Hundreds of apartments are one step closer to being built in the Garden of the Gods corridor on Colorado Springs’ west side, plans neighbors said would defy a 2021 City Council finding that an increase in density in the area would detrimentally affect public safety.

After technological issues delayed the Planning Commission’s meeting start by an hour, and continued for people who tuned in virtually, the board on Tuesday voted 7-2 to recommend the City Council approve a request to rezone a portion of an approximately 9.5-acre site at the corner of North 30th Street and West Garden of the Gods Road.

Commissioners also supported plans to build the Arrowswest Apartments, 222 units in seven three-story buildings at the site.

If approved, the project will be located across the street from a previous controversial proposal the council denied in August 2021 to build hundreds of apartments and commercial space at 2424 Garden of the Gods Road. At the time, the board deemed that project could make emergency evacuations more dangerous.

Laura Neumann, a representative for Weidner Apartment Homes, the company that co-owns and helped build the Weidner Field downtown stadium, said the Arrowswest Apartments will provide needed housing in Colorado Springs.

Weidner Investment Services, Inc., which offers apartments and townhomes for rent, is the registered agent for developer Arrowswest Apartments I LLC.

The apartments will be especially beneficial because they will be constructed in an area surrounded by employment centers such as El Paso County and Entegris, a global supplier of electronic materials that support the semiconductor and other high-tech industries, developers and project proponents said.

The units will be market-rate apartments targeted at Colorado Springs’ middle housing population, Neumann said.

“Housing is a continuum. We need all kinds of housing in our community for citizens to have upward mobility.”

Mountain Shadows residents and other area neighbors, many who lived through the deadly 2012 Waldo Canyon fire, repeated concerns the proposed development could make emergency evacuations in this area more dangerous, among others.

Some recalled the traffic backups along Garden of the Gods Road as thousands of residents evacuated from Waldo Canyon that year.

“Traffic was horrific. It was terrifying. I thought we were going to die in the fire,” one area resident who testified by phone said.

With so many more people living in the area now, traffic backups during an emergency will be worse, residents said.

Approving the new apartments would defy precedent the council set in 2021, as well as May 2022 and July 2023 decisions from an El Paso County district court judge and the Colorado Court of Appeals, respectively, which both upheld the City Council’s decision to deny the 2424 Garden of the Gods proposal, they said.

A city attorney said Tuesday the court’s decision doesn’t apply to new developments in the area, but rather upheld the council’s authority to deny the previous project.

Colorado Springs Fire Department Deputy Chief of Operations Steve Wilch said the city’s evacuation procedures and technology have improved since the Waldo Canyon fire.

Colorado Springs has established new evacuation zones allowing targeted evacuations in emergencies, and the Fire Department urges all residents to sign up for emergency notifications, he said.

“We are able to get people (notified) quicker so that reaction time is quicker,” Wilch said.

Mountain Shadows residents have for years pushed the city to implement advanced evacuation modeling they say could give residents an idea of how long it could take to get out in an evacuation. Fire officials have rejected the idea, saying every emergency is different and modeling can’t predict actual emergency response.

Bill Wysong, Mountain Shadows Community Association president and co-founder of wildfire advocacy group Westside Watch, said in an interview Wednesday the Fire Department’s tools are inadequate.

“Zonehaven is a tactical tool in which to say, ‘Maybe we ought to evacuate these zones.’ But they have nothing that shows them … that if we have to evacuate, what does that do to the roadways?” he said.

Opponents criticized Planning Commission Chair Andrea Slattery’s decision not to allow residents speaking during public comment to cede their three-minute allotted speaking time to other speakers. Neighbors said it did not allow them equal time as developers, who were given 30 minutes, to present a cogent case against the project.

The city said in a written statement the board operated within Colorado Open Meetings Laws, which “do not require the ceding of time nor unlimited time for public comment.”