The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Appeal? Redesign?
Overall size didn’t matter but where the size was located did…and that resulted in a huge setback for the proposed Sixth Street Station project in Crested Butte. The size and mass of the hotel portion of Sixth Street Station appears to have sunk the latest proposal at last week’s BOZAR (Board of Zoning and Architectural Review) meeting.
In what appeared to be a surprise move, the board members unanimously denied the “massing” aspect of the 62,500-square-foot development. All further discussion over the project was tabled indefinitely. The BOZAR vote will likely result in either a redesign of the development or an appeal of the decision to the Crested Butte Town Council.
Despite being satisfied with the overall size of the proposal and agreeing to allow the developers to build 62,500 square feet of building on a parcel of the same size, the board members felt that two buildings larger than 20,000 square feet each are simply too big for Crested Butte.
The development has been working its way through BOZAR for more than two years, and well more than a dozen public meetings and work sessions have been held on the project. The project is comprised of a hotel, retail, restaurant and office spaces, public gathering places, a spa, open space and 113 parking places in an underground garage.
The project would encompass the land along Sixth Street essentially from Gothic Road to the edge of town across from the Gas Café.
In a three-hour public hearing on the proposal on Wednesday, May 5, the board was satisfied with the size of the proposal, given public amenities included in the project and the fact that parking would be hidden. But in the two blocks closest to Gothic Field, the developers were proposing two large buildings to house a hotel and other associated uses. The building across from Gothic Field on development “Block D” was penciled out at 20,783 square feet, while the building on “Block C” was proposed to come in at 22,927 square feet. Block B had buildings totaling 10,194 square feet and the block at the edge of town proposed 8,573 square feet in building.
“Sixth Street Station has done a nice job overall,” said BOZAR member Liz Sawyer. “They’ve really come a long way. But Block C is excessively dissimilar to density we have in that area and in town—22,927 square feet is too much. And having it back to back with the big building on Block D is just too much massing. The architecture is nice, but it is massive. Can some of it go from three stories to two? I hear the economic development arguments but our job is to deal with architectural appropriateness and C is too massive.”
BOZAR member Andris Zobs agreed. “The visual impact of C and D combined is that of a single body. The street façade of C contributes to the overall massive impact.”
Board member Kevin Krill complimented the architects and specifically Gary Hartman of Sunlit Design. “They put in very nice view corridors through these blocks,” Krill pointed out. “We have never seen a project like this so it is going to be excessively dissimilar to what we’ve ever seen. Maybe in the case of the hotel, it could be appropriate.”
“I agree we have never seen a development like this,” added board member Carolina Alling. “It is so big it is hard to compare to other projects. My issue is the volume of Block C. It’s where you see it from places other than the street front.”
BOZAR chairperson Glenn Michel said that while the latest proposal for the hotel was a lot better than the original “monolith-feel,” proposed two years ago and there was an attempt to get a feel for separating the two large buildings, it was out of place next to a residential neighborhood.
“I have always questioned the ability to get this much Floor Area Ratio into the town guidelines,” Michel said. “We don’t want it to be overbearing and it has to respect the National Historic District. Even though they’ve made a great effort, I’d say this is excessively dissimilar to what we want over there in its massing. I don’t think the mass is appropriate and it is not compatible to the neighboring property.”
There were public comments both in favor and opposed to the proposed size and massing of the project. But there was no fervent view either way from the approximately 20 members of the general public at the meeting. Most, even those speaking against specific elements of the project, said they thought it was a nice-looking proposal.
Chairman Michel read a prepared motion to deny the proposed massing in the Sixth Street Station development proposal, based on excessive dissimilarity. The motion passed unanimously. Michel had motions prepared for both approval and denial of the proposal.
Anticipating a potential appeal to the Town Council, Michel said he was willing to continue the public hearing on the still unresolved issues left on the agenda. If everything else was approved, the developers could appeal the one element that was rejected.
“I don’t see much reason to continue with this discussion tonight,” development spokesperson Gary Hartman told Michel and the board. “Basically you are asking me to redesign the project after two-and-a-half years of working very hard with you. I ask you to table the rest of the discussion so we can figure out where we are.”
The developer’s attorney, Chuck Cliggett, cautioned the BOZAR members about how they appeared, in his view, to have reached their conclusion. “Not to be offensive, because I know you all have put in a great deal of time working on this project, but you have to be careful not to make subjective decisions,” he said.
“You are appointed to apply the town code to projects and I don’t see anything in the town code about rejecting a project because it is too ‘massive,’” said Cliggett. “The code says it has to be compatible, but compatible doesn’t mean it has to be the same as neighboring property. It means they have to be able to co-exist. And you know that every project has an impact.”
Zobs responded to Cliggett saying, “The decisions of the board members are ultimately subjective. But this was not a blanket denial of the project. It was not an attempt to sabotage the proposal.”
Hartman said his understanding is that the public hearing will be re-opened at a future, yet to be determined, date.
“We will figure out our next steps over the next week or so,” Hartman said. “I was disappointed in the BOZAR decision and wished they would have brought these concerns up in 2008. We could have then addressed all of these issues and brought a project forward into a public hearing process that both the proponents and BOZAR believed in.”
