by Jeff Mannix

Few would argue that the development of the new and improved La Plata County Comprehensive Community Plan had the best intentions. Facilitated by what were believed to be finest consultants in the field, the process was informed by nearly 2,000 residents, vetted over the course of two years and 150 public meetings, overseen by denizens trained in land-use development and cost nearly $1 million, for everything from planning staff to attorneys fees, logistical expenses and meeting notices.

Yet, after this exhaustive and expensive incubation, the plan floundered and died, causing a miffed County Planning Director Erick Aune to resign a day later (see “Quick and Dirty,” p. 11). At the same time, residents and county officials alike recoiled in disgust, while others scratched their heads in wonder.

Former County Manager Sean Nau, who abruptly resigned last July and is now director of services for Maricopa County, Ariz., said he was not around when the plan was presented to the Planning Commission, “So I can’t tell you what went wrong.”

However, when it came to the planning process, he said the Comp Plan followed standard protocol. “It was the same process of informed consent that every planning project across the nation uses,” he said from his office in Phoenix. “The consultants employed were chosen from 14 qualified companies and were the consultants used to facilitate the current Comp Plan created in 2001.

Everyone from the Planning Commission to the Board of County Commissioners signed off on the consultants and the process, he said. “Our planning department was fully engaged, everyone received frequent updates along the way, no one was in the dark or had any criticism, as far as I remember.”

The State of Colorado requires counties to impanel a Planning Commission, endows it with regulatory authority and a mandate to create and supervise the making of a comprehensive/master plan. The La Plata County Planning Commission is a volunteer group comprised of five members appointed by the county commissioners. However, it is not under the control of the board except by virtue of the gift of appointment.  In all matters having to do with subdivision and land use, the Planning Commission serves an advisory role to the county commissioners. But with regard to preparing and adopting a comprehensive or master plan, the Planning Commission is independent of county government.

The draft Comp Plan was presented to the Planning  Commission on April 7, 2011. Over the course of the next several months, the 157-page document was whittled to a mere shadow of itself before being scrapped entirely Dec. 8. This was the third time in recent years that efforts to craft a county comp plan has ended in a divisive stalemate.

 “The comp plan delivered to us was just too much of the elephant to swallow in one bite,’’ said La Plata County Planning Commission Chairman Travis Craig, saying the plan ignored what the commission saw as “core” land-use issues, mainly private property rights. “We carved out the 11 or so pages concerning land use and didn’t feel that the rest served any purpose,” he said.

“The rest” referred to the vision the plan laid out for the future based on values collected from citizens during the public scoping process. “And planning is one of those values,” County Commissioner Wally White, a vocal proponent of the plan, pointed out. “How do you have planning without first having values? Communities are tied together by their values; cultures themselves are nothing but shared values, and this Comp Plan is nothing but a community’s statement of its values as they relate to the future culture of the county.”

Indeed, it can be argued that a comprehensive plan is a wish list for Utopia, a foretoken of what our patch of earth will look like in the near and distant future; a guide for planning and land ­­use and population growth. However, it is purely meant as a reference document, as the State of Colorado points out in its demand for every county to have one.  It’s not voted upon or codified, and does not hold the power of law, although it is used as a basis for future land-use statutes.

La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter said she supported the Comp Plan, unfortunately, the decision to reject it was not up to her. “I have no influence over the Planning Commission,” she said.  Hotter believes that the patent dismissal of the Comp Plan was reflective of the nation’s cynicism of government, as well as the rural constituency coming awake to what they perceived as encroachment on their property rights.  “Yes, I think that the process lacked adequate oversight,” Hotter adds, “but the BoCC doesn’t have authority over the Planning Commission. We can only do what we have authority to do, and you will notice that we have vacancies in the offices of county manager and the director of our Planning Department.”

Hotter says she bemoans the county’s loss of credibility but vows to renovate the county’s Planning Department and turn immediately to writing a clear and forceful land use code.

Former Planning Commission member Lucy Baizel, who served from 2006-09 before she was passed up for reappointment, believes progressive thinking and action is clearly absent in today’s county government. “I think this Board of County Commissioners is stuck in the Bush era,’’ she says.  “We’re acting just like the Anasazi; we’re going to run out of water if we don’t address development before it’s too late.  Where is the thinking about the greater good?”

And while no longer directly involved in the decision-making process, Baizel said she intends to continue participating. “Like a thorn,” she said, “we must keep reminding them that we’re watching, and waiting.”

La Plata County Commissioner Bobby Lieb doesn’t think the county needs a Comprehensive Plan at all.  “While I wasn’t a commissioner during the process of developing the Comp Plan, I could see that this was a divisive document from the beginning,” he said.

He feels that the product was a forced “gentrification of a community with no such interest, and is elitist.”  “I’d like to challenge the notion of sprawl. It’s in the eyes of the beholder,” he said. “Densities of population drive infrastructure, not the other way around. I won’t tell people where and how they can live; the market will decide.”

In a e-mail sent on Oct. 27 to some members of the Comp Plan’s organizing group and made available to the Telegraph, Commissioner Lieb stated:  “it is evident the comprehensive plan process, with great disservice to the community, has been corrupted from top to bottom, beginning to end.”

Lieb, like Hotter, promises to reform the Planning Department and immediately begin writing a reliable land use code.  “It’s in everyone’s best interest to simplify and streamline our land use code and provide certainty and reduce the obstacle course to building permits,” Hotter adds. “We’ll get this done in-house and we’ll get to work on it right away.”

With abject frustration, Commissioner White said he is disappointed in his colleagues, who have “abdicated their responsibility” to the community and their office. “It’s a lack of governance,” he said.

Perhpaps Debra Uroda, writing for the Durango Herald in 1986, said it best: “Land use planning is controlled by those who yell the loudest.” Twenty-five years later, with the modern tools of consensus building, it appears that the more things change, the more they stay the same.