The county comprehensive plan, with updates from the 2001 plan, is down to the last few chapters and is expected to be completed in the spring.
The county commissioners reviewed the past several months worth of updates on Nov. 15. The updates are actually approved by the County Planning Commission.
Planning Commission Chair Jim Tencza noted, as he often has, that the comp plan is advisory, not regulatory. "It should be a roadmap for all county residents," he said. Use of words like shall, will, and must should be minimized in the comp plan, he said.
County Planning Director Damian Peduto said, "The comp plan condenses long-range planning efforts into one document. Implementation is through regulatory means. Those have various forms. The most common is the land use code. Those will follow many of the (comp plan) policies which talk about managing growth. That's not necessarily limiting. It's how we create growth where we can maintain infrastructure."
County Commissioner Brad Blake had concerns that "the shall, will, and must don't get put in this document, but it seems like to the Planning Department it's a shall, will, and must type of document." He cited clustering and said, "Nobody really knows what it means." He worries about the cost and time for applicants to get through the land use approval process.
Tencza said there was a lot of talk about clustering in the 2011 comp plan that was never adopted. Some of that is in the new plan, along with encouraging development in places that already have infrastructure, he said. "If you don't have anything about it in the document, it's coming out of nowhere," he said.
Peduto said clustering is one of various tools listed in the land use chapter (element) to achieve desired outcomes. "Using clustering means concentrating development onto one section of a larger property, leaving a vast area of open space," he said. "It can protect watershed, viewshed, provide a buffer. There are other things that have to be used with clustering to be effective. It's not something that can be used with every project. ... There will be a lot of incentives and encouragements."
He added, "This guides us toward (land use) codes that will create a better process." The county is just starting on a new land use code, as reported in the Nov. 18 Times.
Peduto noted reference to "right to farm" in the agriculture element of the comp plan, "that growth shouldn't impact existing farms." In the land use code, that includes buffers between ag land and rural subdivisions, site planning, easements, and clustering with open space as a buffer. "All these methods of implementation get considered following the policy," Peduto said.
Tencza noted that some topics only got a couple paragraphs in the 2001 comp plan. Those have been "fleshed out. There was fill-in as well as updating."
The Nov. 8 voter rejection of a property tax increase for county roads came up. County Manager Joe Kerby noted that with that defeat, the county's 10-year road plan has no funding source. The Durango Herald reported Sunday that the road and bridge tax increase passed in and near Durango but was rejected by rural voter precincts.
County Commissioner Gwen Lachelt commented that other counties have property tax mill levies more than double the total 8.5 mills in La Plata County, which hasn't increased since the early 1990s. "People are moving here. There's growth all over the county. ... Right now growth isn't paying its own way. Does the planning commission have ideas about that?"
Tencza responded, "I don't think we've tackled that issue. We will. We've talked about the need for infrastructure. Once we get this off our plate, that might be a subject to continue the first Thursday meetings. We have enough on our plates at the moment, but we'd be happy to look at that."
Planning commissioners have been meeting the first Thursday each month since early 2015 to update the 2001 comp plan. Updated sections are the introduction and growth trends, land use, infrastructure, housing, agriculture, resource extraction and renewable energy, the airport, and environmental resources.
The planning commission focus on Dec. 1 will be public safety. That's already in draft form, Peduto said. The comp plan update finishes in 2017 with historic preservation, which the county's Historic Preservation Commission has been working on, and recreation/tourism. Peduto said historic preservation will be new to the plan, not an update of existing topics.
Tencza said those should be done in April. Peduto agreed but added, "If there's a lot of public interest at the last minute, which seems to be a tradition, we can have another meeting." The monthly meetings have had little if any public participation. The previous comp plan effort was in its late stages when major opposition arose in summer 2011 and the plan was scrapped. Some opponents criticized use of words like "sustainable," which they said implied interference by a United Nations Agenda 21 conspiracy to control local land use decisions.
Once the comp plan updates are complete, attention will turn to district area plans, most dating back to the late 1990s, that are part of the comp plan appendix.
Tencza said planning commissioners should review and update the finished comp plan periodically, "so it's a living document."
Peduto added, "It should be re-visited annually at least."
