The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Employee housing is a growing concern but not everyone is on board
By Aimee Eaton
The Gunnison Watershed School District Board voted at its March 12 meeting to purchase, in collaboration with the town of Crested Butte, a duplex for employee housing. The structure will be located near the Paradise Park subdivision and is part of a larger project to construct five total duplexes for affordable housing.
At the Monday meeting, Gunnison school district superintendent Doug Tredway urged the school board to support the project, telling them repeatedly that the upper valley had a housing problem and that this opportunity was a chance for the school district to become involved in ensuring teachers and staff were able to live in the community in which they work.
“If not us, who? If not now, when?” Tredway asked the school board.
The duplex will cost the district about $500,000, with the town covering all tap fees and the cost of the land. John Stock at High Mountain Concepts will build the project.
According to a survey conducted by the district, about 88 percent of teachers in Crested Butte said they would be in support of employee housing, and about 40 percent said they would be interested in employee housing for their own needs. These numbers were quite a bit lower in Gunnison, and Liz Mick, an elementary teacher in Gunnison and president of the district’s teacher union, said she worried housing could be a very divisive issue.
“I have not heard from one person in Gunnison who is on board with this,” said Mick. “Where’s the equity? If you have all this money sitting there, what is the equitable way to help everyone? This project will help two people. Let’s take that money and add this to our salary schedule. This seems more equitable. All the comments I saw were related to that. Can we just get more money?
“I don’t see that it is the school district’s mission necessarily to provide housing for teachers,” Mick continued. “I see the school district as providing livable wages for teachers. We need to see some equity in this and I just don’t see how this is equitable to so many teachers.”
School board member Dale Orth attempted to address Mick’s concern.
“It’s unlikely that the state will ever have enough money to pay all our people what they want,” said Orth. “So what I look at is what our school district can do for our people. I think it is important that we not think of this as a subsidy for our teachers, but that we look at ways we can partner with our communities in ways that they’re willing to partner with us.”
“This option is not costing us, because the money is going to come back into the fund as rent,” Orth continued. “I look at this as not spending this money to subsidize but as a fund that we are going to have repaid and that will allow us to do other things.”
Orth then made the motion to move forward with the purchase of the duplex. The motion passed unanimously. District staff and the school board will spend the next several months working with the town and the Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority to develop policies and a plan for the construction, rental and maintenance of the duplex.
After the vote, school board member Lisa Starkebaum called for a measure that would outline the district’s commitment to developing employee housing in Gunnison as well. Under Starkebaum’s urging, the school board agreed to pursue signing two master leases for new builds in the Rock Creek project and to look at developing multi-family housing at the bus barn parcel in Gunnison.
