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Planning for an Uncertain Future, Part Two |
Bill Hudson | 7/22/10
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Read Part One
“You have a joint meeting scheduled with the Town, right?”
County commissioner Clifford Lucero was addressing County Planning Commission chair Kirk England at the July 8 planning commission meeting — which began with a give-and-take conversation with the County commissioners before heading off into a longer conversation about new ways to allow the subdivision of large ranches.
Ranches are a big topic, in the world of County planning, seeing as nearly all the privately owned land in Archuleta County is zoned “agricultural” for various reasons. (We’ll take a look at those reasons in a minute.) Forty years ago, even more of the county was “agricultural ranches” but that was before the arrival of Ralph Eaton’s suburban dream; a meandering complex of subdivided ranch properties that later became Fairfield, and then the Pagosa Lakes Property Owners Association — Archuleta County’s “third government”, you might say, after the Town of Pagosa Springs and the County.
 It was Ralph Eaton’s subdivisions — and the subdivisions later created by various other developers — that led to the gradual growth of Pagosa’s real estate and construction industries, two industries that played major roles in the local economy up until about 2008, when they both lost their balance and fell to their knees.
Prior to 2008, the County government’s main concern had been: how do we maintain all these subdivision roads and this airport and collect all the taxes and provide public safety — all without going bankrupt?
Now, however, the County commissioners have voluntarily assumed an additional task: how do we help revive two faltering local industries slammed by a massive global recession?
This task was on commissioner Clifford Lucero’s mind, it seems, at the July 8 joint meeting with the Planning Commission.
“You have a joint meeting scheduled with the Town, right?” Lucero asked Kirk England.
England confirmed that a joint meeting is scheduled for July 30.
“Could you, at your joint meeting, bring it up — that we’d possibly like to think about waiving the fees, by 50 percent, again next year? Can you get the input from them?" Lucero asked.
“I mean, right now, construction is pretty much at a standstill. There’s a little bit going on, but not a whole lot. But I think there might be some people on the bubble right now, who might build — if we could waive the fees for six months or a year. When you guys have your joint meeting with the Town, if you could bring that up and see how they feel about extending the waiving of the fees. For a year.”
England said he’d bring up that subject at the joint meeting.
All three County commissioners have shown an interest in doing more cooperative planning with the Town of Pagosa Springs, the only incorporated municipality in Archuleta County. I can't say that I sense the same willingness coming from Pagosa Springs mayor Ross Aragon and the Town Council.
Ever since Ralph Eaton’s suburban subdivision dream slowly blossomed into reality during the ‘70s and ‘80s, most of the population of the County has lived outside the Town boundaries — only about 1,700 of the county’s 12,000 residents live within the Town boundaries — but the Town has consistently avoided the annexation of those numerous residents into the municipality.
Or maybe, the residents didn’t want to be part of the Town?
This has meant that the Archuleta County government has had to assume many of the jobs normally handled by municipal governments. So what we have in Pagosa Springs is a rather well-funded Town government (by rural Colorado standards) that includes almost all the commercial zoning in the county, and which actually serves slightly less than 15 percent of the “town” population.
It might seem reasonable, to a thoughtful person, for the Town of Pagosa Springs to annex the residential areas of the county and then provide the typical municipal services that towns provide in (more sensible?) situations. Instead, what we see in Archuelta County are two governments providing essentially the same services to two groups of residents living on either side of a political dividing line: the Town Boundary.
Would some type of collaboration make sense in this situation? So far, that cooperation has been almost impossible to achieve, with the particular leaders we’ve had running our local governments over the past 30 years.
In 1987, the Colorado legislature made substantial changes to the state’s annexation law. One of the more significant changes limited municipal annexations to no more than three miles beyond a current boundary line in any given year, except under special circumstances. The legislature also required that a municipality adopt an annexation master plan for the three-mile area (or “three-mile plan”, as they are commonly known)
prior to the completion of any annexation.
Prior to the completion of any annexation within the three-mile area, the municipality must have in place a plan that generally describes the proposed location, character, utilities and infrastructure of the area being annexed. This plan must be updated at least once a year. Even if a municipality argues that an element of its comprehensive plan is the three-mile plan, the former plan will not be lawful unless it has been updated annually.
As far as I know, the Town of Pagosa Springs has never developed a three-mile plan, (but maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on them? It’s only been a law since 1987.) In spite of not having a three-mile plan — and in spite of failing to update its comprehensive plan annually — the Town of Pagosa Springs has annexed several properties within three miles of its boundaries.
It appears, according to the state Department of Local Affairs, that such annexations might be open to legal challenges.
“The failure to have a plan prior to the completion of an annexation could open a municipality up to litigation. Colorado law limits those who have a right to challenge annexations to property owners within the annexed area, the county in which the land is located and neighboring municipalities within one mile. In areas with growth pressures, it is increasingly likely that these three groups will use the lack of a plan as grounds for invalidating the annexation.”
In 2009, the Town and County cooperatively agreed to waive building permit fees, in an effort to help revive two struggling industries. So we know that the two governments can take small dance steps together.
Could the two government also cooperate on something larger than just waiving a few fees? Like, say, creating a sensible three-mile plan?
Read Part Three... |
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