The day after Aspen City Council member Jack Johnson pushed through an emergency moratorium on new development, a construction project began across the street from his workplace.
“There is so much construction going on. There’s so much construction in the pipeline,” he marveled Wednesday as workers tore up the sidewalk on the latest project. “There are hundreds of thousands of square feet either being built or being prepared for building. … The question is simply: How much can a small town tolerate?”
Inundated by building requests and besieged by construction during the short summer building season, many mountain towns in Colorado have resorted to moratoriums as a way to take a breather from the pressures of growth.
Last year, Steamboat Springs delayed new construction projects at the base of the ski area while town planners redrafted standards for development to avoid piecemeal design.
And this month, officials in Vail passed a 60-day moratorium on any project that would reduce the number of hotel rooms or employee- housing units in Lionshead Village, where a neighborhood-wide redevelopment project has created a veritable war zone of debris and chain-link fences.
In Aspen, where an increasingly vocal group of community activists has decried the racket, dust and traffic brought on by numerous construction projects, Johnson’s proposal for a six-month moratorium on new applications for construction passed on a 4-1 vote Tuesday night.
“We live in an extremely small place, and we have no mechanism in place to control the rate at which new things are being built,” Johnson said. “So we have several lodge-redevelopment construction sites going on right now, and we have three more that were proposed that are going to be demolished this summer and rebuilt, and we are reviewing proposals for others. We needed to take time out.”
The city’s construction boom sprang, at least in part, from development regulations that allow for redevelopment of older properties in town, so long as they include affordable-housing units.
Although the freeze doesn’t affect projects already approved and slated for this summer, the hope by Johnson is that it will allow town planners to figure out a way to stagger projects so they don’t all occur at the same time.
Mayor Helen Klanderud, who cast the lone “no” vote, said the amount of construction can seem overwhelming, but she agreed with builders that it didn’t constitute a crisis.
“The thing that I feel the most here right now is the impact of so much construction going on at one time,” she said. “But now there seems to be a sort of panic prevailing. To me, it’s more of a perception. Yes, there’s a lot of construction going on. Yes, the construction impacts are inconvenient and disruptive. But they’ll go away.”
Stan Clauson, a landscape architect and planning consultant, argued that the moratorium was not justified and contributes to the “moving target” of changing building codes that only serves to frustrate property owners.
“I think everybody is in agreement that the community should regulate the impacts of development, but this seems to be a harsh and somewhat disruptive way of doing it,” he said.
Les Holst, who leads a brigade of about 50 residents known as the White Shirts for their T-shirts bearing the slogan “We love Aspen,” argues the town needs to remember tourists are attracted to Aspen for its well-preserved historic buildings, not construction cranes.
“Things just got out of hand,” he said, faulting the town’s “infill” ordinances that encourage redevelopment.
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
