HomeMy WebLinkAboutRIGDEN FARM - OVERALL DEVELOPMENT PLAN - 56-98B - CORRESPONDENCE - (8)We very much appreciate all of the cooperation we have received from most of the city
departments. In particular, we would like to thank you and Troy Jones for all of your assistance.
We also appreciate the willingness of Matt Baker from Engineering and the stormwater group to
sit down with us to solve problems face to face. We value this kind of interaction and wish that
all departments could be as open and accommodating. If reasonable people on both sides sit
down together, we believe that things could be accomplished more rapidly with less headaches to
both the development team and the city staff.
In summary, please let us know if there is anything we can do to speed up the approval process.
We would be willing to meet with anybody at any time if it means fewer delays.
Thank you again for all of your help with this project.
Sincerely,
Dave Pietenpol
Project Manager
Copy: Greg Byrne
Rigden Farm, LLC
WHEELER
Commercial
Mr. Bob Blanchard
Director of Current Planning
City of Fort Collins
P.O. Box 580
Fort Collins, Colorado 80522-0580
BECEI FFn M4R
March 11, 1999
I am writing to you at the request of our development group for Rigden Farm to let you know of
our concern about the development review process. The Rigden development team has met
numerous times with city staff individually, as a group, and also have had two formal conceptual
review meetings over the past fourteen months. This was done to try to iron out issues with
zoning, ODP and PDP questions prior to our formal submittals. As you know, we are very
concerned about the time things have taken and will take in the future. An ultimate approval date
of October 1, 1999 is very critical to the viability of this project.
We have recently received comments back on our ODP submittal and are still waiting for
comments from many departments. A number of the comments raised new issues, even after all
of our previous meetings. This is more than a little disturbing to us since the parties making the
comments were at the previous meetings. Because of this, we have been forced into a second
formal ODP submittal which will again delay the whole process.
The comments we have received have led us to the conclusion that there is very little
interdepartmental communication and in some cases little intradepartmental communication. This
is very very frustrating. Without realizing it, we may solve a problem with one department but
create two more problems with other departments. The city needs to give coordinated coherent
responses to a developer throughout the entire development review process.
We understand that city staff are very busy. However, there must be a better way to do business.
As we have discussed, we would be very interested in having Rigden Farm be a trial project for
the new city team approach to project evaluation. Having a group of staff empowered to make
decisions is an attractive prospect, if that staff team can and will make the necessary decisions in a
timely manner.