County to form new group to tweak energy policies

Discover consistent legal review should be part of
the process

At a joint meeting September 4, the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) and Planning Commission started looking at ways to revise the county’s energy policy as it pertains to development.

After an effort to include a provision requiring carbon neutrality of big projects fell short of making it into the final version of the newly adopted Special Development Resolution (SDPR), the commissioners promised not to let the idea fade away.
Through its Energy Action Plan, the county has set goals to reduce emissions and energy consumption with changes in behavior and efficiency improvements in county operations.
“What we don’t have is any kind of energy policy on new development,” county commissioner Hap Channell said. “We’re trying to reduce emissions, but we know that every new house and every new building increases emissions.”
Without reining in those emissions, the county will never meet the goals the commissioners have set, which was one of the major points planning commissioner Richard Karas tried to make while fighting to keep the carbon neutrality provision in the SDPR.
But in dropping the provision, the commissioners said they felt requiring one standard for one type of development and another standard for county operations and other development would possibly be “a train wreck,” according to Channell.
“Where the conversation gets really pointed is when we do the big projects, like the jail and public works facility,” he said.
The group decided that such an important topic should get special attention from a small group made up of people who are knowledgeable about energy and planning issues. The members of that group would be chosen later.
The group will try to identify the big decisions that have to be made about the goal of the county’s energy policy and come up with a recommendation that can eventually be turned into county policy.
Taking on such weighty topics as zoning and energy policy also raised the specter of a legal challenge to county actions and the Planning Commission was looking to score a more intensive legal review of amendments to the Land Use Resolution (LUR) and other proposals under consideration.
“We’ve got a slug of LUR amendments that are coming up [to be considered] for adoption,” Planning Commission chairman Ian Billick said. “One of the things that I wanted to raise is the legal review of the language before it gets passed up.”
Billick said he would like to see the Planning Commission’s initial draft of an amendment go to the county attorney’s office and returned before it goes to the BOCC for consideration and possible adoption. That simple, systematic review, he said, could help the county avoid legal challenges down the road.
In the past, the legal review process for amendments being considered by the Planning Commission has been all over the board, Billick said. It ranged from excellent review through the development of the newly adopted SDPR, to “marginal” legal review on other occasions to “it really failed with the [Crested Butte] South Special Area Regulations.”