AURORA | Members of the city’s Planning and Economic Development Committee Wednesday sketched out the early details of a plan that would keep some so-called congregate living projects in Aurora an arm’s length away from schools, commercial daycare facilities and hospitals.
While the issue comes to the committee as being potentially broad, some critics have said it targets a proposed homeless service provider that’s caused a flap between Ward II Councilwoman Renie Peterson, residents and city staff.
After about 30 minutes of debate, several city council members — including three who sit on the committee and a pair who attended the meeting on their own prerogative — decided to keep group-living facilities that house niche demographics, such as homeless individuals or single mothers, at least 1,000-feet away from schools and commercial daycare centers and 500 feet away from hospitals. Members also stipulated that there cannot be more than two such facilities in any of the city’s six council wards. Those regulations loosely mirror regulations the city placed on retail marijuana shops several years ago.
The decision came about two months after Aurora planners asked city council members if they would be amenable to making an amendment to the city’s zoning code specifying what constitutes as a “congregate living” facility. The current proposal specifies that such a space would include living, sleeping or sanitation facilities in certain districts under the city’s zoning code. Jails, halfway houses, hospitals, hotels or boarding houses would not fall under the new definition, according to the city’s proposed language.
The issue of congregate living in Aurora has become inextricably married to a new live/work program for chronically homeless people that has been attempting to solidify a new space in the city for nearly a year. Bridge House, a Boulder-based nonprofit organization that provides an array of homeless services, has proposed developing a new residential facility in Aurora for enrollees of its Ready to Work program, which the company started in its home city about five years ago, according to Isabel McDevitt, executive director of Bridge House. McDevitt helped found the organization’s novel work program, which pushes participants to look for full-time jobs after nine months in the network and full-time housing after living in the residential space for one year. She signed a purchase contract for a 13,000-square-foot former bingo hall at 16000 E. Colfax Ave. in February.
In Boulder, the Ready to Work program offers 44 beds to participants who are heavily screened to determine if they qualify and would benefit for the program. McDevitt said the same vetting process would be in place at the potential Aurora facility, which would offer the same number of beds as the Boulder space.
In an email to the entire Aurora City Council, McDevitt said her group has raised about $3.5 million to develop and run the 2.1-acre site, which employ about 16 staffers.
But a slew of residents in the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed space, including many in the Laredo Highline area, have rallied against the project since it was announced earlier this year. More than 1,100 people have signed a petition denouncing the project’s proposed East Colfax location, according to Councilwoman Peterson. Nearly a dozen residents, both in favor and against the proposed facility, attended the recent council committee meeting.
“We were pleased to see that the PED policy committee has listened to our neighborhood concerns and has asked staff to look into offsets from schools for ‘congregate living’ and to clarify some definitions in the proposed zoning amendment,” Duane Senn, head of the Laredo Highline Neighborhood Association, wrote in an email Wednesday.
Several citizens and city council members have said that because the new Ready to Work facility could house recent parolees, the facility should not be located so close to both Laredo Elementary School and the Laredo Child Development Center.
However, McDevitt said there are currently no plans for the Aurora facility to specifically house individuals who have recently left Department of Corrections custody and are on parole.
“This idea that exactly what happens in Boulder is going to happen in Aurora is simply not true,” she said.
McDevitt said the Ready to Work program in Boulder has a contract to accept qualified parolees through another Boulder County nonprofit organization, the Latino Coalition, which acts as a liaison between Ready to Work and DOC. Although, that particular contract expires this summer and McDevitt said there are currently no plans to reinstate that agreement at the Aurora location. She added that she would be willing to indefinitely kill the DOC contract in Aurora if that guaranteed the organization a spot in the city.
“It’s way too premature to have that conversation, but if we were to have that conversation to basically say, ‘We wouldn’t partner with the DOC,’ I would have that conversation,” she said.
McDevitt said there are currently six people on parole participating in the Ready to Work program in Boulder. She added that the program does not accept registered sex offenders.
The Ready to Work program in Aurora would largely receive participant referrals through local homeless service providers, such as the Comitis Crisis Center and the forthcoming Day Resource Center, according to McDevitt.
She said that if the congregate living amendment were to pass through council, her organization would apply to receive that zoning in the city. But until that happens, city staff has told her she need not bother apply yet.
“City staff has been very helpful, but they’ve said, ‘Until … this use gets added to the code, there’s nothing to file,” McDevitt said. “We’re hopeful city council will give us the opportunity to apply for something.”
If the amendment were to pass with the additional distance regulations, McDevitt said the East Colfax site would be out of the picture due to its proximity to schools. She said she’s continued to look at other locations in the city, but the new changes would also preclude many of them from being possible locations.
Jason Batchelor, deputy city manager, said the new amendment would bring clarity to the city’s code and give council and the city’s planning commission more of a say on various projects interested in coming to the city.
“With conditional use there’s a hearing where there is discussion and there is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on this conditional use,” he said.
The new amendment would make congregate living spaces a conditional use, meaning they would have to undergo a public hearing to be approved, according to Batchelor. And without the change — as is currently the case — the projects are zoned as multi-family and can move forward without additional oversight from council.
“With a lot of these types of projects, you may have some legitimate concerns and you may not want them in residential areas,” Batchelor said. “And multi-family zoning is generally in residential areas.”
Batchelor said the need for the change has continued to bubble up in conversations with developers in the past 18 months, and the city has not been able to give particularly straight answers or recommendations for how certain facilities should be zoned.
At the Wednesday morning meeting, Peterson also requested staff contact members of the Boulder City Council and ask what they’ve thought about having the larger Bridge House organization in their city. Council members also requested that staff create a map that would show where in the city congregate living groups could go if the distance buffers were put into place.
“This has gone way out of control,” Peterson said of the proposed facility. “It’s harming my residents. I’ve been serving them for 12 years and I’ve done it well and the people appreciate me and they know that I’ve always stood for them, and I’m not backing down now.
No staff member, no deputy manager, no homeless coordinator, no city manager is going to stop me from fighting this.”
Peterson has been critical of how staff has handled the proposed homeless project, claiming they kept her out of the loop for nearly six months.
Councilwoman Sally Mounier, too, was skeptical of the project.
“This congregate living discussion that we’re having is geared towards one business and one business only, and this does not pass the smell test,” she said. “For us to do congregate living so that it makes it happy and agreeable that we can do Ready to Work — it is abhorrent to me. Under no circumstance am I going to support congregate living.”
The issue is expected to return to the Planning and Economic Development Committee before being forwarded to the full city council.