After reviewing over 100 pages of the commissioners’ code proposal (Module 1), I wrote to each commissioner and attended the Jan. 16 meeting at the fairgrounds (Herald, Jan. 17). There were about a thousand mostly farm- and ranch-owning attendees.
What was to be a listening meeting was an hour-plus of commissioners’ talking points on improving permitting. What the commission revealed is several failed attempts at land use code updates.
Instead of seeking input of owner needs from the affected districts (better yet – one of the 60 of 64 Colorado counties with more up-to-date codes), they paid $100,000-plus for an outside consultant. They then acknowledged not reading their updated draft report before releasing the proposed changes.
What galled the attendees and me, as an agri-tourism farmer, were the proposed scenic and river corridor overlays with “aesthetic” codes having nothing to do with the claimed general purpose of public safety and property rights.
Just the opposite.
Had the consultants visited CR 250, impacted by both overlays, they would have found half the properties out of proposed compliance. The cost to remedy would easily be millions of dollars, so tourists would think the area was “pretty.”
Compounding this are code provisions that are the bureaucratic version of eminent domain, in which diminished property value would not be covered. Rural homeowners know BS when they smell it, and would prefer to invest resources on a legal remedy than accepting a poorly conceived proposal.
Carl Lloyd Sheeler
Durango
