Town Council - Regular Meeting

good evening and welcome to our basalt town council meeting for tuesday september 8th 2026. before we get started i just wanted to remind those online or watching beyond grassroots if you want to join the uh The Zoom meeting, you can do so by going to basalt.net, going to the Agenda and Minutes tab, and then find the September 8th meeting packet, and there's instructions there to join on Zoom. So with that, I will call the meeting to order, and Pam, will you please call the roll?

Absolutely. I understand Greg Shepard will be 20 minutes late.

He's running late.

Yeah.

He may be online.

He may be on Zoom, yeah.

Let's see if we've got anybody there. There he is, yeah.

Let's begin with Elise Hoddle. Present. Angela Anderson. Rick Stevens. Anna Berman. Here. Angel Dupree-Bouchard. Here. Greg Schaffran.

I'm here.

Thank you, Greg. David Knight.

Here.

Okay. Well, most of you are here.

Thank you, Pam. Next up, we have our consent agenda, item two. That consists of item 2A, which is the minutes from August 11, 2026. Item 2B, which of the minutes from August 25th, 2026. Item 2C is to continue to September 22nd, 2026, the public hearing on resolution number 34, series of 2026. A resolution of the Town Council of the Town of Basalt, Colorado, approving amendments to the 2020 Town of Basalt Master Plan to amend the future land use map to remove the existing land use designation for the 555 Basalt Avenue property. And then we have item 2D. which is to continue to September 22nd, 2026, public hearing and second reading ordinance number 18, series of 2026, an ordinance of the Town Council of the Town of Basalt, Colorado, granting special review, site plan review, PUD amendment, and associated development review actions to develop a mixed-use development at 555 Basalt Avenue, Basalt, Colorado. Unless anyone would like to remove any of those items to discuss. Mayor, I move.

Wait. Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

Otherwise, I'd entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda items as presented.

I need to make an amendment to the minutes. It states that I am absent on August 11, and I was here.

OK.

Sorry, that was kind of a big one. Thanks, Greg. August 11, you said? August 11, yeah.

So someone can make a motion to approve the consent agenda items with that modification.

So moved. Second.

Move and seconded. All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Thank you very much. Next up we have our call to the public. So just some some ground rules. Please limit your comments to three minutes and address your comments directly to me. Please identify yourself by name and address and also it would be helpful if you sign it in the back of the room with your name and address. Comments should be courteous, civil, and constructive, and town council will make no decision nor take action except to direct town manager. And I would just also add, if you are interested in making comments on item 7A or 7C, those were both public hearings, I would encourage you to wait until that agenda item so that your comments may be considered as part of the record for those agenda items. So with that, I'll open the floor for a call to the public, public comments.

OK, reading off my phone. Hi, guys. Thank you for having me. My name is Michaela Eidhammer. I am asking council to refer a tobacco tax increase to the ballot this fall, or I guess this spring, sorry, and let voters decide. I'm here as a parent first. I have a 10-year-old at Basalt Middle School who decided to join me tonight, and a four-year-old at Basalt Preschool. In a few years, my oldest will be walking into Basalt High School, and I want the town she walks into to already have done its part. I also spent 10 years as executive director of Aspen Youth Center. I saw daily what our kids are carrying, the stress, the anxiety, the pressure to fit in, and how tobacco, vaping, drugs, and alcohol get woven into all of it. These aren't bad kids. They're kids reaching for relief, and there's an industry engineer to be waiting when they reach. The numbers here are real but not hopeless. 10% of Basalt High School students consistently use vapes. 5% use nicotine pouches. Over half of our kids Half the kids using these products say they want help quitting. Our schools and the Aspen Hope Center are already doing that work. What's missing is price. Basalt taxes cigarettes at $2 a pack. Peking County, Eagle County, and our neighboring municipalities are all at $4. We are functionally the cheap place to buy. Cost is one of the most consistently effective tools we have for keeping young people from starting. I want to be clear that this isn't about punishing people who use tobacco. It's about leveling the retail playing field so Basalt isn't the discount option in the valley and about directing that revenue back into our community. Please put this on the ballot. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Any other public comments?

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Nielas Johannesson. I'm speaking tonight for my mother, Wendy Lucas of 401 East Soper's Drive. Ordinance number three has an unintended but deep impact on her ability to age in place. The flat $2,532 annual fee completely fails to account for full-time on-site residents. Forces a resident retiree to rent her room for 55 days just to pay off the town's fee before she earns a single dime Lumping a local senior into the same category as a commercial hotel investor does not make financial sense there are three clear reasons why this policy misses the mark for on-site residences a First, the 60-day cap misses the point of residency. The town likely designed this cap as a test for residency, the logic being that if an owner leaves town and leases their home for more than 60 days, they are running a commercial business and no longer a full-time resident. For an absentee landlord, that makes perfect sense, but my mother is not absent. She sleeps under her own roof every single night. The guest is there. Even when she leases a room, she is fully in residence, applying an absentee calendar limit to a senior who physically is present is simply illogical. Second the policy taxes her personal living space the town charges her based on total County tax bedroom records Not the single room. She actually rents. She has three bedrooms, but only rents one charging her thousands of dollars based on room She uses every day account amounts to a commercial penalty just to live in her own home. This is financially unfeasible for a resident retiree third Demanding commercial registration and inspection fees for how she occupies 24-7 is unnecessary. She lives there full-time. She knows exactly how her home functions. She does not need an official inspecting her hallway to tell her it's safe to use her own kitchen. My mother lives on savings and social security. Running her spare bedroom during the peak season is her only financial safety net. Against skyrocketing property taxes and inflation, this ordinance strips that safety net away. Furthermore, the policy inadvertently pressures her into taking on permanent long-term roommates. The income does not justify a permanent invasion of her privacy. Hosting her family, including myself, my sibling, and her friends is one of the joys of her life. She needs those rooms available for us. Because of this overreach, My sibling and I are forced into local hotels while her home sits with empty rooms. The policy is locking her family out of her home. Your policy aims to protect housing, but it is actively pricing a local senior out of her own home. On behalf of my mother, we ask for immediate amendment to completely exempt on-site hosted primary residents from these commercial fees and caps. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Anyone else?

Hi, Town Council. My name is David Garrison. I would also like to ask that you consider implementing on this next ballot a tax on tobacco. I think it would be a very fair and easy way to raise money to match tax rates of other municipalities in our area. Our town does an absolutely amazing job at everything. We could always use more money. And this is a great way to do it and will help I'd like to second the things that Michaela was talking about in helping young people, you know, making it a little more difficult for them. The other thing I'd like to bring up, so I'm definitely behind that, and there's a lot of other people that are behind it. If you need more people to come up or sign up, petition or whatever please let us know we can come up with that the other one I would like to ask is on Willits Lane after the roundabout at Lewis Lane there was a crossing light installed I talked to the town engineer after it was installed as to why wasn't one installed at like right there at the roundabout to enable people to get over to Crown Mountain Park and to get to City Market. Why were we putting one in for Lewis Lane, which is, I don't know, 12 to 14 homes and not allowing the entire Willits neighborhood and the entire Soper's Village neighborhood to get across that road safely. So if we could revisit that or if it's not ever been brought up, please, you know, think about it. But that one, there's, I live right there. There's hundreds of people from two-year-olds, one-year-olds, infants, to seniors trying to cross that area. And having a punch light to get across makes a lot more sense right there instead of where it was. And the other one's fine, too. But those are my two items. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Susan Chisholm. I live at 126 Kiowa in Zorpas Village. And I wanted to bring to your attention the condition of the trail easement behind City Market. The maintenance, let's say, is pretty light back there. I've noticed some mowing from time to time and snow removal. But the landscape is pretty neglected. And I'm not sure what agreements were put in place when a city market developer built that project. But I bring this up because this is going to come into play when you review the hotel. um whatever was done with the city market developer has led to a very neglected corridor and i like to see some beefier language in the future for anyone else who comes in with any projects that back up to that trail easement and i'm not even sure who's responsible for maintaining it if it's the town of basalt or the developer And I also am curious if the town has any recourse to get the developer to clean up their portion of the easement. I don't know if there's any enforcement avenues for you, but there's frequently a lot of trash in that zone. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention. Thank you.

Thank you. Gloria, do you have anything you want to address now, or would you prefer to wait?

I'll wait until later. OK.

Anyone else? Anyone online? All right. We will move on. Next up is our item number four, which is our mayor and council reports and comments. The floor is open.

I had a couple of requests made myself notes. I noticed that there's some signage down at Confluence Park. And also, I don't know, our parks are taking a beating right now, which is great because that means they're loved, but they're being loved a lot. The fence along the path by Ponderosa Trail is down. Oh, question. And this is kind of open to anybody that knows the answer.

This might be a James question, actually.

Was there going to be a cut-through path from the Midland residences to Midland Avenue Commercial District, the businesses? thought like along between like the Aspinall and the Midland residences there was going to actually be a path through there.

There was discussion about it. However the town or the developer don't have the easement to do it. OK. That was why it wasn't OK.

Some tourists asked me how to get through and I was like I was like of everybody I should be the one to know the answer to this. And then last but not least, I was curious whether this is maybe a Doug question. We could have an update on how our sales tax performed after the boat ramp closed to Rudy. Like just a comparison of maybe a couple of years of maybe August recording in progress, something like that. That's it.

That would be interesting to see. Is that a big lift for you to do that?

We have the comparable data on a 10-year basis. So it would just be a question of looking at it. I mean, you can look at the raw number, but I don't know whether or not that's going to specifically answer your question because of disbursement. Yeah.

Look at August. I mean, it closed on August 4th. So if we literally just compare the month of August, you could possibly draw some conclusions. Some very rough conclusions. Right.

Yeah. Gloria, you were going to say something?

Oh, just that sales tax typically collected two months in the rear, so you will get that report. It will just be delayed. That's fine.

It's like October. It would be October.

Yeah, no, that's fine. I mean, there's no urgency. I just think it would be really interesting to see if the closure at Rudy had an effect on our local economy.

Well, I think Gemma's doing really well. And that's open now. It wasn't open then. But then you also had Free Ridge Kitchen that was doing well as well. We have, just so you know, we have a comparison of Midland versus Willits businesses. We did that for when Midland was being worked on and we wanted to see whether there's any cannibalization of businesses favoring Willits over Midland. So we have some of that data. Happy to, you know, work it up and then sometime in October we would have some sort of presentation.

That would be fantastic. Thank you. Sure.

That'll be as part of the regular cycle. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Anyone else?

Yeah. On behalf of ROWAPA, Rudai Water and Power Authority, just a little PSA to all river users. I think a lot of people think about the clean, drain, and dry campaign when it comes to boats going into the reservoir, but I wanted to remind everybody in stress that that actually has to do with any and all equipment that touches the water. So your fishing waders, your boots, your... Kayaks, because we had a lot of kayaks on the river when all that water was being let out. Rafts, paddle boards, everything should be cleaned, drained, and dried to prevent invasive species from entering our bodies of water, because once they're here, they're very, very difficult to eradicate.

That's it. Thanks, Angel.

Colorado Communities for Climate Action sat down with Phil Weiser, our current AG and candidate for governor, to talk about the CC4CA priorities for any future governor of the state, and the main focus was on decarbonization, particularly of transit fleets and buildings, markets for a sustainable future resiliency and wildfire protection and some other priorities so that was a good opportunity for us and a couple other rural towns to add our two cents to the mix and I also just wanted to give a huge thanks to the basalt pool this summer was amazing they did a phenomenal job so thank you to the whole team that's such a Great asset that we have. And I was there a lot. So I'll miss it. And we have dog days this Saturday. Coming up.

Mm-hmm. It was closing.

Thank you. Anyone else? I don't have anything. So we will move on to our manager's report, item five.

Yeah, so speaking of ARWAPA, the Rudai Water and Power Authority, they would like to present on October 13th. That's one of our next meetings coming up. And before the meeting is discussed in our retreat, at 5.30 PM to the board, introducing them to ARWAPA and the new director, and wanted council's permission for me to schedule that presentation.

Sounds good.

Okay, and then following up on Stacy Stokes inquiry about a stop sign at Alexander and Few Lane. After consulting with the traffic engineer and discussing in our staff led safety committee meeting, we will be installing three more stop signs at the intersection creating a four way stop. And then we also have a budget work session next Thursday, September 17th at 5 p.m. So if you are not having a good time at our movie in the park, you can come over and listen to us talk about budgeting

Everyone's going to have a good time at Movie in the Park. They just don't know how fun budgets are.

Is the Movie in the Park on Friday the 18th?

It's right over there.

Never mind, you're good. It's Friday. You can go to both. I'm going to go to the movie. Awesome. That's all I have right now.

Thanks, Gloria.

I'll get back to you on those other items that were mentioned in public comment.

Wonderful. Next up, we have our presentations. We only have one presentation tonight, and that's item 6A, which is the Glenwood Southbridge project presentation. We have Steve Boyd, Glenwood Springs City Manager.

You can come sit down, too.

Is that okay?

Yeah, whatever your preference.

Just use the mic.

I've got Ryan Gordon with me. He's our city engineer. And we're just kind of doing the rounds a little bit up and down the valley, kind of to tell you guys what has happened recently with the Southbridge project. We'll be super quick. I know you guys have other things to get to and give you a chance to ask any questions that anybody might have. we don't have a financial ask for you today we might be back at some point i don't know if you want to write a letter of support other communities have you're welcome to do that i can work with gloria on that so with that i'll just hand it over to ryan gordon yeah hello council how are you um ryan gordon the city engineer for glenwood we had a presentation i don't know if we necessarily need it or not

i don't think we do great well i'll just just speak to the project i'll kind of go into um kind of really it's more of update where we stand but i was going to give a little update of where we came from so several years ago um the project has been going on since 2003-ish so to speak 2023 we started a redesign effort We got rid of a couple major components of that project. One was a tunnel underneath our existing runway. We had a really complicated bridge structure. If you think about the bridges that are in Glowman Springs Canyon, those are called concrete segmented bridges. They're very complicated. That was an initial project that was proposed. And then along Highway 82, there was a series Two large walls, 600 feet long by 20 feet tall that were proposed for some access. So what we did is about two and a half years ago, we took a redesign effort and we actually modified and got rid of the tunnel under the runway. We changed the bridge type to a steel girder bridge, which is what you kind of see everywhere. It's really boring and vanilla, but boy, it's easy to maintain and build. And then we've eliminated these large retaining walls, made access a little bit easier. The combined total of all that probably saved the project better part of $30 million. And the most important part really is 18 months of construction time. So as we're kind of going through this, obviously time and money is really what we're doing. So those are kind of the major components that we kind of saved in this redesign effort. Concurrently with that, we have gone after and received a big federal grant from the Rural Service Transportation Fund managed by FHWA. That's a $50 million grant that we were awarded two and a half years ago. And actually this morning, we got word that is fully obligated, meaning that we've satisfied all the requirements to get that grant, actually get the money in the bank. And so as of this morning, we're sitting on a pile of $50 million for the project, really humongous. I'm going to talk about schedule and cost in a second here. Let's talk about the purpose of what the bridge is intended for. The bridge is just south of Glenwood, a couple of miles. The main purpose and the reason we got the grant is for evacuation and fire egress. For the South Glenwood in the four among areas. There's about 4,000 residents that currently have one generally one way in and out There's a couple other Unimproved roads through some ranches and otherwise that aren't quite up to speed up to snuff to get a large amount of traffic in so primarily the bridge the point of it was for a fire evacuation There's some other really nice other benefits. One is that we are really gonna build out and connect a lot of our biking and pedestrian facilities. So now as a citizen in Glenwood, if you're or anybody else wanting to use the trail system, you actually get from South Glenwood neighborhoods and we're building a 10 foot wide concrete shared use path that will connect to the Rio Grande Trail just south of Glenwood. So it makes a really nice loop system and improves mobility. One of the other things that it's really going to do too is, again, a lot of those residents in south Glenwood and or Four Mile right now come up Valley for work or play or whatever they're doing. They currently have to go up to 27th Street across Highway 82 and then come back, right? So they're kind of making this redundant trip, so to speak. With the South Bridge going in, our traffic modeling, those residents would no longer go to 27th Street. Obviously some would go into town for shopping or whatever else, but their normal day-to-day would then cross South Bridge. So we're modeling that's not quite 3,000, real close to 3,000 vehicle trips per day, which accounts for approximately 10% of the current volume on Highway D2. So what that's fundamentally going to do is pull that traffic off make that commute through Glenwood a little bit easier for those folks that are traveling up and down the valley. So that's really, I think, one of the big benefits that I think the up valley commuters will find out is likely a better commuting experience. And in fact, our traffic modeling has suggested that staying on 82 as opposed to jumping off into the Glenwood Springs neighborhoods will be the fastest and quickest way to get through Glenwood. So there's a couple of, like I said, real big benefits that we see. and and i think the other thing really that really the harp on too as i mentioned fire evacuation but we're going to fully rebuild almost an entire mile of highway d2 so this is this is again that buffalo valley interchange i call it the buffalo valley i was born and raised in glenwood so buffalo valley hasn't been there since i don't know 2002 but anyway it's county road 154 is the area Very dangerous intersection, over the last ten years there's been at least two fatalities and upwards of 60 major car accidents. In fact, one week ago today there was a major four car pileup. So this project will fundamentally reconfigure, rebuild that stretch of the highway and make it substantially safer for commuters. And that's one of the things that we really want to emphasize is the safety, both fire and then transportation wise. um to give you an idea of where we stand both both financially and for the project um so as i mentioned earlier right we now actually have you know we applied for got the grant we actually have that grant monies in-house um raft is participating through their 2040 destination planning um four million dollars see that's coming to the table with with four and a half million dollars And then the city is through our local match and whatever else is bringing in quite a substantial amount. So right now we have essentially $72, $73 million out of somewhere around a $77 million project. So we have a little bit of a budget deficit that we need to make up, but we've been trending the right direction with some value engineering ideas to really cut the cost of the project down substantially. Timing-wise, where we stand. We're going through a few, I'm going to say hiccups with the county and others that we're working out. So the county, we're having a conversation on what's the right land use permitting avenue to go through. And then we're dealing with some final right-of-way issues. We're going to get those resolved before we get to any bid documents. So our plan is probably go to bid at the end of this year, beginning of 2027. And then the project will take probably two construction seasons. So again, that would probably be wrapping up construction sometime in 2029. Again, some of this will be dependent on the contractor and how they stage it and how they want to phase this project. But that's kind of where we stand. So we wanted to give you guys an update of where we are as we are getting really close to the execution phase of this project.

um and so with that i will turn it over for any questions anything add steve nope happy to answer any questions anybody has james is there any chance you could bring a map up and we could just kind of we don't have anything in the packet no i just mean like recording progress google earth or something a google or yeah that pulled up and i'm trying to yeah exactly okay yeah just a minute here

Well, while they're pulling that up, the intersection you're talking about is that one with the left turning that's this long and everybody. That's exactly the right one.

In fact, the accident that happened last year was because of that stacking, right? There's only... 15, 18 cars maybe at the max, it's probably even too many, that can stack in that left turn lane, right? And people are just backing up onto the highway. In fact, that accident last week was because of that. So this project will modify and extend those turn lanes. Other improvements in the Highway D2 are a lot of safety barriers. On the east side of the highway right now there's sort of an uncontrolled entrance and exit into the Red Canyon commercial area. That's all going to be cut off and consolidated to a brand new signal and intersection that we're constructing just south of that. There's going to be a bunch of acceleration and deceleration lanes in and out of all those intersections. So again, we are looking at a substantial improvement and a lot of center barriers too that you'll see, not just cones. It's going to be really these type nine barricades, which are basically four foot high concrete little walls. So, again, a lot of improvements. So, yep, recording stopped. We are right, right, right in that area. So, yep, we're looking right now on the left hand side where you see on the right hand side on 82. Generally speaking, where you see those two. lines coming off of 82. That's approximately where the intersection is going to be. You want to just pan north just a little ways. It gives you a little bit better sense of, again, this is this dangerous intersection that we've been referring to.

That's Habitat for Humanity, right?

No, we are, Habitat is still further south. The building right on the left is the Holy Cross Energy Campus in Glenley Springs. um and then you have the the Buffalo Valley um apartments and then there's a the church right over here so this is County Road 154 where the cursor is located right now seems like a good plan thank you yeah thanks for coming I'm sorry I was listening online I missed the very beginning you were asking about a letter of support who is that too and

You would just write it to our city council. Oh, okay. Your city council. We've got one from, I don't know, Aspen, Snowmass Village, Rifle. So if you guys would like to do that, we'd love to have it.

Yeah, I think there's some great regional benefits. Ryan, you and I were doing one of those flights. We were looking at some of this phenomenon occurring, at least in the morning. And it sounds like this would be a great thing for the region, not just Glenwood Springs. So I think it's great. Is everyone supportive of a letter? Sounds like I'd say yes. So Gloria, if you would draft something, I'd be happy to sign it on behalf of council.

Got a draft ready.

All right. Anybody else have any questions or comments? It's not a public, but I will allow it. It's a presentation, so I'll allow it.

Casey Johnson, just a quick question for you.

You want to come up to the microphone?

I'm Casey Johnson live at 21 Lazy Glen. For the last 40 years, what's the estimated time on that construction of the project we're talking about?

Yeah, so we're looking to probably kick off do do construction starting in early 2027 and then be a two year period. So be wrapping up sometime in early 2029.

And what type of impact will that have on people coming down Valley in the afternoon?

Well, it is definitely going to have an impact, we'll put it that way.

Oh boy.

However though, the platform right away through that area is fairly wide. And so the initial phasing plans that we have, we think what we can do is shift traffic one way or the other and build the infrastructure. And so our plan is actually not to reduce travel lanes, say two lanes each direction. It'll just be smooshing things together. So the areas will be slightly slower, probably either 40 or 45 miles signposted speed limits through the construction zone. But again, we're approaching Glenwood, so we don't think it's going to have a massive effect. But construction, as we all know, right, is not simple. So there absolutely will be some amount of impact. But again, we're going to try to minimize it as much as we can.

Of course. Thank you. Well, thank you for the presentation, and good luck with your transformational project.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having us. Your town looks fantastic. You guys should be proud. You're doing a good job. It looks fantastic out there. Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

OK. So next up, we have our council actions. And our first item is item 7A, which is a public hearing and introduction meeting. 218 East Valley Road site plan review, special review, PUD amendments, annexation amendment, community housing mitigation review, and associated development review actions for construction of a 93 key hotel and three deed-restricted units. James, you have this one. And if the applicant wants to come forward to the table.

Come up to the table, please.

James, you have the floor. Thank you.

This item, as the mayor indicated, is an introduction meeting and a public hearing on a PUD amendment, special review, and associated development review actions to construct a 93-key hotel with three deed-restricted units on the movie land site, which is 218 East Valley Road. The application is submitted by Walsh DuPart on behalf of Bowtie Partners. The site subject to the application is located at 218 East Valley Road. And let me zoom out. This is the former Movie Land site. It takes access from East Valley Road, as you can see here. Here's the existing Movie Land building. And then there are some commercial condos that are located right here in the parking lot. The site is adjacent to the El Jebel Park and Ride. which is located right here. And then just to the south of the site is City Market, the back of City Market area. And then you have Sopris Village on the west side of the site. And then also East Valley Road continues on to the El Jebel intersection. The property is located within the urban growth boundary and it's designated service commercial. with an existing land use designation on the future land use map that's in the 2020 master plan it's located in the old orchard plaza pud which includes the commercial condos that are in the parking lot area it also includes the eligible park and ride and then the uh City Market Complex is also a PUD. It's part of the Orchard Plaza PUD. The only uses prescribed for the site for the property are the movie theater. So that requires an amendment for the hotel. And so the review process, which is included in your packet, entails a review by the Basalt Affordable Community Housing Commission, which is BOC. as well as the P&Z to make a recommendation to town council on all the land use actions that are being requested. The BOC committee reviewed the affordable housing aspects of the proposal and they were accepting of the affordable housing aspects of the proposal. The P&Z also had several public hearings on the application and they made a recommendation. They voted to make a recommendation of denial by a vote of five to two. So this evening, staff would recommend treating this meeting as an introduction meeting for the council to understand the project. The applicants are here this evening. They'll make a presentation of the project in full. And then staff would also suggest taking public comments and getting council kind of up to speed on the public comments on the project. And then as such, staff would recommend then asking questions of staff and the applicants. and then ultimately continuing the public hearing to October 13th, as this is just an introduction meeting. At a future meeting, staff will fully present the discussion items that are included in your packet, but we wanted to allow considerable time for the applicants to fully present the project, and then we anticipate quite a few public comments, so we wanted to get those on the record at this meeting. So with that, I will stop sharing my screen and we'll transition over to the applicant's presentation. Grant, would you like to share your screen?

Yeah, I can share a screen.

Ben, you're welcome to jump in there and then I can get a presentation. I will do that. Thank you. I want to thank everybody for your willingness to hear from us tonight. I'll keep this very brief, but I wanted to provide a quick history of the property for context as you hear more from Grant in a moment. I'm Ben Moss. I'm the owner of the Movie Land property. I'm a former full-time Aspen resident, now a part-time Valley resident, as well as an Aspen High School graduate. When I'm here, I live in a three-generation family home that was my grandfather's. My grandfather and my dad, who are both now deceased, were respectively the first and second generation of my family to live here and own a business here. and they were the original developers of the Movie Land property. That started in the 1980s. They built Movie Land, they built the commercial condominiums in front of Movie Land, they built the retail center next to City Market, and they sold City Market the land on which Kroger developed the store that's still there today. Movie Land opened in 1991. My dad and I operated it for its entire life, including its final four years, which were unprofitable post-pandemic. I'm the one who made the decision ultimately to close Movieland, which was difficult and emotional, but it was the only option as the business model is just no longer viable despite our efforts to find a path forward over that four-year period. The original development, as James noted, was done prior to the property being part of the Town of Basalt and under a PUD, which is still operative. That PUD limits the use of the Movieland building exclusively to a movie theater. which is no longer viable, hence our request to amend the PUD in compliance with the underlying zoning and with the dimensional requirements of the building being addressed in the PUD proposed amendment to hopefully make the property viable once again. And as I've done for the last 30 or so years, my plan is to continue to be the majority owner and a steward of the property's future. And that's not to say I can guarantee outcomes or what will happen in the next 30 or 40 years, but I say this to provide, again, context and a little background, that this property and Movie Land in particular has been a multi-generational family business. And my strong desire is that the property's next phase continue in that manner and spirit. So you're going to hear in a moment from our partner, Grant, the details of the proposed project, which is to construct and operate an extended stay hotel branded as a residence inn by Marriott. I'd like just to point out that Residence Inn, like all Marriott brands, is a franchise. So we will be the owners of the property and the business. We're not here representing Marriott. We're here representing ourselves, the actual people who are behind the project and the actual people who will own it and run it. So with that and with my thanks again for all of your time, I'll introduce Grant DuPard of Walsh DuPard, who's our partner in the project.

Thank you, Ben. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for having us. I'm going to share a presentation here. And my goal is to try and get through as much as we possibly can, as quickly as we can. But obviously, there's been a lot over the last almost two years now, starting with planning and getting through all the commissions that sit before you at town council. So with that, I'm going to share my screen here. You know, a quick introduction to myself and my partner, John. John would typically be here. John has a baby due any day here. So John is attending via Zoom. Otherwise, he'd be here with me. John and I started our firm in 2021. We were college roommates at University of Denver. I worked in hotels. He worked in construction. We graduated and went our separate ways. And to make a long story short, we took the entrepreneurial leap together. to start our firm Walsh DuPart in 2021 with the focus of building really high quality and owning high quality hotels in the Rocky Mountain region, specifically Colorado. We're based in Denver. We're a Colorado firm. There's five of us total in our firm, including myself and John as our partners. We're a small business there and we've been growing throughout the Rockies in the hotel space. Most recently, we opened a hotel in Steamboat in June, and we're going to open a hotel at the beginning of next year in Fraser, Colorado. As a business plan, generally, we are focused on delivering really high-quality product at a reasonable price point. And so if you looked at our portfolio or you saw what we built in Steamboat or what we're doing in Fraser, it's a very custom but generally branded hotel product. We do this because the segment of hotels that we plan really accommodates a wide range of people and it creates a higher average occupancy in the hotel for a longer period of time, which tends to generate more business for the local community in terms of off season. It's also a highly sought after highly sought after hotel products for people who are looking for something that's just a little bit more reasonably priced. Generally, you also require fewer people to work in the hotels, so it's less of a strain on the workforce when you open these types of hotels. If we think about the major demand sources for hotels, leisure, Business, government, a product like Residence Inn accommodates all of those people and it does it with a really high quality product at a reasonable price point. And so if we think about the leisure guest, a residence inn room is comfortable for a family, it's comfortable for a couple, it's comfortable for an individual. We own a residence in Durango right now, and we see a lot of that type of demand in our current hotel. On the government side, you can think of a lot of the service workers on government industries that stay in these hotels, whether that be wildland firefighting crews. The people who fix roads for CDOT, they all need a place to stay and this is typically the type of product that they would stay in. And then on the business side, you of course see people like traveling nurses, traveling physicians. I'm sure you can think of the many types of guests who would want to stay in this hotel. We've been working on this project now for almost two years through planning, through BOC, through the Planning Commission. We've worked very hard to try and be as transparent as we can in terms of the process, how we are envisioning the site. Most recently, after getting out of Planning Commission, I wanted to open up some opportunity for more people to voice their opinion about the site and hear what people have to say and see if there's additional feedback I could gather. So I spent 24 hours sitting in a coffee shop in Basalt over four different days in long chunks of time, published that time in the Aspen Times. I tried weekend evenings, weekday mornings, weekday afternoons with the idea that, hey, if I'm going to do this, let's try and find a time that anyone who would want to show up and voice their opinion could probably do it. And I'm really glad that I did. I got to meet some interesting people over the 24 hours. We had five total people show up to talk about the project. Three, four, one I'd say neutral, one that was not pro, for the project but probably more interested if I could sort of channel some of their thoughts on maybe higher quality product or a different type of hotel versus residents in. That was our feedback, transparently. And so we're here, of course, to introduce the project, answer as many questions we can. Coming out of the Planning Commission, the key takeaway that we have is, you know, is hotel the right use for this site next to City Market? And I think that we were able to answer a lot of the underlying planning questions, but really with a lot of community feedback from some of the neighboring some of the neighbors, I think that the planning commission, in my opinion, has sort of referred this hotel question to town council to opine on. And so we're happy to be able to present that to you here. All right, I will run through the project here so we can start talking through a little bit of the data and what we have here. So this is the site as it stands today. It's the old Movie Land Theater, currently closed. view to the back of the loading dock at the city market, view towards Sopris Village. I would just note some of the trees that exist right now on the back of both of these sites, and we'll talk through trees a little bit later. There's been a lot of discussion on what the hotel will look like when you're sitting at the stoplight at this Highway 82 intersection. And so I actually took this photo when I was driving up for one of my coffee meetings, so I stopped at the light and thought, This is interesting. This is the view from the light of that site. Notably, and I probably could have clipped the bush out of there if I had been a little bit further forward. But notably, there's not really a very strong impression of this building at three stories. The building height that we are building to is the same height plus five inches. as the condo building that has the green roof there. So I think that just helps to paint a little bit of the context of the site that we're looking at today and how you view it on the way in. Talking through redevelopment, so as Ben mentioned, they have been involved in this project for a very long time. And we have evaluated, he has evaluated as well, absent of us on the hotel side, our company really only does hotels. What types of uses are a potential fit for this site? Hotel is an underlying use that is allowed under C3 zoning. And so that was one of our core focuses coming out of the gate was to make sure that the product that we're looking to place here did fit with the underlying zoning. It allows for a two FAR on the current site, which means that you could go up to 160,000 square feet, of course, with the PUD removed. This is within the urban growth boundary that was prescribed by the town. And we are excited by the prospect of being able to deliver an impactful project that is not going to take more non-developed space away. This is urban infill behind the city market loading dock. And when we think about the product type that we're developing, we think that that is the right product type for this location based on our experience. And that it would do well here, one, but also suits the underlying zoning that is currently on the site. There has been a number of questions about whether or not hotel demand exists in basalt and in the valley. And so in our industry, we can't actually just come in and say, hey, this is what the element's doing, right? We've done our research, but we try and aggregate data. If you pull specific data on a specific asset, you could then be basically accused of price fixing because then you know what everyone's hotel rates are. So we aggregate data in our industry among a wide range of hotels. I'm sure you could look at the occupancy tax that you collect from Hoffman and see that it's ticked up and maybe extrapolate some of the revenue sources that you've had from that hotel. This data that we have, we pulled together an aggregate of hotels basically ranging through the full valley. And on the next slide, we'll show what those occupancy numbers look like. As a note, 70% occupancy is considered very good for the hotel industry. I know that sometimes 70% seems low, but just using our residents in as an example, 70% in a mud season month, and we took our last April data in here, meant that we had five days that we were Five days were more than 90% occupied and 13 days were more than 75% occupied. And that's in April month, of course, you can imagine. Summer is very busy, winter is very busy. Moving on to some of the additional data that we pulled here. I think this is really interesting and this is why we want to do a hotel here. Basalt is a destination unto itself. I think that there's this idea that somehow our guests are just here as a bedroom community for another purpose. If you look at the Google search data for hotels in this valley, and we pulled some keywords, Basalt Hotel is up 40% in the last two years. hotels, Aspen hotels is down, right? And what that says is that people are saying I want to go to Basalt, not I need a hotel near Aspen, right? And so that as an underlying search piece of data I think helps us to support that there is of course demand here. And then looking at both the Roaring Fork Valley hotel data for select service non-luxury and then luxury hotels, note that the occupancy rate for hotels that are not luxury is 11% higher, averaging this whole valley's hotel numbers. So when you think about what is in demand, what people need here to stay in, they're looking for this type of product and they want to stay in this type of hotel. One of the big benefits too for building lodging in a lodging zoned area is of course that it starts to impact short term rentals, right? And short term rentals can affect affordable housing by taking housing stock offline. And I think on the flip side, short term rentals are a very good indication of what kind of demand exists in a market. There are 142, as of today, short term rental properties in just this little area in the town and outside of the town. I mean, this is a rough map of all the different units that exist on the short term rental side. These are homes, right, that people could be living in. But I also would say. If there wasn't demand for hotel or there wasn't demand for lodging, people wouldn't be putting their units up here for short term rentals. Interestingly, I think that the licenses for short term rentals is a very small fraction of that number. And so that tells me, one, that there's a lot of people who are not in Basalt who are on this map, right? don't need to pull a license, but there's also probably a fair number of people who just do it anyways, right? So there's a significant distribution of short term rentals. And even in the area where we're putting the hotel, there is a tremendous amount of short term rental demand. In some of the units that are just adjacent to the property, the occupancy level of those short term rentals is over 80%. The average rate of those units is over $350. The average rate for short term rentals in the town, the whole wider picture here is over $400, right? These are short term rentals that are happening not in short term rental zone locations. And hotel helps to alleviate some of the pressure and the need for some of those units to be short term rentals, which can help with affordable housing. We've seen it in a lot of the other towns that we have worked in on the hotel side. A restriction on short term rentals and a push into lodging increases taxes and makes the affordable housing equation much easier in those towns. Jumping into the redevelopment plan, we're proposing a 96 unit hotel right now. Three of which the units would be designated as housing. Those are on the first floor towards the back of the property. We put them here because we wanted them as far away from guests as possible. It's not an ideal execution to frankly work in a hotel where you see guests every day because it can just be. And so even after discussing with Bach, we agreed that this location was the right place to put it. And our note, Bach actually approved us at two units, and then we added another unit on top of that. So we made it through Bach with two, saying, hey, that's enough affordable housing for this project, certainly based on the employee count. And then we've increased it to three. We'll talk a little bit more about that scope a little bit later. um talking through the basalt master plan i'd really encourage if you have time to go to exhibit four at some point not tonight it's a very long package i know you're very familiar with the master plan for basalt we went through and did a checklist one by one how many items that apply to this project do we think we are satisfying in terms of the master plan of 197 plan points we think 128 just aren't applicable maybe it's about some other use in town 54 are supported 10 were neutral five are not supported so the relevant points we're at 90 supported i would tell you i've never seen a project that checks every single uh item off on a master plan but we've done a we've done our best to try and comply with as many items as we can under the master plan that's set forth for the town and in this location. Jumping into economic impact, this is a projection of taxes, tax revenues and fees from the total project dated from the day we start the project, so building permit fees. through 10 years of operations. So you figure that's about a year and a half of construction time and then eight and a half years of operations time. We project $15 million of total tax revenue that's including Eagle County as well. 3.6 of that's gonna go to Eagle County and related benefits that end up leaving the town. 11.8 stay in the Roaring Fork Valley or directly with the town of Basalt. notably 4.2 million of lodging tax, $600,000 for RAFTA, $181,000 to early childhood district, $1.4 million to the town's subsidized housing program as well. There's been certainly plenty of discussion in our planning meetings around proposed uses and you know one being an example of hey let's do a rec center here and and I think my my perspective is you know we're we can use a lot of this tax revenue for the benefit of the community right and this is strong recurring tax revenue especially with this lodging tax which was just voted in a couple of years ago to be used right and I think it can be a huge benefit of course for the town and for the community If we need to get into more detail, we have some slides about the direct uses that are the direct locations that all these funds are going in more detail. Let's talk through planning and zoning. So I actually think that, look, I would have loved transparently to come out with just a full approval out of planning. But like I said, I think that this is a conversation about use, right, and hotel use. And I think that planning did a really good job helping us to get to a project that makes a little bit more sense here. And really puts the guardrails on to make sure people feel comfortable about what is going to be developed here. Our goal was always to build a hotel for the record, and our goal was always to build this size hotel, but our initial application did not pare down the gross square footage that we would have been able to build on the site. And so we ended our planning meetings with a strong restriction that would limit this PUD amendment to building a hotel at the size that we've said we would build it. in terms of, and that would be a 40% of what we can build or what could be built under C3 zoning. The other big item I think was height. We went in with architectural features that took the building height up to 46 feet, not occupiable space. I just want to be clear about that. We thought that the building looked better when we put some of these architectural features on it and so the occupiable floor space was not changing but we had done these architectural features and that took the building height up and frankly the commentary was please don't do that we want you to bring the building height down and so we did work to build bring that building height down to 34 feet 5 inches we've improved the exterior design of the project as well as a number of other items that we've either clarified or improved the project with This is the architectural look right now of the project from East Valley Road. Notably, the building height is 34 feet 5 inches from the finished floor to the top of the parapet. The adjacent building here is 34 feet. The finishes that we are proposing here would be heavy timber along the parapets there. That's a real stone veneer, a wood toned siding, and then a board and batten siding. And then we always do a higher quality finish. Our hotels do not look like a hotel you would find at Houston Airport, right? And we're not building prototype hotels. You can do that with Marriott, right? You can go and say, I want to just build a residence in and they give you a design. and then you take it off the shelf and it's covered in Ephus and stucco and it's cheap looking. I'm going to show you an example of what we actually are doing with similar materials right now. This is the view from Soper's Village Drive. Looking back at the building, again, stone, wood tone siding, board and batten, high-quality windows. talking through height the distance from the building so so in this package we have not moved the building but I do want to bring up a couple of items so coming out of the last planning session there was a question about could we try and move the building a little bit further you know john and i contrary to popular belief do not have endless money to keep redrawing this building and that's why we're here right we want to know if this use is going to be acceptable here for us to draw a building 10 feet over might sound like a minor endeavor but that involves civil engineering architecture new renderings it's very expensive we've already done it a couple of times through the planning process and so we're trying to understand if some of these changes are made how do we feel about the project and with that we can push the with a move of the building 10 feet further east towards east valley road We can push a building 66 feet away from actually the fence line of the three adjacent houses. Only one yard actually looks up at this building. And if we do that, that allows us to screen the building with three large windows. evergreen trees and it would also allow us to retain a few more of the trees that we didn't think we were going to be able to keep around the affordable housing units so that would put the building windows 66 feet away from the fence and the top of the fence is just under 10 feet high from the finish grade of the building so it's a 34 foot high building the windows are about 30 feet or so, and that would mean there's basically a 24-foot difference between the top of the fence and the highest window in the building. I should also note on the way that we've sited this building, we looked at doing it horizontal, sort of taking the space where the Movie Land Theater exists right now and then putting the building along that space and away from City Market. That frankly would actually be our preference because right now we have half of our rooms looking at the loading dock of a city market, which as you can imagine, probably not the best execution per hotel. We are gonna keep those trees so we can screen it well and we'll work with city market to try and get some of that cleaned up. There was a comment about trash and everything that has happened around the city market trail. I mean, I agree. I can tell you, John and I have to personally guarantee the performance of our franchise agreements. And so, there is no one who is more particular about the exterior look of a project than someone like Marriott, who has a brand reputation to uphold. But we couldn't do that, and the reason is if we did, we would actually have to relocate a large water line that runs through the middle of the project. We can do that. But we do not want to touch that water line. It actually runs from Soper's Village up across the highway to the top of the hill to a holding tank and then back under the highway, back through the site, and back to Soper's Village. And so we thought it best to not disturb that pipeline and to leave it open and in the location where it is right now so that if it needs to be repaired, it's going to be easier to be repaired that way. Talking through exterior finishes. So this is a project that we are actively building right now with a very similar spec of materials. That's wood toned siding. It's the same stone product that we use and would use on this project. This is metal panels around the windows. We do a fully upgraded exterior, no unlighting. We're not gonna have that exterior lighting. We're very limited on what we can do and would do here for lighting. We've heard a lot of commentary that we don't want to have light shining down in our neighborhood, and I understand that. And so the exterior lighting would be very different at this site. This is also a four story building. So much taller. But this is what that looks like today while we're under construction. I think that's a high quality, high finish quality. This is 30 year warrantied materials. It's a real stone and it looks, we think, high quality. When it comes to signage, we've actually asked Marriott and gotten approval to take all of the signs off from around the building except for one and reduce the sign size and reduce the lumens that we have to have in that sign so that we uh don't have as much specific branding around the residence in peace which is also something that we've heard that is not super desirable and i want the residents in signed up next to city market so this is what the exterior looks like here this is a similar quality that we're going to on the interiors we do a fully 100 percent custom interior design This looks expensive to build and it is more expensive than building a prototype product, but it's not as much, it does not cost as much as you would think to do this. And so for a little bit of extra money, we're able to deliver products that feel more localized. We spend more time finding local art. We spend more time designing to the local imagery of the place that we're putting the hotel. This is just an example of Frasier. This is our front desk. This is our fireside seating area with a small boardroom. We are doing a boardroom in our hotel as well, which we've noted in our package is open to nonprofits for use for free. And we're happy to have them use it. This would be our breakfast area. We actually went with more of a ranching, fly fishing theme at this hotel just because we felt like skiing had been overdone. Look back to the breakfast area here. We do have a small bar in Fraser. We are not proposing a bar for this hotel. We were guided to that early on to not do it for a couple reasons. Increased traffic and two, the feedback we got was drive as many people into the town as possible to eat in the restaurants here when they need the restaurant business. And so we are not taking business at our own bar by the hotel that we've delivered. There'll be questions I'm sure you hear about, well, people are going to cook in their kitchen all the time. Extended stay hotels are great and people think that they want to cook in their kitchens. They don't actually really cook in the kitchen, right? It's an amenity for them to have extra space. They like a big fridge to put leftovers. Maybe they microwave a breakfast. We serve a free breakfast, but predominantly people are not cooking. in residence ends at any large scale. So this is just an example of the finished quality that we go for on the interiors. Talking through traffic and pedestrian circulation, on the left is what the site looks like now. On the right is what the site will look like once all the realignment that's in progress is done. I put this forth because it's important to note how the access from the hotel is is easily accessed over to the RAFTA station. We will have bus passes available to our employees. I think that some of our guests are going to use RAFTA to commute up to the airport when they come in, which is a huge benefit. And so the access through this site is really quite easy to get to that space. And frankly, on the traffic side, there's a significant amount of expansion in terms of turn lane capacity right at the entrance to this project and up closer to Highway 82. Just a zoomed in look here. This is an added lane here going from two lanes to three with the additional turn lane. Same over on this side. And then of course this has been expanded over to this side. Guests for us can either walk to the path here and over to get to the crosswalk. Questions about path that might come up. We're actually required under our development agreements here to redo this path and maintain it. So that's of course our obligation. We did volunteer through the planning process to have our team run up to Willits once a month and do some trash clean up. Just a little bit of do good and we're happy to do that with them if that's interesting. We've heard that people really do not like the trash and the look behind City Market. I don't disagree. Again, I think it looks bad, and so we obviously want that to look nice, and we think it's a nice amenity for guests to be able to hop on a bike trail. We will provide e-bikes as well at the hotel. That helps with a little bit of traffic alleviation on the traffic side. I'm talking through. Oh, and sorry. Lastly, we will do airport shuttles for guests as well if they don't want to take the bus. And so that gives us a little bit more traffic mitigation here. We looked at a number of uses that could fit or have been brought up through the planning process for the hotel. So restaurant hardware store was just an example of like, hey, if we just tried to repurpose this building, like what's an idea of something we can come up with here that would fit? People have talked about rec center for the space, and we picked limited service hotel. And when we say limited service, that just means that we're not doing, again, bar, restaurant, there's no valet, there's no bell service. And so the limited service hotel actually has the lowest traffic count impact of all these uses that we've looked at in addition to others. And that is one of the guiding reasons behind this being a hotel and not perhaps any other uses. I'll briefly touch on light pollution. These are some of the light specs that we use. This is in our planning package. It's in our design package. This limits light trespassing very significantly if you look at how it comes off the sidewalk with a trespass mitigation. You can actually really limit the way that light shines down. These are all downlit lights. It's a great improvement from what we have right now um on a surface lot and you know this is where technology is going in terms of lighting it's it adheres to all of basalt's lighting standards for the project and we've had and been able to get waivers from marriott to be able to do even less lighting at the project as well Talking through good neighbor plan. So comments that we've heard, hey, we're worried about people driving through our neighborhood, we're worried about parking in our neighborhood, maintenance, security, noise, light pollution. I think I've talked enough about light. These are some of the items that we actually have documented in our development plan. And we would certainly be willing to adhere to and frankly already would as a matter of practice Parking we can explain to our guests that you're not allowed to park in the neighbor in the adjacent neighborhood We can do parking passes for them Obviously, they're not allowed to park there so I'm assuming that if anyone parks in a neighborhood that they're not supposed to park in they get towed and And that would be the best mitigation, I think, of a parking issue with someone overflowing. But again, that's not our goal. We do have enough parking for our guests here. We'll go into a parking slide. We don't need one parking space for every one room. We've experienced that with the hotels that we own. There's also a number of precedents set in Basalt and in other mountain towns that show you don't need that. We did contact Eagle County to have them add a note through traffic sign. There's a little bit of commentary around park being private. We're happy to add all the signage, do as much landscaping as we can to make sure that people are directed to Crown Mountain Park, not to the playground and park that is just adjacent to us. impact to potential water sources. There's a well across the street. We would do a similar well monitoring agreement to the one that Rafta did when they did their parking expansion, which we're happy to do. And I think that this is going to really help with actually some of the cleanup around that bike path. Again, the bike path is an amenity for us. We want our guests to like it, to want to be there, to use it. We are not incentivized to have a low quality bike path at the hotel project. Talking through parking, right now we have 93 parking spots provided. Code specifies one stall per hotel key, 1.5 per housing unit. So that would be total required spots of 97.5, 4.5 for the three employee housing units. I do think that in the context of the units that we're developing, we're probably more likely to have a single car user household. And so I think that the need there is going to be a little bit more minimal on the parking side. And then we have 93 hotel rooms. We put a couple of comps up here in terms of what parking ratios exist for similar hotels. We have many more of these as well, but we just consolidated it to a couple of local hotels. And again, We are not incentivized to build a hotel that does not have enough parking for our guests. That's how we make our guests angry and then they don't come back. So me saying I want less parking just to have less parking would not benefit ourselves, right? We need people to be able to park when they come to our hotel. Based on our experience, we have plenty of parking here and we've not had parking issues with similar accounts. Jumping into employee estimation and housing. So this is just the math that comes behind everything on the affordable housing side. We didn't net out the jobs that were at Movie Land when we did this calculation. Technically, the code actually allows for that to happen. So if we do net out the jobs, code requires one unit. If we don't net out the jobs, code requires two units. We got approval from bucket two units. We added a third unit at planning. Instead, it takes us to three units on that housing side. And so that is how we've come up with our calculation now. I think that this is a good time, too, to talk about some other work that we've been sort of pushing forward in tandem as we've heard more requests for community benefit on the project. We currently have an option to purchase a substantial majority of the second floor of the condominium building, the Old Orchard Plaza building. And the reason we haven't brought it up or worked through it yet is because we weren't sure that we could actually do housing there for quite a while. And we now have figured out that we do think it works for us to bring nine units into the second floor of that building. We think that that obviously could be a great benefit in terms of delivering additional housing for the project. This has been something we've been evaluating for some time now. Our proposal, of course, would be to move the three units into the second floor of that building and then to turn the units that we have that are currently housing back into hotel keys. This is more a discussion topic, I would say. This is something we're evaluating. If it's something that you think is a benefit to the town, we can continue to pursue it, continue to push it across the finish line. We're certainly ready, willing, and able to do that. We can talk about what sort of restrictions end up on those units. I'm sure you're thinking, how many of them would be affordable? What would be the path? Our current thought process right now is we already have to do the three. Maybe we increase it to four and then we do something similar to what we just read about the first tracks program. I think it's a great idea. Maybe we do that for the other five. And that's a way for us to get additional units into the housing stock. A couple items to note. It is very expensive to do that kind of renovation. We can do the hotel and leave the three units in as expect right now without those housing units. We can't do the housing units without the hotel because the reason we're able to do those housing units is we're going to use our team when they're out framing the hotel. They're going to help frame the second floor when they're doing the electrical. using the same crew to move over and do a little bit of electrical when you do a small project like that it's hard to get efficient if you don't have the hotel or something larger there to to generate that extra capacity so again happy to do the hotel on its own we think that we've been trying to figure out additional ways to answer some of the community need this is something that we think could do that and we're ready to move forward and do it um this is the first time that we've really brought it up because we weren't sure that we'd be able to do the housing up there until now and so i just put that out there as as a note on something that we're evaluating on that side um i think that that's that that's pretty much everything I've got. So thank you very much for listening. We do have some appendices if we want to get into more detail, but we certainly appreciate your time. We'd love your feedback to the extent that you can give it. And we really want to move this forward. So thank you so much.

Thank you for the presentation. We will do public comment now. So I will go ahead and open the public hearing. Just a reminder, 719, just a reminder before people come up, it's kind of the same ground rules as the initial call to the public, three minutes. And make sure you give your name and address, sign it in the back of the room, and otherwise the floor is open. Please.

There's no microphone.

Oh, that's fine. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Cindy Metzold. I live at 21 Lazy Glen. I've lived in the valley for 40 years. My concern with this project, when I'm listening to it, it sounds all fine and dandy, but there is huge impacts to JW Drive and the intersection at El Jebel. It's already a cluster. If there is a wildfire evacuation, my concern is that people may not be able to get out. They'd have to go down the other way to Catherine's store. The other thing that is concerning me is the PUD loophole that any zoning concessions granted now will run with the land and they'll be permanent. Another one is the water. We're in a drought right now, and how much more water is going to be needed for this project? In addition to the traffic concerns, the one thing that was noted in their presentation, and I appreciate that, they said that the other options for this property were a community center, which I severely really recommend. The new traffic that will be imposed by this development is going to be new traffic. It's not going to be existing residents. If it was a community center, it's people who live here. The traffic might be higher, but it's not new traffic adding to already the existing traffic. So those are some of my concerns I'm not sure it is the right Development for this area if I had a house in sopers village, I would not like a hotel in my backyard But those are my concerns are the evacuation the water and the traffic Thank you.

Thank you for your comments

hi again i'm susan chisholm i live at 126 kiowa and sopress village and for your all's context i'm a landscape architect i've attended the pnz meetings where i made some very specific comments in the past and i'm just going to stick to the important things because i only have three minutes the town of basalt has approved a similar type of project with proximity to a single family neighborhood the element hotel The town required an extensive landscape buffer in the Element Hotel and the houses adjacent. I know because I did the landscape plan and I staked those trees. I would like the town to request the developer to look at doing a more extensive buffer between the homeowners on Cheyenne. and this project. And for reference, a quick Google Earth dimension puts the Element Hotel about 100 feet from the rear of the homes in Willits. And currently, with the applicants moving the building over 10 feet to the east, it looks like it's maybe 80 or only 85 feet. between the rear of the home and the hotel as proposed today i reviewed the application in detail i did not see a lot of substantial changes to the application not really addressing some of those concerns that pnz had which led them to deny the project and for reference the landscape plan does not match the building footprint let's see um the appling provided a good neighbor plan but i'm not sure how the town enforces that this is the town who guarantees that the items in the good neighbor plan are followed are in enforceable is that the town is that the surface village hoa i'm not sure how that pans out in the end I was glad to see that the applicant provided a section to show the relationship between the hotel and the rear yards of the homes on Cheyenne. But there are other types of graphics that are possible to show what the actual people are seeing out of the rear of those homes. and lastly i'm not sure how the project aligns with your master plan principles and i think he said 52 points to me that's not enough and later on in your meeting you're going to talk about your core priorities for the next two years and i don't think this project matches up with your traffic safety and infrastructure concern nor with your priority you've identified of affordable housing And with my last 18 seconds, I'm not sure how this additional housing he just talked about on the second floor of the condominium building next door affects the parking count for which they're asking a variance for. So that's something to think about. Thank you.

Thank you.

Floor is open. Come on up.

Hi, my name is Joel, I live in Sopris Village. Here are three reasons why you should deny the PUD amendment. This is an international brand continuing the corporate gentrification and it devalues the entire mid valley. El Javel has two Starbucks, a Verizon store, a Wendy's, a Napa, a Hilton, an existing Marriott, the Jeff Bezos grocery store with the Amazon counter. I think we're passing a line here. This is from Basalt's master plan. Strive 1K, strive to retain quaintness of basalt and the existing quirky elements that contribute to the small town. A third international branded hotel in El Jebel is not quaint, it's not quirky, and it doesn't contribute to a small town. The only thing it does do is propel us more towards a town like Silverthorne. Reason number two to deny the extended stay hotel with kitchens is going to function like a construction dormitory for Aspen projects You will be creating rooms for Texas drywall errs to come here and compete with your basalt drywall errs You will with the kitchen. They will cook inside. They are not encouraged to go out and freak with the other restaurants It's not a synergy synergistic relationship. If you vote to approve this project, you're attacking your own workforce and their wages. Reason number three is the environment. From your master plan 5T, on a yearly basis the town council should review the progress made on its resolution to declare a climate emergency. So at this point, I'm wondering what types of scenarios would have to unfold for you guys to declare a climate emergency. We have a big drought. If we get the same snow this next year that we did last year, this time next year, there's no water. At some point, it just becomes irresponsible to keep talking about housing and hotels. Nonetheless, we're discussing a 93-room hotel that'll have 93 showers, 93 kitchens, roughly 100 toilets, 200 sinks, 77,000 square feet with 93 rooms blasting heat in the winter and AC in the summer. It'll be a rooftop, we filled with mechanical equipment, which is gonna be heat pumps and condensing units pumping heat into the environment 24 seven. The reality is we have a developer who I like, who wants to sell our limited resources, including water, to create dormitory housing for possible construction workers while sending revenue to Marriott and these guys. They're selling our resources. My question is, what do we get? What do we get in this valley? Here's the summary. Another corporate hotel is a bad for the character of this valley. It's bad for the existing workforce. It does little for the surrounding businesses due to the kitchen. And it draws more of our resources that everyone agrees is in short supply. Please do the right thing. Do not issue a continuance. Issue a denial. And let's move on to the next idea. Appreciate your comments.

All right. We can keep going. Who wants to go next? Come on up.

Hello. My name is Joe Zwana. I live at 205 Riverside Drive here in Basalt. I'm here to support the developers. I've had the last 46 years working in the hotel industry here in the Valley. You would think I wouldn't want competition, but encourage it. I've been hearing the guest type, etc. Working at the Inn at Aspen, most recently at the Element Hotel. The guest type that stays at these extended stay hotels, yes, some cook. Believe me, I clean many rooms. Not every room's getting used as the kitchen. But the guest type, their family come in here. You get a lot of seniors, husband-wife teams, couples, whatever it may be, just enjoying the off-season. That's the group you're getting to come. You get patients at the Stedman Clinic. A lot of surgery takes place there. Thank God we have it. But a lot of the patients stay at the hotel, so they're not out. using parks, et cetera. They're in their wheelchairs and happy to have a bed to stay. You're going to have performers from Dakar. You know, big demand at the Hoffman and at the Element right now from Dakar to make sure you can provide some affordable accommodations for musicians, entertainers. That's going to be something. You definitely get your trades. You get people not only, you know, Local, but you have homeowners from Aspen that will bring their trades in. So you think you're going to prevent trades from being taken? It's happening, believe me. But they're not living in the hotels and dormitories. These people are in and out of these rooms, and they're out. They're definitely going out to eat. They're going to the bars. Their families come up and visit them. They're going to the shops, et cetera. You have traveling doctors and nurses. To me as a citizen, the sales and lodging tax revenue is key. Just think of the off season revenue you're going to be getting to help support all the wonderful things that we're doing in here. Traffic impact, the arrival departure patterns for a hotel is spread over 24 hours. So it's not these massive arrival departures as you currently see at a movie land, etc. Workforce housing. I think you already said it's contributing. Thank you for that. Family and traffic impact. It's hard to say, but I would think. It's potentially actually going to be taking cars off the road because you're going to have workers that are not going up to Aspen or some of us to work. And then finally, on the current PUD usage, I'd keep in mind, make that whole area very flexible just so you have opportunities to be very creative in what you approve there. Thank you. Thank you for your comments.

Hello, my name is Jen Engle. I'm a resident of Soper's Village for 23 years. I'm also I've been a local real estate broker for about 25 years in the valley. I don't have much to add, but I just I don't understand. We've talked a lot about your presentation, talked a lot about demand, and I'm not I feel like we're conflating demand with what's good for the community. And I don't really understand. There's demand for a lot of things. There's demand for liquor stores. There's demand for community centers. There's demand for gun shops. You know, I don't think that demand is necessarily why you approve a project. We've also talked about what benefits the community there is. I haven't seen, you know, it is going to affect Sopers Village in a lot of ways, particularly with the height variance that they're requesting. And I just haven't seen anything be offered really to that community directly to compensate for that and i think that particularly the people i don't live on the back row but i think it's going to be kind of horrible for them so our water line goes through as you said i haven't i just haven't heard much being offered to you know, compensate for some of those things. I also don't feel that, I think we have a lot of mid-priced hotels in the Valley, and I don't necessarily feel that there's a huge demand with the types of visitors that are coming now and spending money at the restaurants in Basalt, spending money in Aspen for that type of lodging, or at least not from the clientele I'm seeing coming. So that's it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Box ready for the next person. Come on up if you want to make comments. If we have anybody on, okay, I hear somebody's coming up. Those online, we'll get to you momentarily.

My name is Hutch Hutchinson. I live in Soper's Village.

I agree with everything that Joel said.

I agree with everything Jen said. And from my own comments. Fire issues. Yes, increased fire issues with more people coming in hanging out still like that. Concerned with additional use of water. We honestly do not know how much water we still have left. In that area. We don't know. And we won't know. until we hire a geohydrologist to come in and check it. We just don't know, period. So until the town or Mid Valley Metro or somebody wants to hire somebody to come in and check on how much water we actually have access to for the future, we just don't know. So it's a very, very risky gamble on that hotel. Traffic. It's a shit show now, and it's not going to get any better with the hotel. Decreased property values for our area, for sure. Does not fit the current PUD. No need to bring it in. If the glove doesn't fit, never mind. I won't go there. Thank you.

All right, who would like to go next? Anybody else in the room? We'll jump online then. I see Ryan Bradley has his hand up.

All right, if you'd like to make comments, please unmute.

I just unmuted. Could you guys hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Awesome. Hey, Ryan Bradley, 60 Arapahoe, Sopris Village. You know, I was riding down the bike down the Navajo Street the other day, and I was thinking about what it would be like if instead of looking up at the Salt Mountain, I was just looking up at a hotel, and that was the view, dominating the view from many of the streets in our neighborhood. I think a big thing people are talking about is Sopris Village is a very mixed neighborhood. We have a lot of Latino families, and I feel like they haven't been represented enough or contacted about this i don't think many of them are aware of what's going on um what was interesting was when they had the uh airbnb dna and they were showing that short-term rentals i was kind of laughing because i'm sitting here on my back deck and i was looking at two of those houses and they're not short-term rentals i know the families that are living in them so you know i'm not sure where that data was gleaned about that um I think the last things I'd like to say is our zoning and planning committee rarely ever shoots anything down. And when they shot this down five to two, what do we have a zoning and planning commission for if we aren't going to listen to their recommendations? They looked at it, said it was a bad development for this area, bad development for the fit of this neighborhood. And so I think we should listen to our zoning and planning committee. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Anyone else online or in the room? We'll keep going until nobody wants to make comments. All right, going once, going twice. So I'll close the public hearing at 738. We are scheduled to go to 745. So I would like to let fellow counselors ask any clarifying questions. or give any brief feedback to the applicant before the next round, assuming that's the way we go. So with that, I'll open up the floor.

Can I ask some clarifying questions? Is it pet friendly?

Yes. And we have a pet area spec'd on our plans. The hotels are pet friendly.

And Where does the water? I'm looking at the plans and not able to understand where the water line runs.

The water line runs parallel to the hotel off the front door. I don't know if it's on the plan set that you have now. It's probably on one of the civil plans. I'm not sure. But if you basically straight down the drive aisle of where you pull in to the hotel.

You did mention fire mitigation crews as a potential client. Does the parking account for large trucks?

In the current hotels that we have, when we've had fire mitigation crews, we've never had any issues with parking on large trucks. And the wildland firefighters, frankly, most of them don't take large trucks. They're actually doing like F-150s, F-250s, and then occasionally they will tow behind like a UTV with them. And then for the smokejumpers, those guys are generally not riding in big trucks either. So at most of our wildland firefighting, with most of our wildland firefighting crews, you don't see a lot of that. Not surprisingly too, you tend to see most of the guests leave when the wildland firefighters are here to fight the fire. So as an example for our Steamboat Hotel, when the fire was coming over the back of Steamboat Hotel this year, we were doing very poorly with our leisure, back of Steamboat Mountain, we were doing very poorly with our leisure guest contribution, right? We weren't having as many people come to Steamboat because they didn't want to be in the smoke, right? And so then that opens up space for the wildland firefighters to be there, of which we had a lot of demand.

And where is the entrance and exit that was hard to see on the

The entrance is, and I can pull this back up. Let me share my screen. The entrance is directly adjacent to the, it's in the same location that the Movie Land entrance is right now. There is a secondary fire entrance that we were asked to put in by fire department, which is locked off, not used for guest traffic, but available to them with a Knox box, which would be at the northwest corner. Let me just... Share my screen here. So this is the entrance right here to the hotel. off of East Valley Road. And then over here, we actually landscaped this to try and create a better execution here versus doing a paved path onto the road here. And so then this is gated. This is not available for people to use and will not be used as an entrance. But Fire wanted something in addition to being able to go down the back of City Market and come in the front here. They wanted a second exit to the site if needed or entrance for that matter. So that's why that entrance exists here.

And my last question is what parking remains available to the adjacent building? I assume UPS will continue to reside there.

UPS will continue to reside there. So there is this. You can see where the line of cars here is sort of shaded out. This parking is all the parking that they are allowed to have under the their plan approval and their PUD. And then there's a 12 parking space easement that exists as well, which we will maintain for the commercial use of this space. A couple notes on parking here. One, hotels work inverted from commercial. So when someone's using a UPS store during the day, if we're using that as an example, or the bank, You know, our guests are typically out during the day. Right. And then they're coming back at night. Our parking lot is most full at midnight and then it starts to empty out early morning. Right. And so hotels work really well next to commercial uses and helps them and and creates a lower price. parking requirement, which we think is just generally better for things like the environment. Um, I think it's also important to note because there was brought up on the traffic and parking side. If we do go down this conversion of space in the condo unit building, we would actually be taking a significant amount of daytime parking use out of the second floor of that building, which is currently office and contributes to the majority of the parking use during the day for that location. And yes, it would, of course, then eat into some of our parking at night. But we're still very comfortable with the parking requirements and what we have here to accommodate that housing, if that's something that we wanted to look at. So we are not changing any of the parking

accessibility or parking permit permitted parking that they have currently thanks for that just uh we don't have a lot of time so like let's really try to keep the answers sorry is you know kind of specific to the clarifying questions we'd like to go next I'll just give a couple points of feedback, if no one else has anything right now. So I'd like to see source data from some of that hotel demand, also the economic impact that you're showing benefits and the estimates. If we're going to be asked to consider these data points to support findings that we may make, we need that to substantiate those conclusions and those findings. And then there's one other question slash comment. I don't understand why we're not looking at the morning for peak trips. I know you said the afternoon is controlling, but it seems like that would be a significant increase for the movie theater use. So I would like to see that in the mix as far as the data that's shared in the traffic. And I know we're comparing editions and all that, but, you know, it's like, just let's do both, morning and afternoon. Okay.

Do morning trips and add in more comparison to the movie theater. Right. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And we can have our... We can have our traffic consultant join for our next meeting too.

Thanks. Anyone else?

Yeah, a couple of things. I'm concerned about the building's proximity to the neighbors. I live in Willits, and I see how close the element is to those residential homes. And to think that this would be even closer really gives me pause. I don't think that the screening that you're talking about is enough. I am concerned about the height of the building and people being able to just see into, you know, people's backyards. And as far as parking overflow in the neighborhoods, you know, you said, well, just get them towed. It's really not that easy. Depending on the neighborhood, you know, somebody might have to be there for 48 hours and not have moved their car and not be sleeping in it. Also, I don't think that's a good use of our police resources to have people calling about cars that they may not even be able to move. Yeah, I would say those are- My biggest concerns and you know, and I am concerned about the environmental impact as well. I think that we all need to start acting like we're in a drought and being really picky about development. And I don't dislike the idea of, you know, an extended stay hotel. But if I'm being picky, I don't think that it's a necessity at this time. and you know lastly i think i would have rather that you had hammered out everything with with pnz before you got here because rick isn't here i'll tell a story of long ago days when the council voted did not vote along box recommendations and they voted to deny a project and the council went ahead with it and and it was it was very upsetting and You know, we did lose most of that committee. So I just want to, you know, refresh everyone's mind about that. I do value the people who are on P&Z. I think that they're experts at what they do. And, you know, I value their time and their recommendations. So that's all I have for now.

Thank you very much.

Oh, go for it.

If I just may on the proximity, and we'll come back with some perhaps viewpoints of what the building will look like compared to the neighborhood. I think it is important to note that the Element Hotel is four stories as well, and we're doing three. So there's about a 10 or 12 foot height difference between the two, and then we're talking about a 15 foot difference in terms of setback. And I think... I think Ms. Shillen's comments about doing better on the landscaping and yours as well is something we can do and we should do. We're also open to talking to those neighbors that have those units there to make sure that we can contribute to their own landscaping if they feel like it is really impacting them I don't think we've heard from them yet at any of our planning meetings but I think that we we'd certainly be willing to do that and we can also even take a couple of viewpoint pictures of back to the looking back to the hotel you know to address Ryan's concerns hey are we gonna be staring at a hotel from the middle of our streets I I understand and thank you for your for your feedback thanks a lot anyone else

Yeah, I was just looking at the site plan to kind of echo that, not to hammer it too much. But if I'm staying on the third floor of those rooms that look directly down into those homes, I'm very concerned about, or if I'm that homeowner, very concerned about people looking right into my backyard. And I don't know how you get a fully established 30-, 40-, 50-foot tree to block that. And then the other quick point that I'd love to see fleshed out more is you talked about signage and telling guests not to use that Soper's Village Park that's right there on that corner that's kind of cut off in here. If I'm staying in that hotel with my small child, I used to travel alone with my small child a lot, and there's a playground right there, I'm 100% using that playground and not walking a mile all the way across Grand Mountain Park to that playground. So there has to be some kind of stronger enforcement. I don't know how you do it, but how do you keep your guests from using that park?

Just a couple quick comments. I won't echo what's been said. I guess one broad question is like we're grappling with this idea of we're losing a third space, like a space that community members and families and people of all ages went. And it feels like that's becoming a space that the community can't use. So I know you'll have one meeting room that nonprofits can use, but I would really encourage you to dig deep and figure out how to get as much community access and to figure out in what ways that could be more of a third space because my my hunch is that's where a lot of the distress comes from um I think the 15 employees is really low. I totally get that's probably the number that will be directly employed. But if we're talking about landscaping, HVAC people, plumbers, whatever, I think that's a much higher number of people that are actually going to that building for work. So I'm very supportive of the nine units or increasing that number of employee housing units as much as possible. I guess a question for you guys is why Marriott? That's a genuine question. I know that's because that's what you've done elsewhere, but it feels very much like a big box hotel. I know you're shrinking signage and things like that, but yeah.

Thank you. I can tackle the Marriott question. There is a whole segment of demand that is very hard for, that we don't see every day, right? And that is companies, industries who only allow their employees or the people who travel with them to stay in a specific type of hotel. So as an example, a large corporation, let's say like one of the companies that does travel nursing, right? They likely have come up with a protocol to try and keep their staff safe and know exactly where they're going to be to say, if you travel somewhere, we want you in a Marriott branded hotel. And they will typically also negotiate a rate with them so that they can make sure that when their nurses are traveling that they have a sort of prescribed discount. And while that's not a majority of our business, it's certainly a big piece of it. And so when you have these brands, it creates a level of security in terms of the investment. It takes a massive amount of financial risk for us to do this hotel. And to know that some of these consistent travelers who use this product are going to stay there is why we like to work with those types of brands. Because if we don't have them, then we don't get those travelers. And it makes it very hard for guys like John and I to even get a loan. And so that's why we do it. We also think in terms, well, I'll try and keep my answer short. Thank you.

Thank you. And then I'll say one positive thing about it is that I run Ski Co. Philanthropy. We have 6,000 free ski days. And the biggest thing I ever hear of groups and nonprofits from Ski Noir to IRA Libre wanting to come and visit us is the average daily rate in Aspen. It's $960. fifty nine right now that's about two hundred dollars more than telluride than veil. And so I totally get that there is demand. I guess I'm very skeptical that two hundred dollars would be the rate like I'm sure that will be a thousand on Christmas week and that's OK maybe. But I do see a positive of being just an access point for for more middle class people.

Thank you. Greg, did you have anything?

Yeah, I'll keep it really quick. Just really more of like a philosophical question we can't answer tonight. It's more for like my fellow counselors to be thinking about if this project was in front of us would be and we were doing a future land use planning session. Is this what we'd want in this area? Is this what we'd say would make the salt better in 20 years? And I think what you could do to help us answer that is I completely echo a lot of what David mentioned of the numbers, the facts. You know, I'm not convinced that people searching Google for basalt rent basalt hotels means they're wanting to come and stay in basalt. And that line that says, well, here's all the short-term rentals and they're not going to be short-term rentals anymore. They'll go back to housing. They'll stay here. I just, I don't see those lines. And I think having more methodology behind your numbers would help.

Thank you.

Thanks.

David, I asked clarifying questions, but I would like to just make a general comment as well.

If you'd like. Yeah, it wasn't my intent, but that's OK. Other folks have.

If I'm wrong, my understanding was they were asking for feedback if they're on track. And so this is relevant to that. I'm going to have to echo Angela. I find it really hard to go against P&Z. I wish that you had stayed with them. And then the other piece is, to Hannah's point, what is the community benefit here? I'm not hearing any particular environmental efforts that are being made, any specific community efforts that are being made. And we are losing a community space. I don't fault you from the economic perspective. I know movie theaters are no longer viable, but it does feel like we are losing a community space. And I'm not hearing anything that you're giving us in return. And we ask that of everyone. That's when I'm not singling you out.

Thank you. If I may just briefly address the planning comment. If you look at some of the commentary out of our last planning meeting, a number of the planners noted that the denial would in fact allow this then to be referred to town council. And it certainly felt as I was sitting where I'm sitting right now at planning that there was a underlying goal to get feedback here before they continued to have us spending a lot of money to keep this going i i can't overstate we are a small business and it's really hard to keep going and redrawing and redrawing and redrawing and so we're not opposed to um you know having other conversations again with planning if we if we need to do that but i think that the comment out of planning really was we need to send this up to sort of get you guys the feedback that you need to have. And so we didn't stand there and say, like, hey, can you deny us, please, so that we can go and hash it out? You know, we really have been trying hard to do this the right way. And that's why I sat in a coffee shop to hear feedback for 24 straight hours. I mean, we want to hear it, and we're trying to do it the right way.

Thank you. We appreciate the presentation. James, appreciate your work. And for the public who's made comments and engaged in this, appreciate you all as well. Fellow counselors, we will have another opportunity to have a more in-depth conversation and give more substantive feedback as we go through this. There'll be at least one more hearing and probably multiple. So with that, I'd entertain a motion to continue the public hearing October 13, 2026.

Mayor, I move that the Town Council continue the public hearing until October 13, 2026. Second.

So moved and seconded. We don't have anybody on line. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? All right.

Thanks, guys. Thank you.

All right, next up, we have item 7B, which is resolution number 36, series of 2026, resolution of the Town Council of Basalt, Colorado, adopting the Basalt Town Council priorities for 2026, 2028. Gloria, you have this one.

Yeah, so the town council held the retreat on July 21st, 2026 and continued the prioritization in a work session on August 20th to set their priorities for staff to focus on until 2028. So this is essentially like a two year plan that you all have prioritized. So in that prioritization, I want to emphasize that you looked at the 2018 strategic plan and our progress on that. You looked at the master plan and our progress on that. And you all chose items also that have come up since then showing kind of that dynamic nature of prioritization and came up with the following priorities. So you have your traffic safety and infrastructure, affordable housing, community engagement and partnerships, and addressing climate change. And then on the, I think, page 274 of the packet, there is a work plan that's kind of rough draft right now that we're putting together on how we are going to tackle these as staff.

Awesome. Well, I'll lead off with one. The room empty. No one?

It's gone. This does not generate the interest.

It's the last agenda. Cool, guys.

It's gone.

I was shocked. Anywho, just a bit of feedback for Remy going forward with this thing. If we could have a read-only Google Doc at least of some of the dashboard stuff that's in there and have some kind of cadence to keep things updated. The artifacts that you created are great. Really helpful stuff. But it's... apologize if i'm repeating the analogy but the one where you want to go get a snack in the middle of the night you don't want to have to wake you up to get the snack i just want to be able to go at 2 a.m and pull up whatever or the public for that matter so they can see some of this stuff too that i think that would be helpful do you have any issues with doing that no i'd love to do that because i do it for myself anyways so okay i'll just make it public um but figure out a way to do that so that the public can see it too and there's a link to it so yeah Thank you. Anyone else have feedback, questions, comments? Otherwise, entertain a motion.

Well, I just want to mention, just to get out there, a couple of these things are specific things that I'm for these priorities. I think we should investigate. But I'm not sold on the speed cameras. I would have some more questions on that. The ban on gas and lawn equipment, I think it's a good idea. I just have some questions. So I think I'm in favor of these priorities. I want to continue moving down these priorities. but once we see what that actually looks like there is a chance that some of these things i'm not committing to with this vote on these priorities saying like yes anything that we see on a couple of these specific items is an automatic yes

I think that's fair. I think that these are priorities for further, you know, to dive into them, to investigate more, to have conversations, and to, you know, flush them out. But I don't think that we're committing to say, like, we're going to vote yes on anything that has to do with all of these things. Because I'm with you on some of them, for sure. I think we probably all are. Yeah.

I think just from a process perspective, my understanding is that there are, naturally be gating decision points with these from a budget and legislative, et cetera, standpoint. But there's also going to be, if a majority of council wants staff to quit working on something, You know, that could be something, too, that's kind of ad hoc. So, yeah, I mean, none of this is written in stone. Is that a fair characterization?

Yeah, no, I see this as more of a framework, not a stamp of approval. Yeah, it's more of a framework on how you all want us directed to have these conversations, which is why I laid it out with work sessions and kind of kept you all focused that we only had so many work sessions to tackle these items on.

And I think, to everybody's point, that once you factor in staff time and financial consequences, there might be some things that fall out that we're just going to be like, nope, that's not a priority. In our list of priorities, it's not as much of a priority.

Likely so. The world changes. Two years is a long time. Any other questions or comments? Otherwise, someone's make a motion.

Mayor, I move that the town council adopt resolution number 36, series of 2026.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Awesome. Nice work. Lovely artifacts. Looking forward to kind of following this process going forward.

Excellent.

Next up, we have item 7C, which is a public hearing and first reading of ordinance number 12, series of 2026, ordinance of the Town Council of the Town of Basalt, Colorado, approving code amendments to town code section 18-4, fees, section 18-23, sustainable building regulations, and appendix C, to more clearly define renewable and energy mitigation program, or REMP, fee exemptions for pools and spas. James, you have this one?

yeah thank you the town building official and the town planning staff have worked on code amendments to try to correct some of the issues that we had in the code that led to a recent code interpretation and code interpretation appeal related to the exemptions for spas from the ramp fees And so what staff has done is we have proposed to add better definitions in the code of swimming pools and spas and prepackaged self-contained spas. And we've also adjusted Appendix C, which is the fee schedule, to identify and reference the exemptions from RIMP. related to spas and pools. That was missing from the code previously and we had an applicant look at Appendix C. He didn't see reference to the exemptions for the rent fees. And so we needed to correct that based on council direction at the appeal review. So staff has provided the proposed code amendments. We reviewed them with the Planning and Zoning Commission as a courtesy review, and the P&Z recommended approval of the code amendments. So this evening, staff would suggest taking public comments and then providing council discussion. And if you're comfortable, you could approve the ordinance on first reading. We did receive a council comment about potentially adding a word to the Appendix C where it talks about pools to add swimming back where we had public pool. So staff thinks that that would be a good adjustment. It would make it consistent with the definition. And you could add that as part of your motion.

That was Appendix D. I was the one who said it. Because down the bottom there for the...

pool residential swimming in pool public and I would add the word swimming just as it's written also in appendix B yes appendix B yeah okay can I ask a question just about the rent fees in general and you can tell me that I should ask this at a different time but I was looking like if you look at the residential exterior heaters and commercial exterior heaters it's 82 cents a watt and then 24 cents for a BTU electric first gas my quick napkin math is that if a watt is 3.412 btus generally speaking that that means that we're waiting electric and gas the same and i guess given our declared climate emergency and holy cross racing towards 100 clean energy in my eyes from an environmental perspective electric heating outside would be much better and My question is very long roundabout way of getting to my question is, could we bias those rent fees towards people going all electric?

We could have a council discussion on that. And we currently are working with core on, you know, potentially some adjustments to the rent fees. know i think staff really intended these code amendments just to be a cleanup of what we have but but it's a fair discussion i think for another another point when we're bringing back the entire kind of ramp scenario and is that discussion with core part of like the impact accelerator going in 2028 2029 yes got it okay thanks

we do public hearing or we can go straight we did yeah we do need to do a public hearing um let's do that really quick maybe not quick but probably quick i'll open the public hearing at 808 anyone online would like to make comments or go ahead and raise your hand about ordinance number 22 and rent fees um seeing no one i'll close public hearing 809 and then you had a quick question um

If I remember right from the appeal, there was also an issue with like there was an Excel spreadsheet in there and he was entering something in there and it didn't show the fees. Yes. Is that part of this cleanup as well?

it's not actually in the code uh it was a kind of user document that was on the town's website it has been corrected and there's reference was added shortly after that discussion um but yeah it's it's not in the code so we're this is just about the code but that supplement has also been that's correct yeah great

Do we have some kind of disclaimer or something to let people know that if they use that and it doesn't turn out to be, like, there's a mistake in the spreadsheet that, you know, that code is the final decision-making framework for the fee?

If there's not, we'll add one, but I thought that there was one from the beginning, actually. I think there was. I think there was, too.

And I appreciate you having those. The code's hard to read, but I don't want us to get caught in the same situation where the code says one thing, the tool says something else. Sure. We'll make sure there's a disclaimer in there.

Cool. Anything else? Why does that entertain a motion?

Mayor, I move that the Town Council approve ordinance number 22 series of 2026 on first reading and continue and set the public hearing and second reading for September 22nd, 2026. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, James. We'll go ahead and adjourn. So everybody enjoy their nice fall evening.

I love it.