The Pitkin County commissioners gave their approval Wednesday for the $60 million redevelopment of the campus shared by the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Aspen Country Day School.
The commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the project, which will double total square footage of the buildings on the Castle Creek campus from 50,000 square feet to 105,000 square feet.
The campus, which is used by Country Day during the school year and the Music Festival in the summer, will include new rehearsal halls, classrooms, administration buildings, practice rooms, a cafeteria and renovation of two historic buildings.
Commissioner Patty Clapper did not vote on the project, citing a conflict of interest. Her husband, Tommy Clapper, works for Shaw Construction, which she said is to be awarded the contract to build the new campus.
Just before the commissioners approved what is officially referred to as the “public facilities master plan” for the 23-acre campus, Aspen Mayor Mick Ireland and Aspen City Councilman Jack Johnson urged the commissioners not to approve the project without a commitment from the music festival to build new deed-restricted housing somewhere in Aspen.
“We have a housing crisis,” Ireland said. “We should be in a position, as local governments, of requiring, and getting, commitments, so that we can say to other applicants, ‘Look, all of us are doing this, we are all in this boat, we all need to make a commitment’ ... I think you should get a commitment and I think it is an appropriate thing for the school to do.”
The festival’s position, however, was that it is not appropriate to tie new housing to the approval of the master plan, as it is not adding any new employees or increasing the number of students on its campus each summer.
“We cannot guarantee as a condition of the master plan approval that we will solve the housing problems that we clearly do have,” said Alan Fletcher, president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School, in response to Ireland’s plea. “And we certainly have not represented that we do not have a housing problem, because we do have one. We have a housing problem for students, for seasonal staff, for year-round staff and for the faculty that we have here in the summer, and we are looking to address all of those problems.”
Essentially, Fletcher said the county should have faith that the music festival will pursue housing solutions, as it has done in the past in helping to create seasonal housing at the Marolt and Burlingame facilities in Aspen.
“As an organization, can we guarantee that we are committed to better housing solutions than we have now?” Fletcher asked rhetorically. “Yes: We guarantee a commitment to finding those solutions ... but at the 11th hour of a very complex process, we have no specific metric to propose, and I would ask that you not impose one in what seems to be an arbitrary and capricious fashion at this point in the process.”
Fletcher also told the commissioners that his organization is engaged in productive talks with the city about partnering on a housing project next to the current Marolt housing facility at 488 Castle Creek Road. “We are eager to be a partner in that development,” Fletcher said, adding that it is even possible that a bond issue for a project could be presented to voters this November.
But Councilman Johnson said the city has been talking with many potential partners in the community, and the city’s priorities are changing with regard to other organizations.
“The city of Aspen has gone to a great public expense to acquire a very small amount of land that we propose to build a very modest amount of housing on,” Johnson said. “And we’ve been approached by the school district, the hospital, the SkiCo, the MAA, other businesses in town, as well as other worthy arts and non-profit groups, about participating in that affordable housing with us. If we added all that up, we wouldn’t be proposing enough affordable housing to meet that need, forget about the general citizen in town, which ... is the most pressing need.”
Despite the city’s pleas that it has the discretion to do so, the county commissioners declined to press the music festival any further to extract a commitment related to housing. “The challenge is immense,” said Commissioner Jack Hatfield. “But we’re not going to solve it with this application.”
Commissioner Rachel Richards told Aspen Music Festival representatives that if they don’t move quickly, they will find themselves priced out of the Aspen market, just as Aspen Skiing Co. has been. She criticized SkiCo for backing out of participating in the seasonal Burlingame housing project with the festival and the City of Aspen some seven years ago. “Now they are buying motels in Carbondale,” she noted.
Aspen Country Day School, which plans to add the equivalent of 18 full-time employees as part of the campus expansion, plans to pay the county’s “payment-in-lieu” of approximately $615,000, rather than build new employee housing. However, representatives of the school suggested they still might try to build, or buy, housing on their own.
To overcome another obstacle to an approval, the music festival agreed to contribute $250,000 towards completion of a pedestrian trail along Castle Creek Road between the campus and the Marolt housing facility, where some music students live each summer. The trail is the subject of litigation between the county and homeowners on Castle Creek Road.
The music festival and Country Day now plan to break ground on the new campus in September. Fletcher said his organization is still raising money for the project, but those efforts are on track and on schedule. Aspen architect Harry Teague, who designed the music festival concert facilities in Aspen’s West End, is designing the new campus.
As part of the redevelopment, more than 430 trees will need to be cut down on the campus that sits along the banks of Castle Creek. The two organizations have pledged to plant 320 new, albeit smaller, trees after construction.
The county approved a “variable set-back” plan to allow the festival to place some buildings closer to the creek than the county’s land-use code normally allows. The county also granted a height variance to the campus so that the three new rehearsal halls could top out at 40 feet in order to improve the acoustical properties of the buildings.
At one point during Wednesday’s deliberations, festival representatives suggested that the Aspen Music Festival and School should be held to the same standard as other organizations with regard to conducting employee audits. That prompted Commissioner Michael Owsley to remind them that the music festival had been given special consideration throughout the approval process.
“Your organization hasn’t been held to a stringent standard,” Owsley said. “Be careful when you ask for equal treatment, because then everything changes.”
Fletcher said the campus will be a significant improvement for the Aspen Music Festival and School — among other benefits, the new buildings will allow three orchestras to rehearse on campus, rather than having to use acoustically challenged rooms on the Aspen public school campus.
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