Briefs Gunnison County

Sometimes, government can be simple
At a May work session, Gunnison County commissioner Hap Channell urged the Board of County Commissioners to keep the redistricting of the commissioners districts simple. And they did. On Tuesday, July 26, the commissioners passed a resolution adopting new commissioners’ districts as mandated by federal law every 10 years, following the U.S. Census. With little discussion and no one in the audience, the commissioners adopted district lines that move the southern border of District 3, which includes Crested Butte, north to the WAPA powerline running from County Road 10 to Jack’s Cabin.
“That was the most non-controversial redistricting we’ve seen in years,” said commissioner Paula Swenson.
“Probably the most non-controversial there ever will be,” said commissioner Hap Channell.

Sometimes, it’s not simple
Smoothing out the stair-step nature of the Workforce Housing Impact Fee—or the Linkage Fee—for both commercial and residential properties has been on the Board of County Commissioners’ docket for a while now. At issue are small increases in square footage that result in large increases in the linkage fee. But while the intent is simple, the formula and the math are slowing things down.
At a July 12 work session, Housing Authority executive director KT Gazunis informed commissioners that the data informing the linkage fee calculations had not been updated since the fee was enacted in 2006. According to Gazunis, the number of workers per household and the number of workers per 1,000 square feet of commercial property had both declined since then.
“According to an updated study completed for the town of Crested Butte, in just Gunnison County we now have only 2.2 workers per 1,000 square feet of commercial space.” The 2006 nexus study placed that number at 2.9.
Because these numbers are ultimately used to calculate linkage fees, the commissioners asked Gazunis to compare Gunnison County numbers to what Channell called other “rural resort counties” to make linkage fee calculations more statistically valid. Gazunis returned to a July 26 work session with a revised number of 2.7 workers per 1,000 feet of commercial space by including a comparison set of Summit, Eagle and Routt Counties.
“I tend to want to go with the lower number of 2.2, but if it’s just one study subject to volatility, it could come back next year and say 2.2 is now 2.7,” commissioner Phil Chamberland said.
The commissioners asked Gazunis to perform further analysis of how Gunnison County and the comparison counties have trended over time. Adjustments to the linkage fee for residential developments didn’t progress much faster. While the proposed recalculations smoothed out increases in the fees as square footage increased, it wasn’t enough to appease commissioner Channell.
“These types of impact fees are targets anyway for people who don’t understand them well, so to reduce the size of the target, so to speak, it behooves us to make this as fair as possible,” Channell said.
After much discussion about formulas, data sets and math, the decision was made to further investigate ways to smooth out the fees.