Gold Rush Next Season, Hoffman crew tears up Colorado (Literally) Options

[Crusty]

GOLD RUSH Todd Hoffman’s Colorado gold mine facing thousands in fines

[Gene Kooper]

Continuing on....

This post deals with the Park County Planning Commission's July 11, 2017 meeting. I've included both a web link and PDF of the agenda, along with PDFs of the additional information (hot links to these four documents are also available in the agenda). The minutes of the meeting have not been uploaded yet.

July 11, 2017 Park County Planning Commission Meeting Agenda.

[attachment=11323:Planning...7_Agenda.pdf]
Afternoon agenda item .1. Rezoning Case #17Zon-04 is the one of interest and contains four documents (last agenda item).

Rezoning case documents

[attachment=11324:17ZON_04...and_Atts.pdf]
[attachment=11325:Referral_Responses.pdf]
[attachment=11326:Public_Comment.pdf]
[attachment=11327:Applicat...y11_2017.pdf]
The first document is the Planning Department Staff Report issued on July 5, 2017. Some of the quoted material in my prior post of Nov. 22 comes from this report.

The report recommends to the Planning Commission that the rezoning be denied.

Based on the foregoing, staff recommends that the Rezoning be denied due to an inability to meet standard of approval number 4 as submitted. If the Commission chooses to recommend approval, staff can assist in identifying potential appropriate conditions.

The second document contains a referral response from the Town of Fairplay that offers no specific objection as long as the mining permit and operating plan are enforced as written. The other correspondence is an email forwarded from Josh Voorhis, District Ranger, South Park Ranger District. It is an informal restatement of the USFS concerns outlined in the letter that Mr. Tonko posted above in this thread.

The third document contains three letters from nearby residents opposed to the rezoning change.

The fourth document is the application for rezoning prepared by High Speed Aggregate, Inc. and submitted to the Park County Planning Commission on April 30, 2017. It is essentially the same document as the document in the previous post with the addition of a letter by the mining engineering firm retained by High Speed Aggregate, Inc., (Greg Lewicki and Associates). The author of that letter, Mr. Ben Langenfeld does not mention that there was no public hearing in 1975 regarding the original zoning. Instead he states:

It appears that the zoning of residential use that was designated in 1975 on this property (and others) was done without regard to the geology or the economic viability of the gold placer deposits.

If the original zoning designation was done without a public hearing why was that fact and any supporting evidence not included in the summary letter by the Greg Lewicki and Associates engineer? If as Mr. Tonko asserts this is illegal why would it not be documented in the rezoning application? As a footnote, the Fairplay Flume published an article on the July BOCC on August 4, 2017. It states:

Three mining engineers testified in support. One said no public hearings were held in 1975 when the first zoning map was approved.

I'll post the July 27, 2017 Board of County Commissioners' meeting agenda (note: the agenda states that this was originally scheduled to be heard at the June 22, 2017 BOCC meeting, but it was postponed because the June Planning Commission hearing had been postponed), 14 related documents, the meeting minutes and the Fairplay Flume article that summarized the BOCC meeting later this evening or tomorrow.