A petition circulating in Durango could upend plans to transform the former Durango School District 9-R Administration Building into a new fire station.
Citizens Voice Durango, a group of local residents and business owners, has undertaken an initiative that would force the city of Durango to change its code for fire and police developments ahead of the Durango Fire Protection District’s proposed conversion of the 9-R Administration Building at 201 E. 12th St. into an emergency services hub.
If it succeeds, the initiative would require public hearings and provide greater opportunity for public input, something the group says has been lacking throughout the sale and redevelopment of the 9-R property. But according to the fire district, the initiative would delay a decadeslong search for a new fire station.
“Durango’s history is really rooted in public engagement,” said Ellen Stein, one of the organizers of Citizens Voice Durango. “We have a really engaged community and all these people feel excluded. We feel so much dysfunction and concern.”
The initiative Stein and the about 30 members of the Citizens Voice Durango organizing committee are circulating would change the city’s code to make protective service facilities such as a fire or police station a conditional use in Durango’s Central Business District, which spans from Fourth Street to 15th Street and Narrow Gauge Avenue to the alley between East Second and East Third avenues.
It also calls for fire and police facilities in the CBD to conform to all of the city’s adopted plans, including its Strategic Plan and its Urban Renewal Authority Midtown Plan.
Fire and police stations are currently considered allowed uses in the CBD. While a seemingly slight distinction, conditional and allowed uses go through a markedly different process when a development is being considered.
Allowed uses are subject to administrative review through the city’s division of planning. In the case of the redevelopment of the 9-R Administration Building for a fire station, the proposal would also go through the city’s Planning Commission because the addition of facilities for equipment storage such as fire trucks will likely require a “major site plan review,” said Kevin Hall, managing director of Community Development for the city, who oversees the planning division.
In contrast, conditional uses require a public hearing process with the Planning Commission, which could then refer the matter to City Council.
“What the conditional-use permit allows for is a discussion about not so much the details of the project, but the merits of the project as to whether it’s appropriate or not,” Hall said. “What the (Citizens Voice Durango) committee has put together is a list of city documents that need to be reviewed against to determine whether it’s an appropriate use, and that’s what they’re pursuing.”
Citizens Voice Durango needs 768 signatures on the petition by Wednesday for the initiative to succeed. The group was about halfway as of Tuesday, but it has faced challenges, said Ted Wright, another organizer of Citizens Voice Durango.
Signatories must be registered voters who live within the city limits of Durango. The group is finding that a number of the signatures they have collected are invalid because the person doesn’t live within the strict city limits of Durango, they are not registered to vote or their name or address does not exactly match their voter registration information.
“The headwinds are so strong that it’s almost impossible,” Wright said.
If the initiative succeeds, City Council can either adopt the Citizen Voice Durango’s proposed ordinance as drafted or send it to a special election that would be held in early August, City Attorney Dirk Nelson said during a City Council study session Tuesday.
Citizens Voice Durango has put the city’s cost for a special election at $38,000.
If voters approved the ordinance, it would head back to City Council for adoption. If voters did not pass the ordinance, the initiative would die.
Stein said the group is making a push ahead of Wednesday’s deadline and will be circulating petitions throughout the weekend at Earth Day activities and the Smiley Building.
Greg Hoch, a member of the Citizens Voice Durango organizing committee, said the petition comes down to just one thing.
“If nothing less, the petition is simply an effort by the citizens to ask to have a legitimate voice in the discussion of the appropriateness of this site through public hearings. That’s all it really boils down to,” he said.
DFPD bought the 9-R Administration Building from the school district in December for $6.49 million.
Though it was a transaction between two publicly funded entities, neither DFPD nor the school district was required to involve the public for the real estate sale.
Even though it was not required, the Durango public had numerous opportunities for comment “at every school board regular meeting for two years while the building was for sale,” 9-R Superintendent Karen Cheser said in an email.
In June 2021, the school district held a special meeting to discuss the sale of the 9-R Administration Building, where the school board identified DFPD’s proposal to turn the property into an emergency services center as the best option.
On Dec. 14, the school district also hosted a public forum, which was just a few days before the sale to DFPD closed, at which time the public could submit written questions for the school district to answer.
“They opened up this forum where you really didn’t have a dialogue. You just had them giving answers to questions they’d already been given and then they closed on the property within three days,” Hoch said.
For its part, DFPD hosted a moderated forum on March 10 where the public could pre-submit written questions. DFPD and Fire Chief Hal Doughty selected those they would answer ahead of the meeting without notifying participants, and the meeting took the air of a presentation instead of a public forum, Hoch said.
“It was all a big public relations piece,” he said. “Nobody got a chance to say anything or speak from the audience until the very end when they had a few minutes left. They opened it up for comments and somebody asked, ‘Aren’t you considering another site?’ and they got shut down immediately.”
It was this limited public engagement that drove Hoch, Stein, Wright and others to form Citizens Voice Durango and begin their initiative.
It was also what spurred former City Councilor and Mayor Dick White to sign the petition after having previously sent City Council a letter with other former mayors in October supporting the evaluation of the 9-R Administration Building for an emergency services center.
“I assumed, and it turns out mistakenly, that there would have to be a public process about changing that building use, in particular, the impacts on the neighborhood,” White said. “I was dumbfounded to find out no because it’s already in public use.
“There was no need for a formal public process where people could weigh in and this has huge impacts on the neighborhood (and) a huge impact on the potential revenues available for the urban renewal authority,” White said.
But limited input and minimal communication extended beyond the public to city government.
DFPD never communicated to City Council or city staff members that it intended to buy the 9-R Administration Building, though the city oversees the land-use code and must approve of the redevelopment of the property, said City Councilor Kim Baxter.
“We didn’t even know about it until it was announced in the Herald,” she said.
The move out of River City Hall into a modern facility is desperately needed, according to DFPD and White. And over the years, DFPD has worked with various city councils to identify potential locations for the building of a new fire station.
Those city councils have ruled out past locations, including the parking lot on the corner of College Drive and Camino del Rio, but Doughty and DFPD have never approached the current City Council as a whole body to reconsider some of those locations as better sites amid the agency’s potential move to the 9-R building, Baxter said.
“What’s unfortunate is the council and the city staff were never allowed to have that conversation because we were never brought into the picture,” she said.
For its part, DFPD has taken a heavy-handed tone in its messaging surrounding the relocation of the downtown fire station to the 9-R Administration Building.
On its website for the downtown fire station project, DFPD blames “political pressures on the City” for the collapse of efforts to build a fire station at College Drive and Camino del Rio.
In its question-and-answer section, DFPD answers the question why not choose another location by saying, “For 38 years, the fire department has served you from an undersized, unsafe, and inadequately equipped fire station.”
But according to Deputy Chief Randy Black, DFPD is simply frustrated by nearly four decades of inaction amid the need for a modernized facility. DFPD has considered 31 different properties, according to its website.
“We’ve been looking for a fire station for 39 years and no properties have risen to the top of that pile. We have tried numerous times to find a place,” he said. “People that have been saying, ‘Why the rush?’ I don’t think 39 years is a rush to buy a piece of property.”
DFPD’s most recent contract for emergency services reached with the city in 2014 stipulates that the fire district must construct a new station by the end of 2028, to which the city will contribute $3.06 million.
But DFPD’s options for a new downtown location are limited, Black said. The majority of the fire district’s calls occur in and around the CBD so a new fire station must be nearby to reach those calls in sufficient time.
“We need a current (and) safe piece of property that is 1.5 to 2 acres in size between 15th Street and College Drive and Third Avenue and the river,” he said. “There are very few pieces of property within that small pocket and we found one that was publicly for sale.”
Citizens Voice Durango has proposed the fire district stay at River City Hall and construct a new facility. But the city, not DFPD owns the property, and City Council has not offered the property for the fire district to build a new station there, Black said.
DFPD has met with organizers of Citizens Voice Durango multiple times to answer the group’s questions, but Citizens Voice Durango has not contacted DFPD about the petition, he said.
“We’ve done everything that we can do to communicate, but when they’ll never accept any answer except the one that they want, it’s hard to find a process that will meet their needs,” he said.
DFPD does not have a timeline for when it will submit its development plans for the property. The agency is still working with the city in the hope that the Durango Police Department will join the fire district at the new facility, but DFPD has a number of businesses and agencies in the queue if the police department does not join, Black said.
Ahead of Wednesday’s deadline for the petition, City Council discussed holding a public meeting about DFPD’s redevelopment of 9-R Administration Building during the council’s Tuesday study session.
City Manager José Madrigal said city staff members would hold a public meeting when DFPD submitted its plans for the property regardless of whether Citizens Voice Durango’s petition passes.
In an interview, Baxter reiterated the city’s commitment to a public forum.
“City Council and staff has agreed that (DFPD’s plans) would still come to City Council to have a public meeting because of the pretty significant impact that this use has on this area and on our downtown,” she said. “We didn’t want this to go just to staff even though legally it could and staff didn’t want that either because we want to hear from the community and we want the community to be informed.”
City Council’s discussion Tuesday marks the first time the city has agreed to hold a public meeting on DFPD’s relocation to the 9-R Administration Building, Hoch said, and Citizens Voice Durango celebrated the move.
“I think they acknowledge that (public input) opportunity has not as yet existed, so this was a big deal for them to announce that,” he said.
Yet, City Council’s public meeting does not entirely align with Citizens Voice Durango’s initiative. The group’s petition calls for a public hearing, which is a required legal proceeding for a project, while a public meeting is more informal.
No matter the outcome of the petition, the decision to move DFPD’s downtown station to the 9-R School Administration Building will be a difficult one, White said.
“We need to have a downtown fire station, but I am skeptical that that’s the right place for it,” White said. “It’s a tough issue, but I think it’s got to be thrashed out in public.”
ahannon@durangoherald.com
