Discovering
Telluride
Local planners
study
Colorado town’s dynamics
"We’re
curious to see other towns and how they’re dealing with the same issues.
Telluride is similar to our level with their development and their
growth."
- Tory
Canfield, Ketchum
senior planner
By GREG
STAHL
Express Staff Writer
An
examination of Telluride’s planning issues confirms that Rocky Mountain
resort communities are wrestling with similar, if not identical, growing
pains. It also illustrates that Ketchum and Blaine County have some
catching up to do.
Telluride,
Colo., at 8745 feet above sea level, boasts a charming National
Historic District in a rugged mountain setting. Ketchum planners and
officials spent two days last week looking into the resort city’s
planning issues and solutions. Express photos by Greg Stahl
Ketchum
planners traveled to the western Colorado resort town last week to examine
the its planning issues and attempted solutions to those problems. Local
planners also explored how comparable planning issues are in the two
similar cities.
"We’re
curious to see other towns and how they’re dealing with the same
issues," Ketchum senior planner Tory Canfield said. "Telluride
is similar to our level with their development and their growth."
From New
Mexico to Washington, western mountain resorts are struggling with growth,
affordable housing, transportation problems and a myriad of other
planning- and growth-related issues. In past years, Ketchum planners have
visited Park City, Utah, and Aspen, Colo., to investigate those cities’
planning conundrums and solutions.
Telluride,
a city of 2,000, is witnessing traffic and parking problems, a mass exodus
of its long-time residents and employees as real estate prices continue to
rise and areas of open space shrink.
Ketchum
planners and officials, as part of a two-day tour of Telluride, take a
peek at a few of San Miguel County’s deed-restricted homes. The homes
are not price capped, but must be sold to the resort area’s residents.
Several of the three-bedroom homes recently sold in the neighborhood of
$300,000. Express photos by Greg Stahl
"We’re
at a crossroads here in Telluride," Mayor Amy Levek told Ketchum’s
planners and officials, who visited Telluride Thursday and Friday.
"People are starting to come unglued" because of the rate of
change, the city’s large budget and the extent of proactive law writing.
The same
comments could easily have come from any of Blaine County’s city or
county leaders.
In the past
15 years, Telluride’s traffic increased over 100 percent. The city paved
its streets and installed parking meters. Residential and commercial
construction maximums were lowered. And the number of affordable housing
units—over 830 deed-restricted units in the greater Telluride region—have
proven to be too little.
And the
city’s streets were only paved in the early 1990s in an effort to reduce
air pollution kicked up by automobiles on the dusty streets, planners
pointed out.
"A lot
of people preferred this funkier Telluride," Town Manager Peggy
Curran said.
Affordable
housing—along with parking, schools, air quality and wetlands
preservation—ranks among the most important issues for many
Telluride-area residents, Special Projects Manager Lance McDonald said.
"We’re
losing the community fabric of the town of Telluride," concurred
Johnny Stevens, president of the Telluride Ski and Golf Co. and a
life-long Telluride resident.
Residents
in coffee shops, watering holes and city offices also agreed.
"I’ve
seen 15-year residents have to leave," said a T-shirt store owner.
"We don’t want that. Those are the people that give this place its
character."
Among the
most notable lessons local planners and officials said they learned in
Telluride, however, is the importance of—and methods used to attain—a
larger operating budget.
Telluride’s
average annual budget is around $15 million, with sizable additional funds
arriving in the form of state and federal grants. Grants—over $7 million
in the past six years—have been earmarked for parking, river
restoration, wastewater treatment, historic preservation and an array of
other growth-related programs.
One of the
city’s employees spends about half of her time searching out and
applying for grants.
"It
brings in much more money than it costs to manage," Mayor Levek said.
Twenty
percent of Telluride’s tax collections are earmarked for preservation of
open space, which has helped contribute well over $1 million per year
toward protection of the area’s sense of place as a historic mountain
town.
Telluride’s
budget includes funds collected from a state-enabled 3 percent real estate
transfer tax levied on all real estate sales. The city has a 4.5 percent
sales tax, with .5 percent of that earmarked for the city’s affordable
housing program. An additional 4 percent sales tax goes to San Miguel
County and the state of Colorado. Another business license tax draws about
$300,000 per year.
By
comparison, Ketchum’s 2001-2002 budget is $9.2 million, with an
additional $820,000 in grants. But the amount achieved through grants this
year is high compared with average grant revenues, Ketchum City
Administrator Jim Jaquet said.
Ketchum’s
2 percent resort sales tax on liquor and beds and 1 percent on general
sales as well as property taxes are the only applicable comparisons to the
array of funding sources in Telluride’s diverse arsenal.
"It
boils down to money," Ketchum and Blaine County Housing Director
Gates Kellett said. "The town having its own funding sources seemed
to be most effective (to achieve affordable housing), because they didn’t
have to rely on the development community."
The two-day
itinerary for Ketchum’s planners and leaders included visits with
Telluride’s and Mountain Village’s planning and housing gurus, talks
with Telluride’s business community and an exchange with Telluride Ski
and Golf Co.’s management.
Mountain
Village is a separate municipality at the base of the ski area, about
three miles via road, or two miles via a free gondola ride, from
Telluride.
At 8,750
feet above sea level, Telluride touts itself as a pedestrian-friendly
town, where vehicles are unnecessary. As such, parking fees or permits are
required throughout town, except in free parking lots.
"This
is a town where pedestrians rule," reads a walking tour pamphlet on
the city. "The speed limit is 15 miles per hour, and cars must stop
and wait for all pedestrians who cross the street in the cross
walks."
The city’s
parking meters, like those in the resort city of Aspen, include one
computerized meter per block face. The machine produces receipt-like slips
of paper that are placed in vehicle windshields and specify the duration
one is permitted to park. An entire day costs $5.
"It
certainly freed up a lot of parking," McDonald said of the paid
parking program, which boasts 390 metered parking spaces.
A regional
bus system, paid for by San Miguel County, services the down-valley city
of Norwood and is "full every day," Curran said.
However,
commuters arrive from various locations, north and south of Telluride,
making regional transit somewhat difficult.
Telluride
is one of a handful of historic jewels in the West. It was set aside as a
National historic Landmark District in 1964, and architectural designs
come under strict scrutiny from a Historic and Architectural Review
Commission. All new construction and remodel plans must be reviewed by a
seven-member design review commission before construction is permitted.
Residential
home sizes are limited to 4,000 square feet, and commercial buildings are
limited to 1.5 floor area ratios, a building’s floor area divided by its
lot size. Commercial buildings are also limited to 35-foot heights.
Telluride
was settled in the late-1800s by miners, and the population soared to near
5,000 in the late Nineteenth Century. By the 1960s, after mines closed and
gold prices plummeted, the town’s population crashed to less than 600.
In the
1970s, as with many old western mining towns, Telluride was resurrected
when the Telluride ski area was built. Tourism and "white gold"
replaced ores as the leading economic engine.