Riverland faces fire concerns

County looks to hire outside consultant to determine risk, solutions

The Gunnison Board of County Commissioners has asked staff to move forward in hiring a neutral third-party contractor capable of finding a resolution to the problem of fire risk at the Riverland Industrial Park. It’s a drastic move, one with which county manager Matthew Birnie is not necessarily on board.

“We’re paying an outside source to reproduce what the fire district exists to do,” he said at an October 15 commissioners meeting. “This is how government becomes inefficient.”
The commissioners came to their decision after listening to several years of unresolved discussion between the Crested Butte Fire Protection District (CBFPD) and the Riverland Property Owners Association about appropriate fire protection measures in the park.
When the Riverland Industrial Park was originally designed and the majority of buildings constructed, it was outside of the CBFPD, and the county did not have an overarching fire code for unincorporated areas, said CBFPD Chief Ric Ems. However in 1995, the CBFPD extended its coverage area from Mt. Crested Butte down to Crested Butte South and began working on fire regulations and codes appropriate for this new jurisdiction.
“We began regularly going down and working with the county and we were finding a lot of discrepancy between the uniform building code and the land use resolution—the document the county used to determine fire safety regulations,” explained Ems.
In 2008, the district went one step further in its work to standardize and update the fire codes and with the county’s approval it adopted the International Fire Code as the regulating mechanism governing fire safety and uniformity. From here, the issue in Riverland grew.
There are 38 lots in the park; many are commercial, some are industrial and a few are residential. Thirty-two of those lots were developed prior to 2008 and the adoption of the International Fire Code; however, the remaining six were not. Now, in order for those remaining lots to be developed, the owners would have to incorporate fire prevention mechanisms into their construction plans.
These mechanisms could come either as sprinkling systems or as a large holding tank with several four-inch pipes to act as water delivery systems to the lots. The associated cost of such measures is prohibitively high, and should not be placed solely on the heads of a few landowners, said Riverland property owner Danny D’Aquila.
For the last five years, D’Aquila and other representatives from the Riverland POA have presented several proposals to both the county and the CBFPD seeking a work-around to the fire code requirements. However, the two parties have remained at an impasse, with the district saying “This is what the code is,” and the affected lot owners saying the situation is unjust.
“The code says that you need appropriate and adequate fire flows, or you need a sprinkler system,” said Russ Forrest, community development director for the county. “It’s straightforward, but the question is, how do you do it? They don’t have the water out there.
John Nichols, a property owner in Riverland, attempted to address this issue last May in a BOCC meeting by suggesting the situation could be fixed with the addition of an amendment to the fire code stating that “preexisting industrial subdivisions non-residential structures with an aggregate fire area not to exceed 3,000 square feet” be exempt from current regulations.
This was not deemed an appropriate solution, and after another meeting the BOCC charged county staff with making some sort of progress on the issue, which is roughly how they came to the recent decision to hire a fire protection engineer from out of area to come to Riverland and assess whether an unacceptable risk exists at the park, and if so what a good short-term and long-term solution might be.
The contractor, who has quoted the county a fee of $6,500, would then share her findings with the BOCC and staff.
“Right now we don’t have the authority to instill what a third party would decide,” said Forrest. “We would hope that the district and the POA would be willing to work with what is recommended to reach a resolution—both have indicated a willingness to work with us.”
However, as years without agreement can attest, this could be easier said than done. For instance, even as D’Aquila voiced his desire to work with the county to find acceptable fire codes that could be economically implemented, he continued to remind the commissioners that the funding to move forward with the project does not exist.
Ems was much the same, saying the district was willing to work with the county but this in many ways came down to issues of health and safety.
“The district’s board is standing fast,” Ems said. “We don’t want to change the code for six lot owners. They’re trying to put economy over life safety.”
The county hopes to move forward with bringing the fire engineer to Riverland within the next few weeks.