Commerce City Council: The Anatomy of Dysfunction
If you have ever wondered how it is that Commerce City came to receive its reputation as a dysfunctional sit-com where a lot of bureaucratic activity happens but nothing ever actually gets done, then we present Commerce City Council’s special study session on March 24.
At the top of the agenda was a request to hold a public hearing at the Planning Commission on two plat approvals for the Reunion Center development, which consists of 180 residential units and 10 commercial. Now, in any sane, well-run city, these would be approved administratively, having already been thoroughly reviewed by professionals on the city staff to ensure they meet all the requisite criteria, as was done in this case. The plats have nothing to do with zoning, or land use, or what is eventually going to be built on them; they are essentially just lot maps.
This, however, is Commerce City. So naturally, the request was made to send these staff-approved plats over to the Planning Commission for a full public hearing. Council Member Craig Kim asked, quite reasonably, what was the purpose of doing so? Council Member Susan Noble answered him: “This is to address the criteria in the final plat, and adequacy of meeting that criteria, and to make that determination at public hearing.”
Well, says Kim “Has the city staff already gone through the criteria to ensure they’re met?” Now listen to Noble’s response: “I assume the city staff goes through every land use case regarding criteria. That doesn't mean that we have not evaluated it differently.”
That statement might just be the best illustration of what is wrong at Commerce City Council. Apparently, Susan Noble knows better than the engineers that the City hired to review such things. Council Member Sean Ford who, along with Charles Dukes, tried to be a voice of reason, said pretty much just that: “The part that bothers me the most is that we have professionals, traffic engineers and these folks that went to school to do this job and we're not trusting them to do their job…I'm not going to be supportive of calling this up without having more definitive reasons of why it's being called up other than just because we want to take a look.”
Council member Renee Chicon was quick to highlight the authority that she and her fellow council members have to micro-manage the process: “Council already has the authority to do this at our discretion, whenever and however, to any plat, when…” ready? “…there's this much community reaction to it.” And what does this intense community reaction consist of, you ask? 10 emails, 6 of which are identical, verbatim form letters, and the remainder which take from the form letter’s language and add in some padding. And none of which discuss the matter at hand, the plats.
As Dukes pointed out: “Even if we did a public hearing, it's about the plat. It's not about what is being built on the plat. So there's still opportunity to talk through the next step. It’s not necessary to just bring it up because we don't like what we heard might be built on a plat.”
Eventually, they went into an executive session to discuss it further. Obviously we don’t know what was said, but evidently the not-in-my-yours-or-anyone’s-backyard members persuaded Kim that accepting the city staff approval of these plats would be the moral equivalent of tearing down the Statue of Liberty, and ultimately the vote was 5-4 to send them off for a public hearing, delaying the construction of these homes and businesses for who knows how long.
Business as usual at Commerce City Council. And people wonder why there’s no commercial development happening here.