the
Sopris Carbondale’s
weekly, non-profit newspaper
Sun
Volume 3, Number 16 | June 2, 2011
Graduation day 2011
Roaring Fork High School graduated 63 students during a ceremony in the school gym on May 28. As a group, the students were offered $2.08 million in scholarships from schools where they were accepted and from local organizations. For more graduation pics, please turn to pages 12-13. Photo by Jane Bachrach
Comprehensive plan turns contentious on 4-3 votes By Lynn Burton Sopris Sun Staff Writer
C
arbondale’s comprehensive plan process turned contentious at Tuesday night’s trustees meeting as it took two votes – both 4-3 – to appoint a citizen working group to help facilitate efforts to produce a new 10-year land-use document. At issue was whether trustees should include Larry Green and Bill Lamont in a working group that will serve as a liaison between RPI Consulting, town staffers and residents to produce a new comprehensive plan. After the first 4-3 vote, a perturbed Mayor Stacey Bernot asked each trustee who voted
“no” on the motion to approve the working group why they had done so. “What’s the problem here?” said Bernot, who served on the committee that drew up the proposed working group.“What’s the issue?” Carbondale is five months into what trustees expect will be a year-long process of drafting a new comprehensive plan. An important part of that process, said RPI principal Gabe Preston in a memo, will be the working group’s role.“The working group is responsible for establishing direction, written revisions to elements of the plan, and for reviewing draft materials prepared by the community, staff and consultants,” the memo stated. “The working group is the glue that
holds it all together,” Preston said on Tuesday night. Early in the discussion, trustee Frosty Merriott said,“In my opinion, they (Green and Lamont) are polarizing figures in that group.” Merriott said if the town has some “polarizing figures” from the pro-development side such as Green and Lamont, it needs some “polarizing figures” such as former town manager Tom Baker and former trustee Russ Criswell from the other side. “This (the proposed list) appears to be one sided,” he said. (For the complete list, see this article’s sidebar on page 17). The working group members were nominated by a committee comprised of Bernot
and trustee Elizabeth Murphy, P&Z members Gavin Brooke and Ben Bohmfalk, and town planner Janet Buck. After more than a half-hour of discussion on Tuesday night, the first motion to approve the working group called for replacing Lamont with a nominee who didn’t make the final list (Martha Cochran) and adding a 19th member – Colin Laird. Voting no were: John Foulkrod, Elizabeth Murphy, Pam Zentmyer and Ed Cortez. Voting yes were: John Hoffmann, Merriott and Bernot. After several more minutes of sometimes heated debate, a motion was made to approve the working group as originally preCOMPREHENSIVE PLAN page 16
First Friday soars
PAC3 shines
Summer events await
Page 3
Pages 5-8
Page 17