The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Going all electronic this time with new vote allocations
[ By Katherine Nettles ]
CB South property owners will be re-voting on new and revised covenants using an updated system of property owner vote allocations, possibly as early as this summer. The Crested Butte South Property Owners Association (POA) board of directors agreed during its March 9 meeting to use a new version of its previous POA ballot to amend and restate its governing documents. Board members agreed on the new ballot language, which pulls out more controversial amendments to be voted on separately, and agreed to set a date as soon as possible once a citizen’s committee finalizes its recommendations on how property owner votes should be allocated.
The POA board nullified its previous covenant vote from 2021 due to problems with misallocated votes, and has also used the time since to take in community input and to clarify the covenant changes to be more transparent.
After deciding to move forward with a new ballot at the February meeting, POA board director Andrew Sandstrom presented a proposed summary of changes document, sample ballot and an updated version of the full proposed amended and restated covenants for CB South at the March meeting that had been prepared by the POA’s legal counsel.
The new documents can be viewed at https://crestedbuttesouth.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CB-South-Ballot-Feb-2022-clean.pdf
Meanwhile, a citizens committee led by Maggie Dethloff and other professionals in the fields of real estate, assessment and town management is clarifying language on how properties are assessed based on deed and plat, and how votes will be allocated in the future. Dethloff said that work should be complete within a few weeks.
During March 9 public comment, several property owners requested that the POA spend additional time working on the amended and restated covenants, to incorporate additional items such as third story allowances for buildings in the commercial district, or to revisit and better document conversations about short-term rental limits that were chosen for the ballot.
Board members said they were interested in the third story allowances but do not have the bandwidth to add that to the updated ballot at this time. Board members also held firm that they had already gone through an extensive vetting process on the covenants and ballot questions, and aside from addressing the voter allocation and ballot transparency concerns, they were not interested in revisiting the entire process.
Board member David Neben addressed many of the questions from public comments and letters to the editor in recent issues of the Crested Butte News. He said there had been careful and thorough discussions on many of the items that people have been bringing up.
“Historically we have not done the best job of capturing everything that occurs at these meetings. The people that have gleaned through all the meetings over the past couple years with the CASK (Covenant Amendment Steering Committee), not everything makes it into those minutes. So if you come in at the tail end and you don’t participate for the majority of those meetings, what you infer from there is not necessarily 100% accurate, unfortunately. Which is why we’ve decided to start recording our meetings and posting them,” said Neben.
“We as a board probably could have done a better job in the public domain explaining how we got to where we are rather than taking bullets every week in the paper and so on…did we get it all right? Is it perfect? I think we did the best job that we could over a couple of years,” said Neben.
“We walked through this stuff line by line, but it’s just been a minute since we went through that process,” said board member Matt McCombs. He reviewed that a handful of building regulations were duplicated in county guidelines and therefore eliminated for simplicity.
The board proceeded to unanimously approve bringing a new vote to the POA on a new ballot using updated covenant language.
Dethloff said her committee expects to have vote allocation recommendations wrapped up by the April 13 meeting, and then the POA will set a vote period and start a campaign to get out the vote again.
Board members agreed that they would prefer to have professionals manage the vote and voted unanimously to move it to an entirely electronic process. The board will make a plan at the next meeting for how to reach those (one third of total votes cast) who used a paper ballot previously.
