In a fairly brazen move Troy McWhinney fooled Loveland’s City Council into believing he was a sincere advocate of “affordable housing” who just needed more time to develop Aspen Knolls with the extension of special discounts in developer fees extending past the city’s legal limit of 12 years last November. see story.
His actions demonstrate something entirely different. McWhinney tried to strip the land of its water shares (needed to develop housing on it), escape the legal obligations of the previous owner, KB Homes, to make traffic improvements and rezone the property to DR (developing resource) thus eliminating the possibility of building homes on the land. Lastly, McWhinney even tried to sell the land to other less sophisticated developers once he couldn’t strip the land of valuable water shares and after his engineering company, Landmark Engineering, discovered Estes Park’s main natural gas supply line along with other costly utilities would need to be moved for an expense nearly equal to the cost he paid for the land.
Everyone close to the project knows the 507 homes KB Homes platted for the development are not going to be constructed as planned.
All these facts have been reported by LovelandPolitics over the past few years in a series of articles on the former KB Homes project in south Loveland named Aspen Knolls.
See McWhinney wants out of legal obligations February 5, 2010 to get a complete background on the project.
Also see Another article in 2009 covering the same parcel of land with more background on the project.
Unfortunately, our City Council apparently failed to read these stories and instead believed the city attorney when he cautioned them in closed session McWhinney would sue the city for a “taking” by not allowing fee waivers to go on longer so the property could be developed as platted by KB Homes way back in 2001. How can the city asking for normal fees be a “taking” when the developer already sent a letter to the city in 2009 saying it could not be developed as planned?
November 16, 2010 was a sad evening for Loveland residents who once hoped the elections of Cecil Gutierrez, Kent Solt and Joan Shaffer represented a change from previous councils. Instead, the three voted for the path of least resistance and gave McWhinney an outrageous extension until 2018 despite the fact the current code already provides McWhinney another 3 years to take advantage of the 2001 fee rate schedule. Staff put the council in a box and they didn’t have enough information to even understand they were being rolled.
Stay tuned as McWhinney will likely seek yet another waiver to re-plat the property for a different development yet still retain those 2001 fee discounts all the way until 2018. In the meantime, Loveland voters may be looking for new candidates who can keep their promises in the 2011 municipal election.
