Project Description:

The Town of Parachute, situated at the western edge of Garfield County and bisected by Interstate 70, has encountered oil and gas boom-bust cycles for the last five decades and longer. The Town, historically, has been pro development and governs by the philosophy that the free market should guide and dictate development patterns and opportunities. While this has created a prosperous community since the mid-2010s, as the housing gap widened, the Town wanted to take more of an active role by incentivizing the “right” development and limiting the “wrong” development. Quickly, it became clear that there was a disconnect between the vision of the community, the policies of the comprehensive plan, and the regulations and standards established in the Land Use Regulations.

With CPS as the town’s contracted planning team, town staff discussed the options and decided to overhaul all the land use documents. This started with a Comprehensive Plan update which focused on economic vitality of all facets of the community, fed into a Trails Plan and a Downtown Plan, and resulted in CPS completing a Code Assessment. The assessment honed in on how well the current Land Use Regulations reflected the policies and recommendations of the Comprehensive Plan, Trails Plan, and Downtown Plan. The assessment findings recommended a significant restructuring of the Land Use Regulations (Title 15) in order to simplify the provisions by being written for residents and business owners to understand, and to remove unnecessary standards, regulations, or processes. While the update is still underway, there will be a significant amount of regulations removed as they are overly burdensome or duplicative of some other state or federal agency regulation allowing the town to remove conflicting regulations, cost to entry, and a more streamlined review process.