FRTA Easement a Possibility

TELLURIDE — In a move that may help ensure that Alta Lakes Road, the only point of access into a proposed subdivision on Turkey Creek Mesa near Alta Lakes, is constructed to county standards, the San Miguel County Commissioners on Wednesday indicated that they would be receptive to acquiring jurisdiction of the road from the U.S. Forest Service by means of a National Forest Road and Trail Act (FRTA) easement.

The disclosure came during a work session between the commissioners, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the U.S. Forest Service, and Silver Mountain Industries, owner of the Alta Lakes property. The meeting had been included as one among numerous conditions set by the County Planning Commission when it met in November and voted 3-1 to recommend that the BOCC conditionally approve a cluster development plan proposed by SMI.

“Our recommendations and local issues may be given further consideration” as improvements to the road are considered by the USFS, said County Planning Director Mike Rozycki.

The commissioners’ willingness to entertain the option, he added, “will give us greater standing and input on the type of road we will see.”

SMI, a subsidiary of the Fortune 500 Leucadia National Corporation, which also owns the New Sheridan Hotel, owns 847 acres of land on Turkey Creek Mesa and in Gold King Basin near the Alta town site. The property is contained within the county’s F zoning district upon which one single-family dwelling up to 12,000 square feet and one caretaker unit up to 2,000 square feet per 35-acre lot or larger are allowable by right.

Rather than building by-right in a 1:35 development, SMI is asking for an exemption to create smaller parcels in order to cluster 28 residential lots on the 540 acres of its Turkey Creek Mesa parcel. In exchange, SMI would convey its ownership of 140 acres located east of Boomerang Road and 307 acres in the Gold King Basin to the county for preservation as publicly owned open space.

The Gold King Basin acreage lies within the county’s High Country Master Plan area whose purpose is to protect and preserve the alpine, sub-alpine and scenic hillsides in the county’s high country areas.

CDOT advised SMI that in order to safely accommodate increased traffic created by the subdivision, the Alta Lakes Road entrance along Highway 145 must be relocated and other improvements made.

Neighbors fear that SMI will reconfigure the summer-access gravel road to allow for faster driving speeds, and that the road will be paved and its rustic character destroyed.

Additionally, there is worry that such improvements to the road could open the door to substantially more development in the area than the envisioned 28-unit project.

“Once they build higher-standard roads, then what happens?” said attorney Doug Tueller, who is representing the interests of neighboring landowners the Casale Trust and the Mai family.

“To a lot of people, this project seems really crazy,” he said.

At the CPC meeting in November concerned neighbors and their legal representatives sought an ironclad guarantee from SMI that Alta Lakes Road would remain an unpaved rural roadway.

However, despite SMI having made a written representation that it would accept keeping the road gravel, it could make no such guaranty, because the decision is not SMI’s to make, but rather up to the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the road, and would be ultimately responsible to require its improvement to meet agency standards for the amount of traffic it would be expected to handle.

While Tueller proposed in November that the county insist that the USFS turn over jurisdiction of the road through a FRTA easement as a condition of approval, attorney Tom Kennedy, representing SMI, countered that although such an easement might be appropriate, his clients have no authority over the USFS.

County Attorney Steve Zwick added that approval of the application based upon the actions of a third party over which the county has no control would be “highly problematic.”

Given this, learning last week that it is USFS policy to look to others to maintain its roads when the character of those roads changes, was a fortuitous development.

According to USFS public service staff officer Corey Wong, who attended the meeting, in such cases, his agency looks to either a road user’s association or the county in which the road is located for its maintenance.

County maintenance of the road would be achieved with a FRTA easement, said Wong, adding that such easements already exist in Ouray, Gunnison and Montrose counties.

A FRTA easement transfers day-to-day jurisdiction to the county, he explained.

“You get not only the authority, but the responsibility,” Wong said.

Tueller said that although his clients would prefer that SMI’s property be protected from development by means of a conservation easement, with density transferred elsewhere, he saw the commissioner’s willingness to consider a FRTA easement as a positive.

“We think that on balance if there’s going to be a road there, it’s a better posture to have the county maintain [it],” he said.

“I’m not going to be happy until we are able to preserve the Alta Lakes area from further development of this scale,” Sheep Mountain Alliance Executive Director Hilary White said when asked about her response to development.

“I would still love SMI/Leucadia to consider a conservation easement,” and density transfer to a location with existing infrastructure, she said.

In the meantime, she added: “It makes complete sense for the county to have jurisdiction over that road.”

SMI Vice President Mark Oligschlaeger called the work session “a good first step.”

“Our objective was to discuss all the moving parts and begin a coordinated approach and we accomplished that objective,” he said.