Date: Apr. 16, 2003
Word count:1700
headline: Plans change
subhead: Developers promise a vision that fades with time
SUMMIT COUNTY — Twenty years ago, the Village at Breckenridge was merely a drawing in a developer’s mind, which included a town-run public parking structure, a cinema, a transportation center, an arena for hockey or similar sports, and an ice skating rink. Eight years ago, Keystone’s new neighborhood plans were drawn with a performing arts center, a library, chapel and a daycare center.
More plans are in the works. Copper Mountain’s Planned Unit Development is currently under study by county planners, and most of the participants expect a final PUD will be approved by August. The town of Breckenridge is anticipating final drafts of the master plan for Peak 7 and 8 by mid-May.
Chris Hawkins, senior planner for current development with the county, said planners have learned something over time. He was not in charge of the Keystone PUD, but has worked with the documents as the plan developed. Reading the actual documents, he learned that the PUD doesn’t require Keystone to build a performing art center, one of the amenities listed in the neighborhood descriptions, but merely requires the developer to set aside the land for it.
When Intrawest, the company that applied for the Keystone PUD, was asked how these would be built, David Hill responded “there is language in the PUD which allows that funds raised through assessments levied as a part of a Large Planned Community are allocated to public facilities.”
No one required the developer to say “when” or “how.”
“There weren’t the triggers,” Hawkins said about the Keystone PUD. “If it was a public improvement, as a staff, we felt timing and triggers should be included.”
So with the Copper Mountain PUD, the county planning staff will ask, up front, for the resort to spell out how and when every item offered as a public benefit will be accomplished.
Every piece of property in the county has a current zoning status and has a certain amount of development that can legally be built “by right,” which means without haggling with the government-appointed planner. Generally, substantial public comments and many hours of public employee time have been invested in creating the planning rules, so a developer doesn’t have the right to rewrite the zoning solely because it will produce more money for the developer. Instead, if a developer wants to build more than the current zoning allows, or request annexation to a city and its utilities, or be given any other special privilege, then the developer must show that the public will benefit from the project.
For example, some of the land at Keystone was traded from the U.S. Forest Service. That 374 acres was zoned NR-2, a natural resource parcel, and had no residential or commercial development potential. When including it in the PUD, Keystone asked that the land be used for building sites, and in return the resort would build a golf course, dedicate open space, give land for a fire station, provide employee housing, build the roads, bring in water and sewer, and work with the Colorado Department of Transportation to improve intersections — all of which has happened.
The PUD also guarantees that Keystone/Intrawest will extend the gondola to serve River Run, create a recreation center in the Mountain House area, set aside land for a cultural campus, a public school, a day care facility, a chapel/community center, and a library or theatre.
The day-care facilities did have a trigger, and it went off after 60,000 square feet of the PUD had been built. So, Intrawest met its obligation by paying $200,000 to Zoomers, an existing childcare facility in nearby Dillon. The school district also agreed that Summit Cove Elementary was sufficient to serve the school-age population in Keystone.
These modifications were approved by county officials, who kept hold of a trump card. If a daycare facility is needed in Keystone in the future, Keystone Resort will provide the land for it.
Promised cultural facilities have yet to become reality, and Kikken Miller, a Keystone resident, wonders when they will.
Paying for promises
Connie Gruber runs the Keystone Neighborhood Company, which has been building a reserve fund by saving 10 percent of the annual assessments to new Keystone property owners. This fund can only be tapped for the building of new community facilities, Gruber said. She wouldn’t disclosed the amount in the fund, but said, “it takes a while to get to the point where you have millions of dollars, and unfortunately that’s what it costs to build these things.”
In the meanwhile, the Neighborhood Company has placed a tent on the originally proposed site of the performing arts center, is hosting cultural programs in the tent in the summer, and started a kids-art-exploration camp. “After a public meeting last year, we decided to step back and develop some activities first,” Gruber said.
Community building is the joint responsibility of Keystone area homeowners and businesses, the Neighborhood Association believes, and another group was organized to do some of the work. Called the Snake River Community Association, it theoretically include every resident from Summerwood to Montezuma. This group, Gruber hopes “will bring all the players together to identify sources of funding.” Additionally, the group’s mission is to help create a sense of community, something residents said they wanted, through a survey conducted in the summer of 2002.
Cultural facilities and children’s activities were also high on the survey results, she said.
Miller and other residents are also asking, once built, how long amenities can be expected to last. Miller recently became alarmed when she learned Vail Resorts, which has taken over development at Keystone from Intrawest, is trying to get rid of the tennis center. Roger McCarthy, CEO at Breckenridge and Keystone, said tennis was not part of Vail Resorts’ core business and should, now, be privatized.
The tennis center was listed in the Keystone Base III PUD Designation, written in 1987, on page 6 in a list of non-skiing recreational facilities. According to this document, “Recreational Facilities are defined as activities (and the structures that enclose them) that enhance the resort experience. These facilities may or may not be income producing and are a resort amenity or service provided to guests; therefore, these items are not charged against the developed density of the Keystone Base III PUD.”
Robin Hadley bought a Tennis Townhouse (on Tennis Drive) at Keystone in 1976. She said, “there used to be so many amenities — that’s what I say when I look at how things have changed in the last 25 years — We used to have a bottle of wine waiting for us when we came out, so much was going on, and there was so much to do, especially in the summer. You’d have seen at least three generations looking at the fish and going off doing this and that.”
When asked earlier this year, Mike Lee, spokesman for Keystone, said Keystone never guaranteed, in the PUD, that there would be tennis.
Apparently, the Village at Breckenridge never promised to keep the movie theater, which was part of the original development.
In 1983, five years before Keystone rewrote its PUD, the town of Breckenridge was being offered the Village at Breckenridge, by Nick Marsh, a California businessman who owned the Bell Tower Mall. Marsh was also building a near-record-sized house in Spruce Valley Ranch, and would eventually file for bankruptcy.
The Village master plan agreement written in 1983 said, “the town and developer agree that development of the project as shown on the matrix and in accordance with the terms hereof will result in substantial public benefit while minimizing public costs.”
The matrix, or the attached map of the proposed development, showed a cinema, a transportation center, convention center in Phase 2, ice rink, a service station and 30 units of employee housing.
Lot 16, known locally as F-lot and currently used for skier parking, was dedicated for a town parking structure. The town could own the land, the masterplan said, or be given a 99-year lease with no rent. Lot 15, also on the north side of Park Avenue, was slated for “an arena for hockey or other similar uses.” The developers also agreed to pay for an economic study to determine what to do with property north of Park.
The masterplan also included an attempt by the town to hold developers to their word. The document said, “the parties agree to perform a review of the project to assure compliance therewith every two years.”
In 1990, the cinema was gutted, and the space was transformed into a meeting room. Since then, the Breckenridge Festival of Film has been searching for a large venue to replace the lost cinema. A movie theater was the most highly desired facility on a 1998 survey of town residents, ranking higher than an indoor ice rink, additional holes of golf, and a performing arts center.
In the 2000 council elections, candidate David Hinton said a convention center was of primary importance. The Village masterplan was amended in the late ‘80s specifically to nix the idea of a convention center in Phase II of the project, which became the Hotel Breckenridge, now the Marriott.
When the Bell Town Mall was torn down and replaced with Main Street Station, in 2000, the bus stop went away, and so did trustworthy maintenance of Maggie Pond for ice skating. The Village and Main Street Station have offered different views as to whose obligation it is to run the Zamboni.
The 1983 Village at Breckenridge Masterplan, with a matrix of great amenities, may have been too good to be true. After all, the developer went bankrupt. But if it had been carried out, the town could have crossed off several things from its wish list - things more complicated than building a movie theater.
Imagine if this 1983 idea had taken hold. The masterplan included 30 on-site employee housing units and a provision to build one employee unit for every 10 rental units. In a 1990’s memo to the town, the owners stated they found the requirement excessive and far beyond what any other development was providing. Today, there is no employee housing in the Village.