Following Greeley city council vote, developers will have to pitch in to help District 6 aquire land for new schools as more homes go up
By Kelly Ragan
Most school districts in Colorado have agreements with housing developers in which developers pay fees or dedicate land as they build housing to help districts secure land for future schools. As communities grow, they usually need more schools to keep up.
That system helps ensure school districts aren’t behind the curve, scrambling to find room for a school after the houses have already been built.
Until Tuesday night, Greeley-Evans School District 6 didn’t have such an agreement with developers.
Brad Mueller, community development director for the city of Greeley, said at the meeting the city was an outlier. District 6 needed city council to approve an agreement to change that.
School districts don’t have jurisdiction over land use, said Mueller, so districts can’t control the dedication of land – they’re only able to partner with other jurisdictions, like the city of Greeley.
In a 5-2 vote, city council did approve that agreement.
The new policy essentially gives districts a way to acquire land for schools as new properties are developed and houses go up. Until Tuesday’s vote, there was no way for District 6 to do this.
Superintendent Deirdre Pilch spoke at the meeting to explain why the district needs the policy.
“When I got to Greeley five years ago, I began to look around saying how much over capacity are we? Why are we educating kids in substandard portables?” Pilch said. “Well, it’s because we didn’t build schools. Then I started to ask the question, well, do we have land to build schools? I’m here to tell you any district our size has land they secured maybe decades ago.”
Plich said the district has done a lot of work over the past few years to secure land for new school sites. There are two properties out west the district is looking at, she said, and the district will also need to secure land in Evans and east Greeley.
“This should have been done two decades ago,” Pilch said. “I don’t know what was going on with the district and city of Greeley 20 years ago, but I’m guessing something was broken about their relationship and that’s why this wasn’t done at that time.”
Pilch said if councilmembers didn’t vote to take care of the issue now, things would only get worse – especially in west Greeley and Windsor.
Council approved an intergovernmental agreement between District 6, Eaton School District Re-2 and Windsor-Severance School District Re-4.
The agreements with each district were mostly the same, barring some fee differences due to building size standards.
Each district breaks down different types of developments – such as single family detached, single family attached, multifamily development and manufactured home – and calculates a separate “student yield” for each type. The district is essentially counting on different types of developments to “yield” different numbers of kids in the district.
Mueller said the dedication is proportional to how many kids different housing can be expected to bring into a community.
Single-family, detached homes have a higher fee because young families often seek out those homes.
The District 6 resolution calls for a land or in-lieu payment per dwelling unit that looks like this:
Single-family, detached housing
Land: 0.0159 acres
In-lieu payment: $2,498
Single-family, attached housing
Land: 0.0077 acres
In-lieu payment: $1,210
Multifamily development
Land: 0.0035 acres
In-lieu payment: $549
Manufactured home dwelling
Land: 0.0155 acres
In-lieu payment: $2,449
Mueller said city staff hosted a roundtable in May that included developers, realtors and builders to discuss the move.
It was a Zoom meeting, Mueller said, so more people attended than usual. More than 80 were invited to the meeting and received details, and about 30 attended and gave input, Mueller said at the recent city council meeting.
At the time, he said, no one raised any issues. That part is important, since developers, realtors and builders will later have to deal with the fees implemented by the agreement.
Some city councilmembers worried that might scare off developers or affect the council’s efforts to bring more affordable housing to Greeley.
City councilmember Ed Clark spoke on that concern at the meeting Tuesday.
“If we’re looking at affordable housing and we tax developers $1,300 or whatever we’re looking at, that gets passed down to the people who buy those houses,” Clark said.
Councilmember Kristin Zasada mentioned affordable housing is one of the council’s priorities. As a real estate agent, she said, she knows that cost will get passed along.
Chad Sanger, an Eaton School District school board member and local developer, spoke in favor of the agreement at the meeting.
“I’ve been a builder here in the Greeley area for 20 years,” he said. “I have zero issue paying for fees when I pick up a permit. Quite frankly, our clientele won’t be here without good schools.”
Sanger said developers can build all the houses they want, but if people don’t want to move to those neighborhoods because the schools aren’t good, it won’t matter.
According to the analysis Mueller presented to city council, two large-lot developers north of the Poudre River in Greeley have even voluntarily paid fees requested by Eaton School District.
Council voted Tuesday to pass the agreement 5-2 with councilmembers Clark and Zasada voting against it.