Steamboat Springs City Council agreed to move forward with an in-depth outreach process on Tuesday that hopes to help the community find solutions to divisive issues.
The earliest Steamboat voters will consider a new plan for the Brown Ranch would be November of 2026, as the city works through an extensive outreach process that hopes to find solutions to the various issues with the project over the next 10 to 14 months.
Steamboat Springs City Council agreed to move forward with this outreach process on Tuesday, the second phase of an effort led by Glenwood Springs nonprofit Community Builders. The first phase, a situational assessment, was delivered to the city earlier this month.
Clark Anderson, the executive director of Community Builders, said this process needs to be able to rebuild trust at multiple levels. This is not only about repairing relations between the city and Yampa Valley Housing Authority, Anderson said, but community members rebuilding trust with each other.
“People have a hard time understanding how one person or another was on the other side, so that has hurt community trust and fueled division. And that division is still there,” Anderson said. “We need to work toward a broadly shared vision and that is not something we have right now.”
But Anderson said it wasn’t all bad. There is broad agreement among community members that housing is an issue and there is support for finding solutions, including solutions at Brown Ranch. How much support there is for various solutions is what this process intends to discover, he added.
“We’re starting farther back than if this is a normal planning process,” Anderson said. “It’s like we went down into the basement, we got to walk up those stairs.”
It has been nearly nine months since Steamboat Springs voters soundly rejected Brown Ranch annexation in a vote spurred by citizens. City and housing authority officials are generally in agreement that this next Brown Ranch annexation agreement will need to be sent to city voters for final approval.
Immediately following the election, Council members said they wanted to take more control in the next planning process for Brown Ranch, which led to the hiring of Community Builders this summer. While there is urgency to get a plan for Brown Ranch in place, there is a stronger desire to ensure this process is not rushed.
“I feel pressure because I was elected to represent those who are facing this problem more than anyone else in this community,” said Council member Dakotah McGinlay. “That part of our community is being lost every day. So, to hear two years before an annexation election is very disheartening to me, but I get it.”
Anderson laid out a process that includes three more phases, with phase two focused on building a shared understanding. Phase three would start to wade into design and problem solving using various activities to allow community members to explore and refine potential solutions together. The final phase is about identifying the preferred way forward.
Completing this process will take some time, with Anderson throwing out a potential timeline of 10 to 14 months. City Manager Gary Suiter said he was being more conservative with an estimate of 12 to 18 months.
“[Anderson] sort of painted the picture of a pretty involved engagement structure, and you want to move at the pace that it feels like those who are bought into the process and that are effectively and adequately participating are comfortable moving at,” said Brad Calvert, a principal planner for the city, who is acting in a project manager role for this effort. “That is something that is kind of hard to predict.”
Anderson said this process would not produce a completed annexation agreement for Brown Ranch, but it hopes to put the community in a position to put one together rather quickly.
“This process, whether it’s 10 to 14 months, it gets us to a point where the getting to an annexation agreement is relatively easy because we’ve hashed out a lot of the big issues,” said Jason Peasley, executive director of the housing authority, which owns the Brown Ranch. “There’s likely to be an annexation vote and a funding vote. If it’s a funding vote it has to happen in November, so it’s likely a November 2026 sort of target.”
Peasley said trying to get something on to a ballot by November of 2025 would feel very similar to the previous process, but 2026 would allow them to avoid scrambling to get something to a vote. This process would allow community members to “break out the Lego set” and explore potential options at Brown Ranch themselves. While this is something the YVHA team has done quite a bit of, Peasley said he wanted to involve more people in that process.
“I’m comfortable ceding some control of what’s the outcome because ultimately this is a community resource,” Peasley said. “We thought, through the process that we had that we had absolutely the best thing for the community and clearly we were not right. So, let’s go back and do it again and hopefully we get it right this time.”
City Manager Suiter said it is important the neither City Council or the Housing Authority Board sees themselves as a steering committee for the Brown Ranch, as that could result in the public believing they are steering the process toward a predetermined outcome.
“Sometimes being a good leader is knowing when to follow,” Suiter said.