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City should rethink pot, vacation-rental rules

By Brieanne Stahnke

It’s nice to go downtown to forget all your troubles and forget all your cares. There’s music, shopping and fun downtown. It’s where all the lights are bright. But, eventually, you return home.

Home can be a haven when good land-use decisions are made. Or it can be a hell when decisions fail to take into account long-term impacts for the sake of quick dollars. When communities are concerned about families they work to preserve and protect housing stock, so stakeholders have homes. They want their workforce to be able to live where their children go to school. They adopt and enforce rules that keep neighborhoods safe and quiet at night. They know that cars have to be parked somewhere, and that kids need sidewalks that connect to schools and grassy places in which to play. Healthy established neighborhoods boast people of every political stripe, age and background. What do they have in common? They care about the small but important stuff that makes life worth living. And they care about their homes.

Right now, the city of Durango has a unique opportunity to add to its coffers. Recreational marijuana stores can generate lots of tax dollars without much infrastructure expense – especially if these can go wherever commerce is allowed. Offering vacation rentals can also generate impressive revenue. It’s easy enough to repurpose homes into commercial money-makers where tourists come and go, with no connection whatsoever to neighborhood and community.

So who has a problem? You do.

Durango’s older, established neighborhoods are closest to the downtown, have the narrowest streets, the greatest density and the fewest parking spaces. The people who choose to raise families here shoulder that burden while the downtown maintains a vibrant face.

These families are being asked to have their neighborhood’s homes in the mixed-use zones repurposed, so marijuana sales can happen in the midst of where these families live, work and their kids play. These families are being asked to give up opportunities for a neighbor next door so an investor can turn a much more lively profit than what’s generated if that home were rented instead to a waiter working downtown.

Are Boulevard residents opposed to the retail sale of marijuana? No.

Should it be sold in their residential neighborhood – or in yours? No.

There are lots of places in Durango that can absorb the impact of increased traffic, parking and congestion these facilities will likely create, but Durango’s neighborhoods are not one of them. It is unlikely anyone (from young families to retired couples, Republican or Democrat, marijuana advocate or not ) who has chosen to live in one of Durango’s neighborhoods would have reasonably expected a retail pot store to be their neighbor.

Are Boulevard residents opposed to vacation rentals? No. Plenty already exist. But when a community with a housing shortage has leadership that chooses tourists over those who are working and living here now, all neighborhoods have a problem.

That’s why 16 representatives of two established neighborhood groups have joined forces to call on the city to reconsider ordinances recently passed by the City Council. One increases the allowable numbers of vacation rentals in Durango’s oldest neighborhoods on both sides of the Animas River. The other allows retail marijuana to be sold in five mixed-use Durango neighborhoods. These concerned residents are exercising their rights under Article VII of the city’s charter because they think both of these recent decisions are bad for the sustainability of neighborhoods.

Every Durango neighborhood has a flavor and color all its own. No two are alike. Yet each is the world to the person who has planted his feet firmly in the place he proudly calls home.

Take care of your neighborhood. It is part of a greater good we still have in Durango called community.

Brieanne Stahnke is secretary of the Boulevard Neighborhood Association. The association’s board of directors, Mike Todt, Tony Rocha, Jim Foster, Karen Brucoli Anesi, also signed this op-ed.



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