Gunnison County kicks off strategic plan update

Considering road and bridge ballot question for 2024 or 2025

By Katherine Nettles

Gunnison County has started updating its strategic plan, a guiding document that outlines measurable goals ranging from environmental conservation to improving health and human services to meeting road and bridge needs. 

The county revises its strategic plan every two years, and last did so in June 2022. County commissioners and county staff reviewed a rough draft in a work session on Tuesday, May 14 and will continue fine-tuning the document in the coming weeks before considering adoption. Major points include whether to put a road and bridge funding question on this November’s ballot, starting a short-term rental license program by the end of 2025 and how to approach regional corridor planning that would span from Gunnison to Mt. Crested Butte. 

The county’s current strategic plan is divided into four categories: infrastructure, environmental protection, community health and prosperity and services. 

Infrastructure

Commissioners spoke to department heads for various aspects of these categories, beginning with public works director Martin Schmidt regarding infrastructure. They discussed three goals listed: to develop a ballot question by 2025 to provide adequate funding to support road and bridge infrastructure; to complete the Shady Island River Park by the end of 2024; and to complete fairground improvements. Each of these is more or less on track, said Schmidt. Shady Island is expected to be complete this summer, and fairground improvements include expanding the main parking lot east of the multipurpose building, adding multi-modal transportation routes from Spruce Street and improving the entry plaza for the rodeo grounds, all to be finished by November of this year. 

Schmidt said a detailed assessment study of all county roads and bridges will likely be complete by the end of May and will also identify all related critical road and bridge needs for the next 30 years. The idea behind this assessment is to get a clear sense of long-term budget needs and current shortfalls in advance of asking voters to approve a ballot measure either this fall or next.

Schmidt said the assessment consultant is studying the county’s inventory of bridges first, which is apropos of the current Highway 50 closure for the state-owned Middle Bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir. 

“We do have all our bridges assessed every two years, so we do have a report that shows for decades how all our bridges are doing. Almost all were replaced in the 1980s,” said Schmidt. As for the county-owned bridges, such as those on County Road 10, Miller Lane and the one across the Slate River between Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, Schmidt said, “We have generally good bridges. A few are in need of repairs, but none are critical.”

Schmidt said the comprehensive data should be ready in the next couple weeks, and commissioners and county manager Matthew Birnie discussed whether to consider a ballot question for this fall before deciding it was too early to make that call. All agreed that the data and funding mechanisms should be included in any ballot language used in the future. The language for a ballot question must be finished by July to begin public engagement and until the study results have been released no one is ready to determine next steps.

Environmental protection

There are three strategic results identified in the draft plan involving environmental protections: continued protection of water quality and quantity for in-basin purposes, expanding conserved private ranchland in the county by an additional 11,900 acres from the 2018 baseline and to reduce energy use impacts and lower greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 50% from 2005 levels.

Prosperous and healthy communities

In terms of the community prosperity plans, there are seven goals: facilitating equity, diversity and inclusion; promoting health and safety through an integrated health and human services team; reduction of youth substance use; stabilize and increase early childhood education, childcare and pre-kindergarten slots; capitalizing on airport facility investments with increased enplanements and reducing passenger leakage; constructing 300 new essential housing units to the county; and revising the Land Use Resolution to create a review process for approving essential housing projects in designated areas.  

Delivering services

The fourth and final element to the county’s strategic plan is to deliver high quality services. This goal includes three parts, the first of which is to establish a north Gunnison area master plan in collaboration with the city of Gunnison by the end of 2024. This would be a first step toward a larger corridor planning process for the whole valley from Gunnison to Mt. Crested Butte. This corridor planning was also identified as a final item in the prosperous and healthy communities strategic result, and that goal stated that by the end of 2026, the county would, “through Gunnison County Land Use Resolution (LUR) revisions, create a review process for approving essential housing projects in designated areas as a use by right or administrative review and the development of a comprehensive corridor plan from Gunnison to Mt. Crested Butte.”

Commissioners discussed this corridor planning process with assistant county manager for community and economic development Cathie Pagano, and ultimately decided to move the goal up based on the Crested Butte town council requests to include North Valley corridor planning with the county’s 252-unit Whetstone Community Housing project across from Brush Creek Road.  

The other two goals for delivering services in the strategic plan are to meet residents in accessible ways to facilitate opportunities for residents to participate in local government, and to implement procedures for licensing short-term rentals by the end of 2025. The plan will be fine-tuned and returned to the board for final approval at an upcoming meeting.