Laserfiche WebLink
ROTARY TALK <br />OPENING: <br />Right before Easter weekend this year, while a lot of people were taking their kids some place during <br />their Spring school break or were visiting family, 90 property owners received a "memo" from the Delta <br />County Planning Department (no date on the memo but it was postmarked April 12) stating we were <br />"hereby notified that Paonia Holdings, LLC, Mark Levin, Manager, has applied for approval a <br />"commercial and light industrial uses on a site previously used for coal loading and mining support <br />activities." I was one of those property owners notified because I was within 1000 feet of the some of <br />the property involved. The property was owned by Bowie Resources, and Levin was the potential buyer <br />(not yet the private property owner). I'll just read a few of the uses included in Levin's plan for this type <br />of development: heavy equipment storage, repair and maintenance of mining, excavation, agricultural, <br />and other equipment, fabrication and machining services, welding services, manufacturing of firearms <br />and ammunition, facilities supporting electrical transmission and distribution, communications lines, and <br />water conveyance. These within 1000 feet of 90 notified property owners. <br />We were also notified that this only required a simple "administrative" review, (meaning no public <br />meetings with the Area Planning Commission or a public meeting with the Board of Commissioners). We <br />were told this was allowed because the land had previously been used by Bowie Resources as a semi - <br />industrial site anyway, even though it was under a special purpose agreement to support mining, and <br />that Bowie needed the Department of Reclamation and Mine Safety to approve the change of use in <br />order to move forward with the sale to Mark Levin. As long as Levin used the existing facilities for his <br />commercial development, no reclamation to pre -mining use was required for those facilities. <br />Betsy Marston asked me why I got involved in this issue. As one of the property owners near the site, I <br />was angry—that the county thought this only required notifying me by a memo, that the planning <br />department gave me 2 weeks from notice to send in comments about it, and that those comments were <br />to be made without any hearings or investigations of the facts. <br />One of the statements in the original application submitted by Mark Levin and Bowie Resources was <br />"There are no foreseeable added costs to the County from this development." 1 am a retired CPA. This <br />was one area where I could do some fact finding. <br />Within a week of getting the memo, about 30 of the property owners were in contact with each other, <br />quickly looked up a few facts and sent numerous comments and questions to the Planning Department. <br />By April 20, the Planning Department made the wise decision to scrap the "administrative review" <br />process, and open up the approval process to a more normal public comment period, with an Area <br />Planning Commission hearing followed by a public hearing before the Board of County Commissioners <br />on June 21. After our group of concerned property owners discovered a number of problems not <br />considered by the County, the public hearing was moved to July 17. And after more problems and <br />possible County costs and liabilities were uncovered by our group, the public hearings were cancelled <br />without any future scheduling until "more data" could be reviewed. <br />So what were the facts, problems, and issues uncovered by our group of concerned property and <br />business owners? <br />