The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
County commissioners will consider it next with public hearing
[ By Katherine Nettles ]
After a lengthy work session on Friday, July 23, the Gunnison County Planning Commission voted to recommend a reduced limit on new home sizes to county commissioners for consideration. The recommendation is to amend the Land Use Resolution (LUR) to limit allowable residential building sizes to 4,200 square feet for primary structures and 5,700 square feet for aggregate building sizes. If approved by commissioners after a public hearing, any project applications for residential building sizes larger than that would be required to go through a Minor Impact review process.
Under the current LUR, a residential building aggregate is limited to 10,000 square feet with no differentiation between residence, garage or accessory dwelling sizes.
The recommendation came with a vote of 3-2, with commission members Laura Puckett Daniels, Andy Sovick and Melanie Miller voting in favor. Vince Rogalski and Scott Cox voted against it.
Cox had openly opposed the concept from the time that county commissioners first asked the commission to consider it, and Rogalski spoke about his concerns that it would create problems for those who have bought large acreage with the expectation that they could build larger homes. Rogalski openly wondered if current controversial projects such as the Wandering Willows project proposed for the Slate River corridor was causing a knee-jerk or arbitrary reaction.
Miller asked how many large resident applications were currently pending, and community and economic development director Cathie Pagano answered that there were 21 permit applications of this size (larger than 5,700 square feet) “in the queue” as of June 21 and some more had come in since then. Pagano said if those applicants have submitted a complete application prior to adoption of the amendment, then they would not be subject to the amendment.
“This is not a square footage prohibition, just a deeper review process,” said county attorney Matthew Hoyt of the proposed amendment.
After public comments both for and against the recommendation, and a substantial discussion clarifying the details and language of the new amendment proposed, the commission members agreed it was time to move on.
Sovick said he struggles with this in different ways as a building contractor and an environmentalist, feeling in some ways the amendment would go too far and in others not far enough. “I’m going to hear from my colleagues about this,” he said. But he said ultimately he would like to see other topics, such as climate change mitigation and affordable housing addressed with such urgency as this has been.
Puckett Daniels reminded the board that this recommendation was only the beginning of the process, and that the county commissioners would then take it on for their own consideration. “And that will include a public hearing,” she said.
The commissioners will now take up the matter in an upcoming agenda. All three of them attended the first planning commission meeting on the subject and participated in the discussions, and Roland Mason and Liz Smith attended the July 23 meeting as well.
