The Town of Monument has taken a pause from accepting new land development applications for at least 30 days.

Because of staffing issues in the Town of Monument Planning Department, including the resignation of its most recent planning director April Kroner, Monument issued a temporary suspension on the receipt of any new Land Development Code applications.

Initially, the suspension was announced applicable as of Jan. 4 and an official ordinance establishing the parameters of the moratorium was a high point of discussion prior to voting during the regular meeting of the Town Council Jan. 16 at Monument town hall. After lengthy discussion and public comment, most of which came from representatives in the land development community with projects at play within town limits, the council voted to approve the ordinance post revisions to be revisited after 30 days.

The reason for the suspension is due to the town having its planning director position, which came open for a second time in the past 12 months and the fifth time in recent years, as well as the remaining town planning staff being new to Monument and/or being employed for less than a year. With a large number of Land Development Code applications presently pending and being processed by town planning staff, some of which involve large and complex developments, town manager Mike Foreman said recent mistakes within the department over past weeks have illustrated the need for a temporary suspension.

Mayor Mitch Lakind said, after having learned of the troubles with the town’s remaining planning staff keeping up with present applications, if new applications continued to be submitted, the idea of a temporary moratorium on new applications made sense.

“Based on research, moratoriums aren’t uncommon,” LaKind said. “At least 30 of them have been implemented in Colorado over the last few years, so I wasn’t too concerned about developers, especially since we didn’t stop submitted applications.”

The ordinance that was approved continues the moratorium until July 15. However, a review of the ordinance was included for Feb. 20, allowing the town manager time to contract a planning consultant, of which he said four were recruited to submit a Request for Quote (RFQ), to aid the assessment of the department and its processes prior to hiring a new planning director.

“My strategic plan moving forward is to hire a consultant to case manage the 25-35 existing cases for the next 45 days,” Foreman said.

The 35 cases already in the planning department’s system are exempt from the ordinance. It was later clarified that issuing of building permits for structures on land which have been already platted and approved would also continue.

In addition to case management, Foreman’s plan is to have consultants perform a process review of the department to help adjust its processes to make them more efficient, adjust present ordinances to make align them with the Home Rule Charter, as well as work with town attorney Bob Cole, the planning commission and town council on requested education sessions. Lastly, the consultants would help prepare the department for the hiring of a new planning director to be onboarded and work with those persons for a minimum of 60 days after the hire date.

“We’d also prepare an RFQ for a consultant to lead the town through our required comprehensive planning process to expend the $200,000 grant that we received in 2023 and also the $200,000 this council budgeted for our comprehensive plan,” Foreman said.

At the Feb. 20 meeting of the town council, Foreman is to report to the council the planning department’s capacity to receive and process re-application meetings, which was a point of contention from public input received during the hearing of the ordinance. The town council will decide at that time to lift or continue the suspension of pre-application conferences.

Specifically, the approved ordinance suspends the receipt and processing of all new development applications for approval set forth under Table 1-1 of the Land Development Code. However, during the course of the hearing, the ordinance was revised. The ordinance called to continue applications in the code involving all applications received prior to Jan. 4, all applications received where the pre-application conference was held prior to Jan. 4, site plans of which no other subdivision or rezoning is required and all applications associated with the provision of essential public services such as fire, law enforcement, emergency medical, ambulance, water, sewer, storm water, management, electric, natural gas, roads and transportation, and recreational services.

Council members and town staff discussed the suspension would be lifted earlier than July 15 should the planning department and its contracted consultant be ready to take on new applications sooner than anticipated.

“This I think guarantees that we have the time to be able to do this the right way but if we get it done sooner, we can come back to council and change it,” Foreman said.

Mayor Pro Tem Steve King also expressed a desire to see the lift of the moratorium happen in stages over the course of the timeline, so developers could begin to submit applications and move projects forward but still protect the planning department from getting immediately overloaded. He suggested the possibilities of allowing pre-application meetings after 30 days, then after each 30 days increment thereafter lifting the suspension for different land uses or something similar.

“We have to get this problem solved and we’ve been dealing with this for a long time,” King said. “We’ve been kicking this can down the road and we need to try to figure this out.”

LaKind said letters from several developers had been emailed to the council prior to it modifying the originally drafted ordinance. Some requested the council not implement a moratorium at all while others were “more reasonable and provided solutions that sounded reasonable,” he said.

While the public comment portion of the meeting was a majority of those from the developer community with high concerns for meeting investor expectations, maintaining anticipated timelines for their respective projects and projected revenues from their developments, it was Brock Chapman of Schuck Chapman Companies, owner and developer of the Conexus development project west of I-25, who expressed similar concerns but presented “minor solutions” to make the suspension easier on developers. Chapman also expressed a concern for the town planning department, and a new planning director, being inundated with pent-up applications all being submitted at once when the moratorium was lifted.

Chapman suggested an exit strategy to the moratorium by making certain aspects of the process exempt in increments to allow the department’s system to unload, for instance allowing pre-applications to start, then final plats and PUD’s, then preliminary plats and PUD’s and lastly, annexation and zoning applications since they are more discretionary, he said.

“That kind of unloads the system in front of things over time, allows things that are already in the system to continue through, but then when you get the new stuff moving through, you have a lot less ahead of it,” Chapman said.

After further discussion on what revisions the council wanted to see made to the ordinance, the meeting went into recess so it could be redrafted. After reviewing the changes, the council approved the ordinance 7-0.

“I think we tried to provide some balance, incorporating the suggestions,” LaKind said. “In the end though, the staff and town needed to be protected more so than the needs of the developers. Personally, I would have been fine with something more restrictive because of the state the planning department has been in over the last few years.”

King said his hope is for the town can use the opportunity to put better systems in place which have criteria more closely aligned with the town’s comprehensive plan and code systems. The people don’t feel represented and that present criteria does not follow the spirit of the comprehensive plan, he said.

“We need staff in order to implement a good system that benefits everyone including landowners,” Kind said. “Perhaps rezoning and annexations should be put on hold indefinitely, but several PUDs are far enough through the process that when we can obtain staff, we can better process the final pieces of those PUDs.”

King agrees the pre-application process to discuss future projects can be a part of this as long as it’s been “made clear to the development community that we are in a staffing crisis and they will need to have some compassion for our town employees,” he said.

Councilman Marco Fiorito said given the discussions, it was far more obvious with the hundreds of millions of dollars which developers have invested in the town that a fix of its planning department must be done correctly.

“Something has to change, so this is our way of giving the power to the town manager, town staff to get it right,” he said. “We’ve built ways and methods to give town staff the flexibility to adjust as conditions change. I think we all ran on a platform of making things better in some way, shape or form during the elections. I think this is part of making things better. Yes, it’s going to be painful, but it’ll be less painful taking care of it now than if you do death by a thousand cuts.”

Although it was suggested otherwise if the moratorium was passed, Monument remains “open for business,” LaKind said.

“The idea that the council needs to cater to every developer demand when and where they say, well those days are over,” he said. “We do need to address the concerns of staff, even when it might be inconvenient, in this case, to developers. But more importantly, the council needs to listen to the concerns of the citizens and community at large. With multiple construction projects in flight, including major roads being widened, it makes sense to slow things down to avoid further inconveniences to the residents.”

“The idea that the council needs to cater to every developer demand when and where they say, well those days are over.”

Monument mayor Mitch LaKind

The sign for Monument Town Hall and Police Department.

Jeff Kearney, The Tribune