The Glenwood Springs Housing Commission met with the Glenwood Community Housing Coalition to talk language for the 2C advisory board and funding.

The housing commission meeting was held on March 9, when the two housing groups talked about some of the language they want to present to Glenwood Springs City Council when seeking a Housing Advisory Board and dispersing funds. 

The advisory board will direct City Council in deciding how to best appropriate funding from the recently resident-approved lodging tax to help fund workforce housing called 2C.

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The group unanimously decided on some of the language they want to specify to Council.

When deciding qualifications for the board, they agreed to allow up to two professionals from Garfield County as a whole instead of just Glenwood Springs, to keep it local while also still having a large geographic area to seek professionals.

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They also agreed on language that encourages the board to be made up of a “demographic representation that closely resembles the community,” to encourage representation from typically underserved communities.

The board is expected to be made up of people with both lived and professional experiences to offer a larger perspective on housing. 

They distinguished that the board is intended for 2C only, while the housing commission will continue separately with their own focuses in housing. If the two overlap, however, they are still able to collaborate.

“At the end of the day, we want the group to be as useful as possible,” Community Builders’ Clark Anderson said. “We don’t want it to be too heavy, and we don’t want there to be too much blurriness between the different efforts that are going on.”

He’s the executive director of Community Builders and has been an active member of the Glenwood Community Housing Coalition and campaigned for 2C. 

He and Sumner Schatchter, who serves on both the housing coalition and the housing commission, agreed they don’t need to list all of the applications for funding, and Anderson pointed out how a lot of the points used as examples for the 2C ballot language can now be expanded on more. 

“We did it in order to make it really digestible for people,” Anderson said. “We sort of simplified and grouped these in ways that now we might be able to break out a little bit.”

Councilor Shelley Kaup also pointed out the list of points in the ballot language would still be good to keep. They included seven main points:

• Purchase real estate property
• Address infrastructure
• Redevelop existing housing
• Provide resources for the city to form partnerships
• Develop workforce housing
• Support programs that reduce the cost of workforce housing
• Provide available housing
• Maintain existing affordable housing

At the end, there was also discussion about creating a housing manager or director of some sort, but specifications on that were left for a future discussion.

The senior Planner for Community Development Watkins Fulk-Gray and the Director of Economic and Community Development Hannah Klausman both gathered this information while working with the groups on the language and will be bringing it back for the next meeting.