<\/p>\n
After months of waiting, the Cortez Historic Preservation Board wants to move forward on establishing a historic district on Montezuma Avenue.<\/p>\n
At the board\u2019s monthly meeting on Wednesday, vice chairwoman Linda Towle said it was time to start working on the Montezuma project again, after it was stalled last summer in anticipation of possible changes to the Cortez land-use code.<\/p>\n
The avenue is lined with some of the oldest houses in Cortez, and designating part of it as an official historic district has been a dream of Towle\u2019s for more than a year. The board started raising support for the district last summer, but stopped after city attorney Mike Green questioned the wording of the current land use code for historic districts at a city council workshop in July.<\/p>\n
Towle wants to start raising support again.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s now been seven months, so I have not done anything with the district, and I really want to get this moving forward,\u201d she said at the meeting.<\/p>\n
The board needs a letter of support with signatures from at least 70 percent of the property owners in the proposed district in order to apply for a historic designation, and in July they were only one or two signatures short of that. Since then, three properties in the area have changed hands. But signatures aren\u2019t the primary obstacle to the project.<\/p>\n
The current land-use code would require Cortez citizens to notify the preservation board before making major changes to a house or business in a historic district, although the board doesn\u2019t have the power to veto any changes. But at the July workshop, Green, along with city manager Shane Hale, said the code isn\u2019t worded clearly enough. Since not every building on Montezuma Avenue is a designated historic site, it\u2019s not clear whether people living in newer buildings would need to consult the board before altering their homes, or whether dropping that requirement would go against the state\u2019s criteria for historic districts.<\/p>\n
Assistant city planner Tracie Hughes has been working with Mark Rodman, the director of preservation programs for History Colorado, to figure out the details of the code\u2019s requirements for historic districts. She said she hopes to schedule a conference call between him and the board members next week, to nail down the problems with the current wording and figure out how to fix them. The revised land-use code won\u2019t come before the board for a few months, Hughes said, but clarity on the historic district section could come sooner.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re waiting on comments from several other people,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it\u2019s all going to happen in the next few weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Towle said she plans to start writing letters of support for the district again, in the hope they can get it designated \u201cvery soon.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the meeting, the board also began discussions about what to do for the city\u2019s annual Historic Preservation Week celebration, which is scheduled for May 21. Chairman Dale Davidson suggested this year\u2019s theme might have to do with celebrating the history of Cortez\u2019s parks, but no final decisions were made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Preservation board struggles to move project forward<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,318,13,198],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-67275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-cortez-municipal-government","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-history"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67275"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=67275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}