The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Applicants making revisions; corridor plan kickoff scheduled for spring
By Katherine Nettles
According to Gunnison County officials, the applicants for the proposed Lower Verzuh major impact proposal have requested that the January 22 joint public hearing between the county commissioners and planning commission be cancelled. In the meantime, the county is preparing to start a corridor planning process for the North Valley in the next few months.
The Lower Verzuh hearing was scheduled after a third work session with the applicants and the county planning commission last month.
The most recent project proposal from applicants Bill Lacy and Daniel Dow were presented at the December 18 planning commission work session. It proposed to develop infrastructure for 344 residential lots across 450 acres just south of Crested Butte.
Cathie Pagano, assistant county manager for community and economic development, shared on January 5 that the applicants requested their public hearing be cancelled for the time being.
“The applicant has indicated that they would like time to make revisions to the application,” wrote Pagano in an email to the CB News. “We have not yet received any revisions but once something is submitted staff will review it and determine if it can be scheduled for a work session with the planning commission.”
After another work session with the applicants to review any new revisions, the planning commission would determine if they were ready to reschedule a public hearing.
The News reached out to Lacy for more information but did not receive a response prior to publication.
The corridor plan…
During a planning commission meeting in mid-December, the lack of a county corridor plan for the North Valley came up repeatedly among public comments regarding the Starview proposal for 107 units near CB South.
Pagano responded that she was glad to hear so much public enthusiasm for a corridor plan. “I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see you at all the meetings,” she said to the general crowd. She reviewed that the county had just issued a request for proposals for a corridor plan, after having done so in 2024 and then cancelling it due to concerns from the town of Crested Butte that they had not been included in the process.
“When we did that, we lost the grant to do that work so we didn’t have adequate funding at the time,” Pagano added, and said the county had worked with its regional partners for the past several months to identify the scope of work before reissuing the request for proposals in December.
The corridor plan is now funded with a $200,000 state grant and by the town of Crested Butte, Mt. Crested Butte, the RTA and Mountain Express. The RFP process closes in February 2026, and the process will likely kick off in the spring of 2026, estimated Pagano.
She also stated that current applications cannot legally be stopped, despite that suggestion from both CB News editor Mark Reaman, the Crested Butte town council and various community members; she added that a development moratorium would only last six months and that would not be enough time to create a full corridor plan.
“It will likely be one of the biggest planning projects the county has ever done. It will be challenging and we will want lots of public engagement,” she summarized.
County commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels added that the decision came from commissioners not to impose a moratorium prior to the Lower Verzuh application. She shared similar reasoning to Pagano’s. “I decided the most impactful action I could take was to consider these land use applications thoroughly and move forward with a corridor plan,” said Puckett Daniels.
“Do I wish we had a plan in place to drive these applications? I do. But we have a process that owes due process to the landowner and their development team to consider these things in the time that they arrive to consider them. We have statutory legal obligations to be responsive to them in a certain amount of time,” continued Puckett Daniels.
She said she believed they could tackle some of the issues through the land use conversations about specific applications while also pursuing a corridor plan.
Commissioner Jonathan Houck said that in some home rule municipalities, a moratorium might be able to achieve such a pause on applications, however the county legal obligations did not allow that.
