Hundreds of Delta County residents are speaking out against the county’s new Land Use Codes.

Written by: Niki Carpenter

February 13, 2023 (Delta County, Colorado) - From cancelling meetings due to exceeding the safe occupancy limits of meeting rooms, to warning the public to stay home due to threats of violence, the passionate response from Delta County residents to the county’s attempt to update the 2021 Land Use Code has been causing quite a bit of turmoil.

Before April, 2021, the county’s land use regulations consisted of a handful of simple ordinances addressing junk accumulation, road access permits, and a “Development Application” ordinance requiring new development plans to be filed with the county (the latter was, allegedly, not enforced). The new Land Use Code was presented to the Planning Commission by Planning Director Elyse Casselberry in June 2020, certified by the PC on October 7, 2020, and enacted by the Board of County Commissioners in January, 2021, all during the height of the COVID pandemic. There was little documented public input, except for a focused opposition against lax regulations surrounding oil and gas development and intensive agriculture resulting in hundreds of written comments that failed to achieve any changes to the document.

Less than one year after the implementation of the county’s first Land Use Code, the new Planning Director, Carl Holm, began working on an extensive overhaul, adding over fifty pages of text and significantly altering much of the language contained within. The county claims to have followed all legal requirements for notification about the adoption of the 2021 codes and the public hearings for the 2022-23 update. Nevertheless, more than one hundred Delta County residents felt “blind-sided” and stated at the January 11th PC meeting that they were completely unaware that these codes had been adopted. Others said they only found out about the new LUCs because they were met with significant resistance against their attempts to develop, subdivide, or simply live on their properties over the past two years.

After learning of the LUC, residents labored to read over 400 pages of land use jargon between the current code and the proposed update. As understanding of the implications of the Code spread, the community became increasingly upset by the perceived threat to their property rights and livelihoods. Over 240 people showed up at the January 25th Planning Commission meeting to observe them work on the LUC Update. The space provided could not accommodate the crowd, so the meeting was postponed until the next regular meeting date, which was later restricted to online-only attendance with no opportunity for public comment. Two weeks later, at the Feb 7th Commissioners’ meeting, about sixty people opposed to the LUCs delivered an official notice to the County Commissioners requesting them to halt the process of updating the Code and to repeal the 2021 Land Use Code. The following morning, the county posted a warning on all of the local Facebook message boards citing a threat of violence against county buildings, advising the public to stay home for the scheduled PC meeting. Despite the warnings, about forty individuals showed up outside the county planning building to listen to the meeting together on Zoom and peacefully demonstrate the desire to have a voice in developing reasonable LUCs for Delta County.

In an interview with KREX5 during the demonstration on Feb 8th, Delta County resident Niko Woolf stated that this LUC was “imported from another place. It’s a standardized Land Use Code, and what we need here in Delta County is something that’s written for the specific, unique needs of this place. It’s a very special county.” Tom Kay, the Chairman of the Planning Commission, admitted on Zoom at last Wednesday’s PC meeting that while “the 2021 version was drafted by well-intentioned people that were trying to help Delta County begin the process of using land use code, it wasn't necessarily Delta County-centric. After two years of using it, we feel the changes we've done to clarify it, it really is the first Delta County Land Use Code, in my opinion, that we have.” However, many citizens are critical and disagree with the premise of using euclidian zoning and restrictive regulations. The citizen group Alliance for Land Liberty, or A4LL, are advocating for performance-based regulations, instead. They have taken it upon themselves to survey the community to determine what problems the people of Delta County would like to see a future LUC solve, and how. Their survey can be found at www.a4ll.org/ survey.

In a recent press release and media interview, the county rebutted fliers and social media posts by admonishing the spread of misinformation and encouraging the public to rely on the county for the facts. In his KREX5 interview, Mr.Woolf replied that any misinformation that was shared was likely not intentional. “If you read the code, it is a very confusing document. So, it is easy for anybody to get lost in there… A lot of us have been communicating with the planning director…with the commissioners. We’ve been having a conversation and we are clarifying what the problems are. But the truth is, the problems don’t go away, because the problem is the document itself. It’s just too much.”

In their public comments, the community has agreed that there is a clear need for land use regulations. However, they were under the expectation that those codes would follow the guidelines in the 2018 Master Plan, a “policy document that offers visions for the county’s future and sets… land use planning objectives designed to achieve these visions.” The objectives in the Master Plan for land use and development outline a process that is “consistent, fair, predictable, defensible, and easily understood.” Many feel that the adopted LUC missed the mark, and that the proposed update brings Delta County further from those objectives. In response to public pressure, the county announced on Friday, Feb 10th, that they will be holding a public hearing before making a decision on the LUC Update. The hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, February 28th at the Delta Family Center (822 Grand Ave. Delta) from 4:30 - 7:30PM.

A4LL Press Release 2/12/2023