La Plata County staff have found a firm to rewrite the county land-use code, which is expected to be the key to an easier permitting process for local businesses.
A land-use code is a set of regulatory standards that dictate where and how development can occur. County staff members have not finalized the contract, but selected Texas-based community planning firm Kendig Keast Collaborative, the same company that worked with the city of Durango on its land-use and development code, to begin work on the rewrite this fall.
In its application to the county, Kendig Keast pointed to a lack of cohesion and order in the county’s code, lack of building and landscape design standards and the absence of mechanisms to allow mixed use.
The company pledged significant public involvement throughout the process, as well as consideration of native culture, historic ranching, agricultural and mining uses and where utilities are feasible as the code is drafted.
The code rewrite is an overdue milestone in the county’s history of attempts at long-range planning.
In 2007, La Plata County commissioners approved an overhaul of the land-use code to govern rapid growth. The draft took three years of work and included divisive regulations on driveway standards and river setbacks, among others. But the code was never implemented, and was ultimately discarded in 2009, with commissioners fearing it could promote rural sprawl.
The current code, which dates to at least 1990, stayed in place and has undergone incremental updates over the years. But as the county grew and diversified in its uses of land, the code became outdated and conflicting.
“Since 2012, we’ve had about 25 major amendments to our code,” Planning Director Damian Peduto said. “We were progressively making improvements to it over the last several years, and the efforts we’ve made since 2012 have been piece-mealed. It’s onerous. This rewrite would be another holistic effort.”
When staff announced last summer plans to rewrite the land-use code entirely, Peduto noted that changing the code’s standards would cut red tape on the county’s inhibitive land-use permitting process for businesses. Currently, it can take months, sometimes a year for some businesses to get up and running.
Though the county has streamlined the permitting process for businesses in the past year, the steep front-end costs and time investment stay the same unless the land-use code is updated.
“If a land-use code is structured properly, it should streamline the permitting process, take out unnecessary steps and be structured to deal with different development interests,” said Kendig Keast Collaborative owner and chief executive officer Bret Keast. “We encounter that often,” he said of business communities complaining of over-regulated, time-intensive permitting and development processes.
One way to remove roadblocks, Keast said, is to open up planning districts to more diverse uses.
A 16-month process, the rewrite would be completed in four phases: orientation and analysis, drafting, public review and adoption. Kendig Keast Collaborative estimates the project will cost $250,000.
The consulting team, which consists of KKC, community planners and landscape designers Logan Simpson, document editing system enCode Plus and law firm Fairfield and Woods, has written plans governing land use, transportation and open space for communities throughout the country, including Cortez, Farmington and Aspen.
Planning staff will work directly with the consultants.
The land-use code is inextricably linked to another document the county has been buried in for more than a year: Staff members are more than two-thirds of the way through an incremental rewrite of the comprehensive plan, which is expected to be finished by early 2017.
Under statutory rule, the county is required to have a long-range planning document, and this one addresses the most critical aspects of land use in La Plata County, including housing, land-use, agriculture, utilities and extractive resources. Unlike the land-use code, the comprehensive plan isn’t regulatory; it’s a nonbinding blueprint advising future growth and development.
“The comprehensive plan is significant, because it advises regulation,” Peduto said. “The two documents rely on each other when they’re correlated well. The comp plan will directly inform how we want that product (the land-use code) crafted.”
Peduto estimated five staff members will invest 15 to 20 hours total per week in the comprehensive plan, averaging about 800 hours a year with a cost of about $55,000 over the 18-month revision process. That excludes extra time volunteered by planning commissioners.
As both processes advance, the business community in particular is paying close attention to how the documents are drafted, and if they will facilitate rather than hamstring development.
Roger Zalneraitis, executive director of the La Plata County Economic Development Alliance, said the land-use segment of the comprehensive plan, which was updated last spring, lacks specificity on “what kind of development they (the county) want to encourage and where.”
“What I hear more about isn’t unchecked growth making our community worse,” he said. “Instead, what I hear more about is regulatory policies that make development prohibitively expensive.”
That statement rings true for the James Ranch in Animas Valley. Cynthia James Stewart, a stakeholder at the Ranch, applied for a Class II land-use permit in September 2015 to build a bigger kitchen for The Harvest Grill & Green and expand food service accommodations. She’s still waiting.
“We’re still jumping through hoops,” Stewart said. “It’s not just the county. We have to go through a process with all the other entities, like the water department, the fire department, Parks and Wildlife, and then you have to wait for a reply. And once we get approval, then it’s another two or three months to get a public hearing on the commissioners’ agenda. It’s an exciting thought that this all could be streamlined.”
Some developers and once-hopeful entrepreneurs declined to speak on the record about the county’s planning and development principles, but agreed they’re flawed.
“Since 1990, when ‘growth should pay its own way’ became the governing principle for most municipalities in Colorado, we have seen a significant change in the Colorado real estate environment,” Zalneraitis said. “At that time, land and construction costs were cheap, so it was understandable that development should pay for infrastructure. That is not the case anymore, but we have not started rethinking how much additional regulatory and fee costs developments should pay.”
But Keast assures that, if his consulting team gets the job, it will craft the land-use code to work in conjunction with the comprehensive plan, and those affected most will have a seat at the table.
“I think our work with Durango certainly gave us familiarity with the lay of the land,” Keast said. “If we’re awarded the contract, it will be an open, transparent process. The county is so diverse, we would have to be inclusive in working with the different communities and make sure we’re involving everyone.”
jpace@durangoherald.com
