The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Working with City of Gunnison on first right of refusal
By Katherine Nettles
The Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority (GVRHA) is considering whether it should attempt to purchase the Palisades Apartments complex in Gunnison to preserve existing affordable housing in the south end of the valley. Palisades is for sale and upon word that there is a viable offer on the 60-unit building, the city of Gunnison has a first right of refusal contract that may be transferred to the Housing Authority.
The GVRHA board of directors held a special meeting at the end of October and determined they would ask the city of Gunnison to preserve its first right of refusal and transfer that right to the GVRHA.
Gunnison County commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels, who is also president of the GVRHA board, updated fellow commissioners about the situation on Tuesday, November 5. She said the meeting had been fairly general, and the board wanted more information before deciding whether to actually make an offer on the property. But given a short window of time to exercise a right of first refusal, the board agreed to lock in that option.
“We need to have a follow-up conversation about what that property actually looks like and get into some of the numbers,” said Puckett Daniels. “There was very little that we were able to share in that first meeting; it was very high-level because a lot of the information is private.”
GVRHA’s executive director Melissa LaMonica had signed a nondisclosure agreement and could not divulge many details about the property’s current offer. “But we had 14 days to decide if we were going to share that right of first refusal [with the city of Gunnison] and when it gets transferred there will be 30 days to decide if they want to make an offer on the property. There is an existing HUD contract on the building that preserves affordability for some time,” said Puckett Daniels of the government-subsidized program with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“The board decided to preserve that right of first refusal because we really care about making sure we preserve affordable housing within the community,” concluded Puckett Daniels. “And mostly because we have a lot of questions that couldn’t be answered in that first meeting. There’s not a commitment to acquire the property or make an offer,” she said. “The board simply made a decision to look at it more deeply.”
LaMonica confirmed that the city agreed to grant that request at their November 5 meeting. “We have not yet officially received or accepted the assignment, nor has our Board decided if we are going to exercise that right,” she wrote in an email to the Crested Butte News this week. She noted that the GVRHA board has an executive session scheduled on Thursday, November 14 and will discuss the opportunity further.
“According to my interpretation of the statute, we have 30 days from the November 1 date that the city gave the seller’s attorney,” she said.
The News has reached out to Palisades Apartments several times for information about the potential contract but received no response.
