The Aspen City Council approved the Aspen Meadows housing proposal during a special meeting on Monday after spending five separate meetings reviewing the controversial project.
Council members voted 4-1 to move the project forward while acknowledging the need to continue addressing existing traffic problems in the West End. Councilman Bill Guth voted against the project because he wanted to see more effort in the proposal to address impacts to Fourth Street, where the Aspen Music Festival and School is proposing to reroute the entrance to its housing parking lot.
For months, West End residents have expressed concern about existing traffic issues in their neighborhood and the issues that might arise with the joint proposal to create new housing units on the Meadows campus for the Aspen Institute, Aspen Center for Physics and AMFS. But a majority of the city council ultimately voted to move the project forward, and agreed that further work should be done to mitigate excessive traffic.
“A lot of the issues that are still withstanding are city issues and not so much applicant issues,” Councilman Sam Rose said. “Which is why I’d like to support this application in the way it’s proposed now, knowing that it’s going to take time to gather funds and to build and in the meantime, the city needs to work tooth in hand, which I believe we are, to really fix a lot of issues in the West End that are caused by things not because of the [Aspen] Meadows.”
The council held several marathon meetings over the last three months to review the project. The Aspen Institute, AMFS and ACP have worked with the city to tweak the design and attempt to reach a consensus on the proposal they call “housing the Aspen idea.”
The most recent iteration proposes building 54 units of housing for the three organizations to house employees and visiting physicists.
During a March 24 meeting, the council was stuck on plans to relocate the entrance of the AMFS’s affordable housing to Fourth Street. AMFS wants to build 13 units of housing east of the parking lot along Gillespie Avenue — the current parking lot entrances are off of Third and Fifth streets.
Residents on Fourth Street have frequently told council members that the street is too narrow to accommodate a main thoroughfare to the housing units. They worry about pedestrian safety on the road that leads to one of only a handful of bus stops on Main Street and about the difficulty of two-way traffic on the narrow road.
The project team met with the city’s engineering department to discuss alternatives, but the engineering department ultimately backed the Fourth Street entrance. The intersection of Third and Gillespie streets is a complicated intersection, and is one of the only places in the neighborhood with recorded crash data.
But the engineering department also wanted to see additional measures taken to mitigate for additional traffic during high attendance events in the neighborhood. The project team proposed testing a temporary barrier to prevent vehicular access on Fourth Street between Gillespie and North streets during busy event days, like concerts at the music tent.
Council members did not support testing a temporary barrier on Fourth Street, but did want AMFS to study traffic data this summer to understand current impacts during high-attendance events on the residential road.
The council also agreed there is a larger traffic problem in the West End — something city council members have acknowledged before. They said the concerns the West End neighbors had with the project were symptoms of a larger issue, and one they want to continue to address. In December, the council approved $400,000 in contracts to study potential traffic mitigation measures in the neighborhood.
The council hopes to implement some recommendations from that study in tandem with the Meadows housing project.
“I see this as the beginning of a new partnership with the [Aspen Center for] Physics, the MAA and the Aspen Institute in terms of all of us managing traffic,” said Mayor Rachel Richards.
Guth voted against the project because he wanted to see better improvements to the Fourth Street entrance. He also said he wanted to see design changes for the AMFS housing units to better match neighborhood aesthetics.
After the March 24 meeting when the city council last reviewed the project, the ACP agreed to scrap six proposed single-family units along North Street. It decreased the ACP’s proposal to 28 units with a total of 51 bedrooms.
The project will now enter a detailed review, which will look at smaller designs like landscape details.