From The Fairplay Flume (Lynda James):
Will-O-Wisp Metropolitan District’s water project 1041 special development permit for the now nullified Tanglewood Reserve Planned Unit Development was revoked on Nov. 3.
The county 1041 permit, approved in 2008, was to minimize impacts from the metro district developing infrastructure to pump water from Elk Creek and pipe it up Mount Evans Boulevard to the Tanglewood PUD.
The final plat for the 400-plus lot high density Tanglewood, located adjacent to Pine Junction on both sides of U.S. Highway 285, was conditionally approved in 2006 and nullified in 2015 for not fulfilling the conditions of approval.
The land was slated to be the second phase of the WOW subdivision development in the 1980s, is in WOW service area and WOW was going to use its Elk Creek water rights to provide water.
Phase 2 was never developed and the land has been through several owners since then.
At the Nov. 3 meeting, Park County Attorney Lee Phillips said the 1041 permit stated that if substantial material changes occurred after approval, the commissioners shall suspend the permit and set a hearing to determine whether new requirements are needed or if revocation was appropriate.
Phillips said the commissioners suspended the permit in June and decided to schedule a hearing to determine if it should be revoked since the PUD plat had been nullified.
Phillips said the county received a letter from WOW in August asking that the permit be kept active.
WOW’s attorney Richard Toussaint attended the Aug. 25 commissioners meeting and asked the commissioners not to revoke the district’s water project 1041 permit.
Toussaint said the permit was needed so WOW could continue to show the state that it was completing due diligence on the conditional water right WOW owned on Elk Creek.He said a possibility exists that WOW could lose their water rights if the 1041 permit was revoked and WOW could not continue its due diligence.
By state water law, due diligence means actively doing something to reach the point where the water rights are put to beneficial use. Once beneficial use is established, the water right becomes absolute, instead of a conditional water right.
Toussaint said WOW wants to start building the infrastructure in Elk Creek as part of its due diligence. (See “Residents pack room for … ” in the Sept. 2 issue of The Flume).
A hearing was set for Sept. 22, but continued to Nov. 3 because Doug Windemuller, whose property would have been impacted the most, was gone in September.
Neither Toussaint nor anyone from WOW attended the Nov. 3 hearing.
Windemuller owns one of the three lots in Woodside Park subdivision where infrastructure was proposed both on land and in the creek.At the hearing, he recommended revocation and that if a different land development on that property was permitted, then WOW could reapply for a 1041 to meet that development’s water needs.