the ban earlier.
