The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Town looks for financial guarantee the work at Wildhorse will be done
With the understanding that the five exposed foundations at the Wildhorse subdivision in Mt. Crested Butte likely won’t be dealt with in any permanent way before winter sets in, the Town Council gave the property’s prospective owner another two weeks to consider a deal that will get the process of improving safety and reducing visual impacts moving.
The deal, pitched to developer Wildhorse Denver Partners LLC by the town, would require the developers to make good on their promise to put fences around the open foundation and exposed rebar causing safety concerns in the neighborhood. Plus, it would include a plan for a more permanent solution to the perceived negative impacts to surrounding properties, as soon as the snow melts next spring.
After the town identified the properties as an unsafe and unsightly nuisance early this fall, it issued a Notice of Abatement August 30 to set a 10-day timeline for the property’s owner to fix the problems. Community development director Carlos Velado laid out two potential solutions: remove the foundation walls and bury the concrete footer for about $50,000, or remove everything and reclaim the site for more than $75,000.
But the town has less than $30,000 from a clean-up deposit for the foundations to do the work, and a solution involving the property’s owner would avoid a lengthy and expensive legal solution, like a lien.
Wildhorse Denver Partners, which is planning to take over the foreclosed property January 1, asked the town for some time to address the concerns and presented a plan at a meeting on Tuesday, October 4.
Developer Brad Pauls of the Pauls Corporation and Wildhorse Denver Partners said his company was happy to address the safety issues at the property. He made it clear, however, that he wasn’t eager to remove the $300,000 in concrete used in the foundations and would rather see a temporary solution that will allow his company to build when the real estate market warrants the new construction. He suggested a fence eight feet high on the uphill side and six feet high on the downhill side with a mesh screen to hide the holes.
But waiting for market conditions made the council nervous. Councilman David O’Reilly repeated the part of the developer’s proposal that read, “We hope to be building homes as soon as the market conditions warrant,” and added, “I would feel that maybe as soon as January rolls around you might do something with those foundations.”
Local attorney David Leinsdorf, who is representing a group of homeowners in the overlooking Prospect Subdivision as well as the Wildhorse Property Owners Association, told the council that the open foundations are causing a real reduction in property values and a fence won’t fix the problem for those people higher on the hill.
“’As soon as market conditions warrant’ is what one of your members quoted as the suggestion from Mr. Pauls… Well, that could be six months, it could be six years or longer. Nobody knows. The property owners in Wildhorse and Prospect have suffered problems for the last five years since those foundations have been in place,” he said.
Leinsdorf said he’d represented a client who succeeded in getting the assessed value on his lot reduced by a quarter of a million dollars. A recent auction for another lot failed to draw a single bidder, even at $100,000.
Although Leinsdorf admitted the open foundations weren’t the only reason neighboring property values had decreased, he said, “It’s very clear that these foundations are causing a lot of harm in terms of property values and they should be removed or covered and landscaped in such a way that the damage to the adjacent properties is mitigated.”
Pauls never addressed the visual impact of the Wildhorse foundations in his presentation but told the council that filling the foundations with dirt and landscaping them until they could be built upon wasn’t reasonable, since the necessary grade of the dirt cap would push past the property boundary.
He said he hadn’t considered building and weatherproofing a sub-floor on the five foundations, as councilman Danny D’Aquila suggested. But the consensus between the council members was that nothing could be done with the foundations this fall, other than a fence to keep people away.
Councilman Chris Morgan suggested getting a financial mechanism, like a deposit or bond, in place that the town could call on in case the developer failed to deal with the open foundations after a certain time. How much time is still up for discussion and the council will consider its next step at a meeting on October 18.
