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HomeMy WebLinkAboutLetter to Garfield County - Spring Valley Ranch 4.4.2025 J. Bart Johnson 970.544.4602 johnson@wcrlegal.com April 4, 2025 Via Email Garfield County Attorney’s Office Attn: Kelly Cave, Esq. 108 8th St., Ste. 219 Glenwood Springs, CO 81601 Garfield County Community Development Department Attn: Glenn Hartmann, Director 108 8th St., Ste. 401 Glenwood Springs, CO 81601 Re: Cancellation of Planning Commission Hearing Scheduled for April 9, 2025 for Amendment to Spring Valley Ranch PUD – File No. PUAA-05-23-8967 Dear Kelly and Glenn: As you know, our firm and Jon Fredericks of LANDWEST represent Storied Development LLC as the applicant for a Substantial Amendment to the Spring Valley Ranch PUD. The application is currently scheduled for consideration by the Garfield County Planning Commission at a public hearing to be held on April 9, 2025. Following up on my telephone conversation with Kelly yesterday afternoon, I am writing to let you know that Storied Development LLC has decided to cancel the scheduled Planning Commission hearing. Once we are comfortable that the application has been given the consideration it deserves and is needed to make the public hearing process productive and efficient, we will coordinate with your offices to schedule a new Planning Commission hearing date and will provide new public notices in accordance with Garfield County’s requirements. This application has been years in the making at a cost that now runs into the millions of dollars, and has been filed for review by the County for nearly two years now – since May of 2023. After a tremendous amount of work, we had finally been scheduled to start the public hearing process with the Planning Commission next Wednesday. Our client was looking forward to this next step in the process. But we have two primary areas of concern that have led us to conclude we have no choice but to cancel the Planning Commission hearing as we confront new questions and issues. Before detailing these concerns, I will be candid in saying that my client is very frustrated at this turn in events because they feel ambushed at the last minute. They are confronting a choice of either walking into a public hearing looking unprepared or appearing like they are cancelling the hearing because they are unprepared, when neither is true. The problem is not that we are unprepared – rather it’s that we are being asked to respond to generalized criticisms with little detail and in one case a very late 180-degree change in position by the County’s Road and Bridge Department we learned about for the first time a few days ago. We do not believe that a public hearing is the appropriate venue for working through fundamental questions and issues that can be better addressed with proper analysis and a thoughtful exchange of information. The extended referral period for this application ended well over a year ago on February 23, 2024. Some referral comments trickled in and were accepted after the deadline, which is to be expected for an application such as this. But the County’s Road and Bridge Department recently sent in a second and new comment memo in which April 4, 2025 Page 2 4919-0903-2754, v. 1 it completely reverses itself on a substantial issue. On January 30, 2024, the Road and Bridge Department originally took the position that County Road 115 through Red Canyon should not be improved or encouraged as a means of access for the Spring Valley Ranch project. Our client and its consultants took this position into account in the traffic studies and other planning analyses and infrastructure plans for the project. Then on January 13, 2025, they issued a completely new position statement saying that the applicant should be required to improve the road through Red Canyon into a full width two-lane road with guardrails or convert it into a one-way road. We weren’t provided with this new, completely different referral comment until March 28th – 10 weeks after the fact, and well over a year after the referral period ended. And then the staff report we received makes multiple references to the new position on County Road 115 as something our client will need to address in some way. It is hard to understate the impact this has on this PUD amendment proposal, from assumptions made in the traffic study, to engineering requirements, to the prospect of a daunting and expensive road construction project through a notoriously constrained area. We also have issues with other various aspects of the staff report we received this past Wednesday. The report is very light on analysis, and many sections of the report provide no analysis whatsoever. It draws a lot of conclusions referring to how the application fails to meet various standards, but offers very few details or indications of what changes could be made to address the shortcomings. No recommended conditions of approval are offered, contrary to the norm we have observed in the treatment of most all land use applications heading into the public hearing process. And in various places the staff report refers to how some aspects of the application are still under review and that additional comments can be expected, without offering any sense of when we might receive these additional comments. Perhaps most notably, we’ve been informed that the County staff intends to significantly rewrite the proposed development phasing plan to essentially put the project on an unrealistic 10-year clock, with any development beyond 10 years needing additional discretionary PUD amendment approvals that could be denied for any number of reasons, effectively stopping the project in its tracks well before any realistic build-out timeframe for a project of this scope could be achieved. This had never been discussed with us previously and there is no timeframe given for when we might see the details of this County rewrite. Through this application and review process the County has required and demanded exhaustive and highly detailed studies and reports from the applicant on all manner of topics. The applicant in return expects and deserves a comparative level of thoroughness and detail in the County's staff report. We respectfully request that the County staff engage with us so that we can provide answers to open questions, and then take the time needed to augment and update the staff report to provide a more detailed and considered analysis of the application in reference to the applicable code provisions. To proceed with the public hearing process without the benefit of a more comprehensive report, would, we believe, lead to a confused and inefficient process that will be unfair to both the applicant and the public and also try the patience of the Planning Commission and, in turn, the Board of County Commissioners. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, J. Bart Johnson for WAAS CAMPBELL RIVERA JOHNSON & VELASQUEZ LLP April 4, 2025 Page 3 4919-0903-2754, v. 1 cc: Jon Fredericks Storied Development LLC Joseph E. Edwards, III, Esq.