Snowmass Village, Colorado: Base Village Update
Today, Erik Cavarra highlights the newest update from Base Village.
The newly installed town council on Monday sent a clear message to developer Related Colorado that it’s no longer business as usual in Snowmass Village.
In their first official decision, Mayor Markey Butler, new council members Bob Sirkus and Bill Madsen, and incumbent Chris Jacobson, unanimously voted that the remainder of the Base Village project, with the exception of the Limelight hotel, be subjected to a normal, three-step review process.
The Limelight project was ripe for exemption from the sketch — or conceptual — step because it was reviewed in early 2014 before the application was originally withdrawn. It was resurrected this past summer by Aspen Skiing Co., which said it was reacting to overwhelming community support that favored a Limelight for Snowmass.
Related Colorado had requested that the sketch step be waived for the entire Base Village planned-unit development application because it proposes no new uses, the mass and scale of the base area buildings remain the same and the community purposes established in a 2007 approval are still relevant. That would leave just two review steps — preliminary and final.
The four sitting council members disagreed, saying that changes in the community amenity were significant and have not been thoroughly vetted.
“I’m struggling with how to get you what you like, but not box us into the revised pool as a community purpose,” said Sirkus, who was formerly chair of the Snowmass Planning Commission. “That’s my dilemma.”
The original “community purpose” was an aquatic center, to be located in an outlying section of Base Village. Recently, the developer proposed moving it contiguous to the Limelight hotel, though drawings show it more to be a pool than an aqua center.
To augment this amenity, the developer has offered to provide free space to the Snowmass Discovery Center, which would showcase the Ice Age finds from Ziegler Reservoir that were first discovered in 2010. But the lack of detail was troubling to staff and elected officials alike.
Read Full Article: http://www.aspendailynews.com/section/home/164660
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