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9/10/2010 By: Carole McWilliams
Vallecito residents weigh in on comp plan
Vallecito was not included in the schedule of community meetings over the past year to get feedback on the county comprehensive plan process.
That will change, comp plan project manager Jason Meininger told around 40 Vallecito residents on Aug. 31.
Around 150 residents showed up at a meeting in early August, many of them with no understanding of what the meeting was for. Their concern was county regulations on nonconforming uses, and recently approved flood plain maps that put many more homes north of Vallecito into the designated flood plain.
Those issues will be the focus of a meeting on Sept. 28 at the Vallecito Community Center, Meininger said.
And whenever groups of comprehensive plan community meetings are scheduled from now on, Vallecito will be among them, he said.
He told the Times after the early August meeting that during the very first round of visioning meetings last summer, only two people showed up at the Vallecito meeting. More Vallecito residents showed up at the corresponding meeting in Bayfield, so the county stopped scheduling meetings at the lake, he said. Now they will be scheduled.
Lake residents also have set up a committee to focus on the comp plan process. Barbara Wagner chairs that group. She said they want formal representation on the citizens working group that has been involved with the comp plan process.
Gail Rush asked Meininger, “Will you honor our little group since none of us are on your group? There are things that will apply here that don’t apply elsewhere.”
Meininger said he’d like to get a lake resident onto the working group.
One man asked, “What percent of county residents have any idea what’s going on?”
Meininger said, “We’ve had easily at least 1,000 unique participants. A lot of people really don’t care. If you want to pull some people together, I’ll come to where you are. But they have to want to participate.”
Judy London commented, “We want some influence with the experts. We live in the county, and we need representation.”
Meininger promised to take that message back to county officials.
Comp plan meetings have been announced and advertised in the Times and the Durango Herald.
A history of the process and the current status are online at www.laplatacountyplan.com.
Meininger took participants through the six elements in the draft comp plan – economic vitality, sustainable development, transportation, natural environment, housing, and healthy communities.
Each element has a group of strategies to achieve them. The intent of this meeting was for participants to pick their top three strategies for each element.
One woman worried about the open-endedness and room for interpretation of some of the strategies.
“That’s somewhat by design,” Meininger said. Incentives to develop in a way preferred by the county could vary according to the situation. The working group looked at all possible incentives. “They didn’t want to pin down what those would be.”
The Vallecito meeting was on the deadline date for people to pick strategies, so Meininger gave people at the meeting until Friday, Sept. 3, to have their say.
The next step in the process will involve mapping. “The focus will be what do we want to create and where,” Meininger said. “The last step will be the land use code, the regulatory process. The current process is awful. I apologize for the current system. That’s one of the things we absolutely need to fix. We need certainty of what we can do with our land.”
Wit’s End Resort owner Jim Custer objected, “I’m the biggest landowner in the valley. It has come from no regulation to where it’s impossible to develop anything unless you have huge deep pockets. … We need hard zoning if we are going to have regulation, but it shouldn’t take two to five years to get something approved. It should be six months.”
He asserted, “We are regulated to death from the federal, state, county government. … If there were all these regulations back when (in the early days of Vallecito), none of you (meeting participants) would be here.”
Custer said he’s had a project in the review process for three or four years. He said the recently adopted flood map affects that property, and the map isn’t accurate.
“That study covers a lot more of this valley than ever before. (The people who did the map) never walked the properties. It gets adopted, and the people who suffer are those who want to put something on their property. There are half-acre lots all up and down the river. We can’t get this (project) through.”
Another man agreed. “There’s a huge number of people who were in the 500-year flood plain who are now in the 100-year flood plain.”
Meininger said the county commissioners had to adopt the flood plain maps to assure that federal subsidies would continue for flood insurance policies.
An audience member drew scattered applause when he said, “Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution, and now you come here and tell us what we can do with what we pay taxes on… This is America, and we’re getting tired of the bureaucracy.”
On the flood plain discussion, he challenged, “How can you send a tax bill to someone in the flood plain, but you tell him he can’t build on it?”
Meininger pulled out his pocket copy of the Constitution and said, “The Preamble of the Constitution includes protecting the general welfare. The Corps (of Engineers) regulates in the flood plain as part of the general welfare.”
He urged locals to save their flood plain and nonconforming use issues for the Sept. 28 meeting, and contact Emergency Management Director Butch Knowlton to contest flood plain designations for specific properties.
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