Group Faces Barrage of Planning Tasks in Tight Timeframe

RIDGWAY – Most of the people who work in Ouray County don’t actually live here. Instead, they commute everyday, from places like Montrose, mainly because of a lack of affordable housing in the region.

To answer that need, the Regional Housing Authority, a 10-member consortium of elected and appointed officials from the City of Ouray, Town of Ridgway and Ouray County, met last week to begin the process of creating a regional housing plan. The three governmental entities have partnered in matching funds to receive a heritage funding grant for $12,000 to develop the plan.

The group met with Melanie Rees, of Rees Consulting in Crested Butte, to outline a timeframe for coming up a housing plan. The timeframe includes a series of five monthly meetings during which the housing authority will establish housing goals, strategies, conduct a worksession, and then finally in May make affordable housing recommendations to elected officials.

“It is a tight timeframe and it is good we are not dragging this out,” Rees told the group.

Perhaps the hardest task in front of the group right now is trying to figure out the current demand for affordable housing in the region. It seems to be a moving target.

At a joint meeting of the Ridgway Town Council and Planning and Zoning Commission on Jan. 21, Town Manager Jen Coates reported that a 2008 needs assessment found that 75 percent of employees who work in Ridgway live outside Ouray County. Housing costs have increased 10 percent a year with real employee wages only increasing 2.1 percent a year.

“There is little or no permanent affordable housing in Ouray County,” Coates said.

According to the assessment, 149 units of affordable housing are needed to catch up with current employment/housing demands. By 2015, the region will need close to 200 units.

Members of P&Z and town council expressed some skepticism of those numbers due to the changing economic picture.

“I personally have concern about the need for 145 to 150 houses in the county,” said Jack Petruccelli, a member of P&Z. “That number is suspicious to me… I don’t see where we have a demand for those units today. I don’t know how accurate that number is, but it presents the point that we are behind the eight ball.”

Coates went on to outline recommendations that came out of the 2008 housing needs assessment: inclusionary zoning to ensure future development projects include affordable housing; a fee attached to commercial developments to mitigate housing needs for the number of employees; mitigation rates for new developments to make sure a beneficial number of affordable housing units are built to keep up with the region’s needs; and developer incentives to encourage the building of affordable housing.

But if actual numbers of affordable housing units are difficult to nail down, figuring out just where those units will go may be even harder. Although not definite, it us generally understood that most of the future affordable housing will be built in the two municipalities – with the majority of it in Ridgway.

“In 2002 the Town of Ridgway entered an IGA [Inter Governmental Agreement] with Ouray County that says if it [affordable housing] is going to occur, it is going to occur within the municipal boundaries,” Coates told council and P&Z members.

If most or all of affordable housing projects are to be built within the two municipalities because the county really has no land to offer up, it leaves the question of what role Ouray County will play in the process. The consensus at Friday’s Regional Housing Authority meeting was that the county’s contribution could come mainly in the form of money from impact fees.

County Interim Planner Mark Castrodale, who is also a member of the Regional Housing Authority, brought this to the commissioners attention at a meeting on Monday.

“My thought is that it was awful early to make those decisions,” Castrodale told the commissioners on Monday. “I was hoping to look at some new things and there was no interest in them whatsoever.”

And even though the county has taken the lead, at least in administering the grant for the housing plan, Commissioner Keith Meinert said that affordable housing is a municipal problem.

“I think it is consistent that this is a municipality issue, not a county issue,” he said. “It responds to business needs and housing needs. Although the county may provide some sort of solution, if they want to solve it within them, it is fine with us.”

“It’s not fine,” Commissioner Heidi Albritton said. “I am taken back by this. The municipalities are putting the county in the lead on this. They demanded we be the point on this by setting agendas to calling meetings. They put pressure on us and we came through. They expect so much and then say that the county has nothing to offer? Colona is the perfect example. Not even to have it on the table is really disappointing to me.”

Ridgway Mayor Pat Willits said at the Jan. 21 joint P&Z/council meeting that it is important to keep in mind that the lack of affordable housing is a regional problem and that creating a uniform plan will benefit all.

“When we first talked about creating a task force, I felt like one of the benefits of this was to create uniformity,” Willits said. “I would ask to that we keep mindful that the advantage of a regional housing authority is to create some uniformity across governmental lines so some day we can administer a housing program across those lines with a common language.”

The next Regional Housing Authority meeting is scheduled for Feb. 13 at the Ouray Community Center from 1-4 p.m. The session with Rees will include strategy identification and strategy prioritization.