GVCA Journal for 02/27/05
Summary:

It was a rather frustrating week for the GVCA, and we spent a lot of
Sunday's meeting deciding in what directions to go.

What we really want is responsibly responsive government, and we found that
lacking with city council last week.

This week's report includes:

1) City Council last Tuesday
    Ellen gave a presentation on our views on tax giveaways, and Richard
tried to get some answers from Thomas Smits about the reasons for his stance
on design standards.

2) Planning Commission last Wednesday
    Thomas Smits out and out threatened planning commission that if it won't
implement a PUD from within the design standards, he will move forward to
scrap the standards entirely and put everything above 50,000 square feet
into a PUD (planned unit development).

3) Our Meeting Sunday
    We discussed communication, the need to get our larger membership to
help us out more, the Farmers' Market, and health care.

4) The City turns 125 on Monday.
    The GVCA, along with all citizens, is invited to help the city celebrate
its quarquicentennial, to use a term from Colorado Central Magazine, which
likes to note 125th birthdays. There's a party at the Municipal Building
(council chambers, I believe) from 3-6 p.m., with cake candles lit at 5:15.
Please stop by if you can to wish our city happy birthday (and many more).

6) Tuesday meetings
    A night off for our dedicated meeting volunteers, since city council
cancelled its work session, but at 7 a.m. (AM), the council will meet with
the county commissioners at a site no one was sure of at our Sunday meeting.
We'll find out, in case any of you early birds would like to attend to see
what issues impact both the city and county.

7) Massive planning commission work session, Part I
    The commission is ordering in and, starting at 5:30 p.m., working until
they can't go any longer on design standards. Part II of this marathon takes
place Saturday afternoon, I think starting at 1. Get your fun here!

8) The fiscal impact steering committee has received the draft of Section 1
of the big-box fiscal impact study from Civic Economics. Two more sections
will be forthcoming, and the entire document is scheduled to be presented to
the public in something like three weeks. No word still on the WSC fiscal
impact study, which was commissioned in August and funded in part by us, the
friendly GVCA.

Additional information on Items 1-3 follows:

Details:

1) City Council last Tuesday

    I'm vague on the details, since I wasn't present, but Ellen presented
our take on tax giveaways to the council. We are opposed to corporate
welfare for large-format retail, although if Wal-Mart or any other big box
wanted to place an additional tax on its customers, over and above the
city's 3 percent, to help fund infrastructure and possibly even design
standards, that is fine with us. But we don't countenance giving city tax
money (the 3 percent most businesses collect for the city)  back to a big
box. Ellen really didn't get any sort of reaction from any of the four
council members present. (Don Simillion is out with a broken hip.)

    Richard, however, got a reaction from Thomas Smits, but it wasn't the
one anyone wanted. Thomas has taken an adamant stance on PUDs (see Item #2
for details), without ever explaining himself, so Richard requested an
explanation. The question was, What about a PUD is so attractive to you? and
the answer was, I'm not going to tell you.

Although tempers flared on both sides, this remains a reasonable question
for citizens to ask -- and that was an extremely unreasonable, rather rude,
reply. The council works for the citizens of Gunnison, not the other way
around, and members of council need to be accountable for their actions.
There's really no need to be defensive if one is acting in a manner he (or
she) believes to be best for the city -- and the council person ought to be
willing to explain his or her rationale on all public issues.

The meeting, coupled with Thomas' blatant threat to planning commission, has
left many of us frustrated and angry.

We have tried to be polite, participatory citizens in the process. We have
modified and adapted our stances, met in compromise and offered solutions
every time we've been invited to. But at some point we have to quit
kowtowing to the "other point of view" -- a point of view which some city
council members have been vociferous in defending, even though very few
citizens have come to the meetings to represent these viewpoints. Even fewer
of those people have attempted to be part of the solution, choosing instead
to complain and then expect their will to be done automatically.

We are not governmentally funded, and thus not accountable to citizens, and
yet we have gone out of our way (I feel) in attempts to be inclusive and to
bring other points of view to the table. Perhaps not all of you know, but
Ellen, Richard and I met with some other folks (supposedly of the EDC, which
IS two-thirds publicly funded, but only Mike Darnell claimed membership with
that organization; Jeff Walker and especially Joe Puchek were emphatic that
they were not of the EDC) to discuss a larger forum for some of these
issues.  While it didn't go as we had hoped, our meeting at least succeeded
in getting Mike and Jeff to submit some written specifics about their
concerns with the design standards, and Jeff was regularly attending the
meetings until a health problem interferred.

It is time for us to recognize that we are citizens entitled to our
viewpoint, entitled to be listened to, entitled to be answered -- entitled
to be acknowledged as holding a vision that we believe to be in the best
interests of our community. It diverges from other visions, also presumed by
their holders to be in the best interests of our community, but our view is
legitimate, and at some point it ought to be the other side that gets asked
to do some compromising, and not just us.

I realize I'm on a soapbox here, but I for one am tired of trying as hard as
I can to be part of the process, only to be rebuffed at every turn. I still
intend to be part of the process, but I'm feeling decidedly less malleable
about it.



2) Planning Commission last Wednesday

    Much of my attitude (see the last few paragraphs above) can be
attributed to Thomas Smits and his veiled warnings, which have become
outright threats. Oblivious to the irony, he gave a council update that
included mention of a Gunnison Area Foundation initiative on anti-bullying,
and then told the planning commission that if it didn't incorporate a PUD
(planned unit development) process into the design standards, he would move
forward to scrap the standards and put every retail development over 50,000
square feet into a PUD.

This brings us right back to Aug. 10, when council (illegally, I suspect)
attempted to avoid the moratorium on first reading of the ordinance. Part of
the council's action on that mostly unmonitored evening was to instruct
planning commission to work on an ordinance that would put all retail over
50,000 square feet into a PUD.

If this has been council's intent all along (and I realize one council
member is a ways away from having a majority vote, but the vote on Aug. 10
was 3-2, and it could be again), then taxpayers have wasted considerable
money on:

a) a consultant, who charges $100 per hour, charged with drawing up a design
standard ordinance;

b) a second consultant, whose fee has not been publicly stated, to review
the first consultant's work (and pronounce it "90% there," missing only
intent language and a provision for "architectural concrete," a substance
that has yet to be clearly defined by anyone);

c) innumerable hours of staff time, including but not necessarily limited to
Steve Westbay, Kim Antonucci and Andie Ruggera;

d) whatever meager fee planning commission members receive for devoting
almost every Wednesday of their existence (plus packet-reading time) since
September to work on moratorium issues, largely focused on design standards.

That would also mean that some of us taxpayers, including those from other
viewpoints, have also wasted considerable hours and effort.

Putting design standards in place would actually simplify the process for
developers, which then begs the question: why is Thomas so insistent on a
PUD option?  Clearly, he thinks this is a means of wiggling around having to
have an attractive building that might cost someone (say, poor, indebted
Wal-Mart, which really has no money to spare) a few extra dollars.

As a contrast to this, most of last Wednesday's meeting was taken up by a
public hearing on a building proposed by Mark Lucas on Virginia Avenue
behind Gunnison Tire. Remember, our city has no design standards in place
currently, and if design standards are ever allowed to go in as a result of
this process, they so far only apply to retail buildings over 50,000 square
feet.

The building Mark is proposing to build is for commercial use on
commercially-zoned property, but after neighbors' objections (including a
few, I'd guess, who may stand with the bankers on the large-format retail
issue), Mark voluntarily upgraded the facade of his building.

The hearing was continued to the next planning commission meeting (not the
work session this week), so the outcome isn't quite there, but it clearly
demonstrates that when its in your own backyard, suddenly design standards
seem quite appealing. And a building the size of City Market, Wal-Mart and
perhaps True Value all put together is going to sit large in all our
backyards.

I believe that at Sunday's GVCA meeting, we settled on this group stance: a
"placeholder" for a PUD ought to be put in the design standards, not to be
filled in until the Land Development Code and the current PUD are rewritten
by a planning professional. We will only accept a PUD process that uses the
proposed design standards as a starting point.



3) Sunday's GVCA Meeting

We spent a lot of time on the PUD (see above), and a discussion on how
attending Sunday meetings has brought the process into clarity for several
members. Bringing the clarity to others is more problematic.

What we need, though, is for others who think along our lines, to start
stepping up and helping us out. Meeting attendance isn't necessarily
required (but always welcome), but we do need to start making council -- and
our community at large -- aware that these are not just the sentiments of
the 10 or so people they keep seeing at the meetings.

If any of you come into contact with city officials and councilpeople while
going about your days, you need to let them know that you expect businesses
that want to locate in our town to be willing to take pride in their
appearance. In fact, you need to let them know about the other issues we
support as well.

One of these is the Farmers' Market, although it will be run this summer by
the same folks who did so last year. We have submitted an offer to help with
or take over the PR for them, and Karen Jensen has agreed to be our liasion
on this project. If anyone is interested in giving Karen a hand, please let
her know through this e-list.

We also, if we can ever get design standards sorted out and a vote of
confidence in the process from city council, are going to turn our attention
to health care coverage. Another valley provider, one of the eye clinics,
has dropped Blue Cross. I don't think there's a surgeon of any sort in the
valley who accepts it, although I might be wrong.

We've looked very preliminarily at a couple of options that might offer some
assistance to people, but we've been regrettably tied up with design
standards for far longer than any of us expected at the outset (and could be
for much longer, the way things are looking right now).

We've also looked somewhat at classes for cooking and shopping for
nutritious food on very limited budgets, but the national organization we
talked to doesn't currently have expansion funds. CSU Cooperative Extension
used to offer some of these classes, but fell victim to budget cuts (can we
all say TABOR? and how very glad we are that our governor is now trying to
infect Kansas with this idiocy? At least Wisconsin turned him down).

If any of these projects interests you and you'd like to help out, we
wouldn't complain.

Although we don't have any formal action plans or discussions, we are also
keeping an eye on immigrant integration -- I believe both Richard Karas and
Jan Carroll have already participated in the successful roundtable
discussion organized by Mary Burt.

And that's this week's long-winded report. As always, let me know what I
left out or got wrong -- sadly, it turns out I'm far from perfect in these
matters.

TL