Mt. CB council denies Nordic Inn PUD application

Back to 132-room hotel and parking garage?

By Kendra Walker

After continuing a public hearing from March 18 and several hours of discussion on May 6, the Mt. Crested Butte town council ultimately took the recommendation of its planning commission and unanimously denied a major alteration preliminary planned unit development (PUD) plan to remodel the Nordic Inn. 

The current application proposed 27 three-bedroom rental cottages, a redesign of the existing structure with eight hotel rooms and four community housing units, and a 130-space, two-level parking garage. The proposal also includes four town-owned community housing units to be constructed by the Nordic Inn owner Pearls Management LLC on the town’s adjacent ROS-1 lot, per an Amended and Restated Development Agreement created between Pearls and the town in February 2024. 

As previously reported in the Crested Butte News, the planning commission recommended denial of the application due to concerns related to emergency road access, the use of the ROS-1 property, building density and setbacks, among other items. The planning commission encouraged the applicant to withdraw the application and address the issues they had with the plan; however, the applicant chose to bring the plan to the town council for review. 

The Nordic Inn property’s original PUD was approved for the development of a 132-room hotel, eight community housing units and 220 parking spaces, 75 of which must be public. Pearls attorney Aaron Huckstep reminded the council that PUD currently remains valid and in place should they deny the application. He said if the council denied the application, Pearls would pay the town $1.05 million for NIS-2 and eliminate the Amended and Restated Development Agreement requiring Pearls to build the four community housing units on ROS-1.

“That is exactly what the applicant will do if you deny the application,” said Huckstep. “We’re not going to amend the application, we’re not going to withdraw it and make revisions.”

“Everything boils down to the Amended and Restated Development agreement,” he said. “I think the biggest challenge this evening is that somebody is going to have to decide to be a champion of ROS-1 and those four community housing units. If you don’t like what’s happening or what’s proposed on ROS-1, give some consideration to removing it altogether.”

Huckstep noted that town staff didn’t appear to want to discuss the proposal of removing ROS-1 from the proposal. “We have yet to receive solid feedback from council and staff that they’d like to investigate and tweak.”

Town manager Carlos Velado later clarified why the staff did not entertain questions on amending ROS-1. “We’re working off that (Amended and Restated Development) agreement,” he said. “Until the council says no, it’s not our place to negotiate or consider something contrary to what the council has already approved.”

Huckstep said that the other issues the planning commission had with the application could all be easily fixed during final plan review. “In my opinion the main concern was ROS-1. We can get through these issues, the applicant is not concerned about them…we can address the other things through conditions. There is a process for how to deal with them.” 

Many neighbors to the Nordic Inn have spoken during public comment over the last several months of planning commission and town council meetings, reiterating that they are not against the development but feel it needs more work and expressed concerns related to how building setbacks, the design on ROS-1, fire codes and snow storage would impact the surrounding neighborhood. 

Tim Greydanus said it was misleading to say that the only issue the planning commission had with the application was ROS-1. “They had a whole list of concerns with the project,” he said. He encouraged the town to look at the current PUD that keeps ROS-1 as an open space buffer, and includes public parking and eight community housing units. 

“Let’s start with a clean sheet of paper and redesign it and revisit it,” said Noah Eckhouse. 

Michael Blunck and Tina Baker both expressed concern for the safety and welfare of guests and residents. “Fire codes are designed to protect someone’s life and should never be a candidate for flexibility,” said Baker.

Huckstep expressed his continued frustration surrounding the fire district not approving the internal pedestrian/emergency access roadway. Huckstep told the council that the internal roadway is a private road only used for pedestrians, electric vehicles owned by the hotel to transport guests and for emergency vehicles. “The notion that we are trying to somehow abandon the fire code is simply false…Remember that this is a PUD and we are varying the town code. You should not expect the internal roadway in the application to meet with the fire department’s approval. The reason is because the type of road does not exist within the town code. If that’s the approach you take, you will never be able to approve a PUD that has a variation.“

He said the town could ask the fire department to refer to Appendix D, which can be used as a catch-all for designs such as in PUDs that don’t follow the typical code. 

Fire chief Ric Ems was present at the meeting and confirmed that he would be willing to review it to Appendix D as adopted by the fire district within Gunnison County if told to do so. 

Baker had also noted that the traffic study was done in summer 2017 and did not account for busy ski season traffic on Treasury Road. 

Huckstep stated the reason for not doing an updated traffic study was because the proposal was significantly less dense than the previous iteration. “Why should the applicant spend more money and time to perform a traffic study when we’re confident in the results of that study?” A town staff memo to the council also confirmed that a full traffic study is not required because the traffic generated by the proposed site is less than the traffic generated by the currently use entitled on the property.

Council discussion

“The traffic thing is a hangup for me because it seemed like low-hanging fruit to appease a lot of people, including the planning commission, town council and residents,” said council member Steve Morris. 

He recognized the complications of the Amended and Restated Development Agreement. “I have zero support for the community housing plan associated with this. It doesn’t seem to fit with where my current goals as a councilor are and what my goal is to the community. I think back then with the housing emergency there were a lot of driving factors in creating this housing hysteria and knee-jerk reactions that weren’t fully mapped out because they sounded good at the time. And I think this is one of those examples. This was probably pushed through based on that hysteria. With that in mind I’m struggling to find support for this. I do think parking spaces do hold some value up there,” he said, referring to the previous, currently approved PUD. 

“Some of us were on that previous council,” said mayor Nicholas Kempin. “All that still was on planning commission approval… it still had to get to the people with the nitty-gritty details. We expected it to go to planning commission and see what they said. I see that as a potential problem that planning commission might have been confused about the agreement.”

“ROS-1 for me was the biggest hangup,” said council member Bruce Nation. “I like ROS-1 as open space. I do feel like we could have possibly come to some sort of agreement. I’m sad we didn’t see a plan that met all those requirements.”

When council members asked for clarification on the results of a denial, town attorney Gerald Dahl responded, “If the application is denied and they [Pearls] choose not to resubmit, they pay the town, retain ownership of NI-2, town has ROS-1 and the obligation for Pearls to construct a garage under the current PUD shall be reduced to 160 parking spaces,” he said. “I interpret that of 160, 75 would have to be public parking.”

However, council and staff were uncertain if Pearls also interpreted that obligation the same way from their perspective, but the public hearing had already been closed and the council could no longer hear from the applicant. The council debated taking a 10-minute break for the attorneys to discuss, but Nation said that his position would not change either way and made a motion to deny the Nordic Inn PUD Preliminary plan application and direct the town attorney to prepare findings in support for the council’s consideration.

The council voted unanimously to deny the application. Council member Roman Kolodziej was not at the meeting. The council will review the findings for denial at their May 20 meeting.