Editor's note: This is the second in a continuing series of stories about the proposed revisions to the Garfield County Comprehensive Plan, which is to guide the county's policies until 2030 or so. This installment deals with the plan's analysis of housing and transportation. The first installment was published on July 28.

County residents have laid out what they think Garfield County should do in the coming two decades, in the recently completed draft county comprehensive plan.

Now, it's up to the appointed members of the county planning and zoning commission, who will preside over the plan's first official, public review on Aug. 16.

According to the text of the plan, the county encompasses about 3,000 square miles of territory, characterized by significant changes in topography, climate and socio-economic attributes from the west end to the east.

As of 2007, the county was home to an estimated 55,000 people, according to the text of the “comp. plan,” as it is known. Around 60 percent of county residents were said to live within the boundaries of the county's six municipalities — Parachute, Rifle, Silt, New Castle, Glenwood Springs and Carbondale, taking them from west to east.

That represented an increase of roughly 25 percent since 2000, when the U.S. Census put the county's population at 43,713.

In two important and interconnected policy areas — housing and transportation — the county has been consistently challenged in finding ways to meet the growing needs prompted by its burgeoning population.

Housing

The county's primary goal, according to the draft plan, is to “bring about a range of housing types and costs that ensures for our current and future residents affordable housing opportunities in safe, efficient residential structures.”

This housing is necessary, in part, to satisfy the needs of a “significant” segment of the county's workforce that, the plan states, continues to commute to employment in the upper reaches of the Roaring Fork Valley.

An issue identified in the plan is a need for increased affordable-housing inventory within the Roaring Fork River drainage, with its “potential of being closer to upper valley work without having to pass through the bottleneck for traffic in Glenwood Springs.”

Although the county recently adopted a 15-percent affordable housing requirement for new development, the plan notes, “Providing affordable homes in rural subdivisions is counter-productive if the residents still have to drive … long distances to work, schools and shopping.”

The plan notes that existing codes do not permit rural developers to “locate required affordable homes offsite in areas close to urban services.”

In a section entitled “Strategies/Actions,” the plan urges the county to “encourage … affordable housing closer to where jobs are located,” in part by permitting developers of rural projects to provide affordable units closer to urban centers.

The plan also calls on the county to “place a high priority on providing cost-effective [mass] transportation alternatives” for residents of affordable housing.

Transportation

In the section on transportation, the plan predicts that “with projected growth, SH 82, especially through Glenwood Springs, will continue to operate at unacceptable levels” of traffic congestion, whether or not there is a “significant gain in industrial and commercial employment opportunities” in the western portion of the county.

The plan also concludes that the county's roads in general are carrying more traffic than they were designed or built to handle, and that current road impact fees are “not sufficient to pay for any significant improvements.”

The two goals enumerated in the draft plan are to find ways to pay for building and maintaining county roads, and to “support public transit services as well as alternative modes of transportation, when and where feasible.”

Specifically, the draft plan calls on the county to take part in regional and statewide transit planning aimed at encouraging the format of a regional public transit system.

The document makes no mention of the county's recent efforts to establish a special transportation authority or district to provide mass transit to the western communities, from New Castle to Parachute.

That effort has been abandoned for now, according to County Manager Ed Green, after a survey of voters showed no enthusiasm for raising taxes to support such a move.

The draft comprehensive plan will undergo its first official review before the county planning and zoning commission on Aug. 16 in Glenwood Springs, followed by an Aug. 17 hearing in Rifle, and then what could be a final meeting on Aug. 18 in Glenwood Springs again.

jcolson@postindependent.com