The colossal scale of this plan creates too many expenses beyond actual housing, currently $480mm of infrastructure if it’s on budget, and squanders your valuable STR funds on items such as highways.

This growth will be driven, by YVHA estimates in the fiscal impact study, by approximately 4,800 transplants who will move to Brown Ranch for subsidized housing.

Examine the details in this plan and you’ll quickly note that the current annexation agreement funds extraordinary population growth that requires massive expenditures for sprawl to the west of Steamboat but doesn’t create a community because it cuts parks, transit and other things that create a healthy community.

Would you prefer to fund more housing construction and the proper parks and transit for locals or to use our STR funds on big-ticket infrastructure items to accommodate a population surge? The current plan spends our STR funds on big-ticket items such as $95mm for grading, drains, roads and sidewalks, $64mm for highway 40 widening, $57mm for a geothermal facility, $22mm for a new public safety facility and $6mm for highway 40 intersections.

After failed housing project developments of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, most cities moved to balance affordable with market-rate housing to keep communities vibrant and balanced.

Adding a market rate percentage to the housing mix relieves the heavy burden on taxpayers of the next 20-years and allows the development to self fund amenites such as parks and transit that were shorted in this plan in favor of 100% subsidized housing.

Look to succesful programs in major cites across the country and you’ll see that mixed market and affordable developments allow for faster and more economical delivery of affordable housing.

Michaels Organization, the selected Master Developer of our future, does not build for-sale housing and emphasized this to the City Council. The Master Developer specializes in high-density, income-restricted rental housing. Did you know this is a guiding reason that 77% of the multi-family units in the first phase will be rentals? The mix of housing fundamentally changes a community that is currently 66% owner-occupied housing to accommodate an influx of transplants in a lottery-based rental system.

Most citizens don’t know that this is a 20-year commitment of our funds with very few performance hurdles or ability to reevaluate the plan. The City is on the hook for funding through 2032 with only 450 units required for completion in exchange for more the $100mm of funds. That’s a staggering $222,000 per new apartment unit delivered! Using YVHA math that 80% of residents are newcomers, that’s $1.1mm per existing Steamboat resident housed. Might there be a more cost effective way to support locals?

Further, the Master Developer, Michaels Organization gets to retain 80% of the profits of the development and has exclusivity in the MOU that was signed by the housing authority. With one developer extracting mammoth profits from our town shouldn’t we have a more frequent ability to reevaluate our funding commitment? We propose smaller phases with the ability to alter the housing and commercial mix to meet evolving needs of our town.