Following more than three hours of debate at a May 14 work session and more than two hours of consideration at a May 21 meeting, the Archuleta County Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) approved revisions to the Archuleta County Land Use Regulations (LUR) regarding signs while tabling decisions on other proposed regulations until its June 4 meeting.
The regulations before the BoCC for consideration covered several topics, including new regulations for short-term rentals (STRs), the introduction of requirements for neighborhood meetings as a part of the approval process for certain projects, rewritten regulations on signs and revised outdoor storage regulations.
These regulations were considered and unanimously approved by the Archuleta County Planning Commission at its January, February, March and April meetings, and many of the topics, particularly those relating to outdoor storage, have been subjects of debate at previous BoCC work sessions and meetings.
Development Director Pamela Flowers reviewed the regulations with the BoCC at the May 14 work session, going through the proposed changes by topic and soliciting commissioner feedback and revisions to the proposed regulations.
Key points of discussion included the requirement for noise monitors at STRs, which commissioners Veronica Medina and Ronnie Maez spoke in opposition of; the requirement that neighborhood meetings be conducted for certain development projects, which Medina and Maez also opposed; and the regulations of outdoor storage, a topic where all commissioners voiced varying opinions.
The discussion at the May 21 meeting largely covered the same information as the May 14 work session, with Flowers reviewing the regulations by their section in the LUR.
At the meeting, commissioners voiced their frustration with the repetitive discussion and the lack of progress toward a decision on the proposed regulations, with issues including the significant length of the regulations, the way that different elements of the regulations intermix in the same section of the LUR and the lack of consensus on a forward direction for certain regulations, particularly concerning outdoor storage.
At one point in the meeting, at the request of the board, Interim County Manager Jack Harper provided his recommendations for how to move the process forward.
He suggested that the board could be presented with a list of major changes to the LUR at a work session, where it could discuss each item and then conduct a straw poll to determine if there is agreement among the board on approving or rejecting the change, or if it needs to be debated further at a meeting.
He suggested that this approach might allow the board to reduce the volume of regulations being debated and find points of consensus while focusing the discussion at the meeting on key points of controversy.
The board and Flowers expressed that this could be a valuable approach in future.
At the close of the discussion, Commissioner Warren Brown noted that the revisions to the sign regulations appeared to be an area where the board agrees on the proposed LUR changes and recommended that the board move forward with approving that portion of the regulations while tabling the other elements to ensure that it made some forward progress at the meeting.
Following a discussion where County Attorney Todd Weaver stated that the board would not need to notice another public hearing for the LUR changes — which requires a more lengthy public notice period — due to already having heard public comments at the meeting, the board agreed to move forward with Brown’s recommendation.
The rewritten sign regulations were then unanimously approved, with the remaining regulations being tabled to the BoCC’s next meeting on June 4.
Flowers explained at the meeting that the sign regulations have been fully reworked from their previous form for clarity and consistency but contain relatively few significant changes, although the changes slightly expand what types of signs can be erected without a sign permit and remove allowances for off-premises signs for temporarily available farm products, among other alterations.
josh@pagosasun.com
