Several residents of the Cavern Springs Mobile Home Park, situated between Glenwood Springs and Carbondale, appeared before Glenwood City Council for the regular Aug. 21 meeting seeking help to fund a possible resident-organized purchase of the park.
All seven council members were present in person for the meeting, which invited members of the public to speak on items not on the agenda before council delved into the scheduled topics.
After hearing from Marc Adler, a longtime resident and former city councilman, requesting more pickleball courts in Glenwood to serve the growing number of participants, several people lined up to talk about the dire situation faced by Cavern Springs residents.
While other Roaring Fork Valley mobile home parks have received financial assistance from local governments and other organizations recently to help put them into resident ownership, Cavern Springs has not gotten that same attention, residents Tina Gomez and Monica Muniz said.
They now find themselves in a “race against time,” with a looming deadline in early September to present an offer and $6 million in earnest money. That represents only about 20% of the asking price, they said.
The park, located at the Garfield County Road 154 and CMC turnoff intersection with Highway 82, houses 98 families and a total of about 300 people, she said.
As with most mobile home parks, the residents own their mobile homes, but lease the space from private owners. The park was recently put on the market, but state law gives mobile home park residents four months to come up with a purchase offer.
“There’s a real risk that many of these families will be displaced out of the valley, losing their jobs and community roots, and disrupting their children’s education,” said Gomez, who has lived in the park for 10 years.
Muniz has lived at Cavern Springs for 36 years, and noted that many of her neighbors have also been part of the community for multiple decades, raising their families and contributing to the local economy.
The property has gone through multiple out-of-state owners in recent years, each one bringing rent increases even when they do maintain the use as a mobile home park, she said.
Council members were sympathetic to the dilemma, but noted that the City’s dedicated affordable housing funds can only be used for efforts within city limits. That was the case with the recent assistance provided for the Mountain Mobile Home Park in West Glenwood to become resident-owned.
Though the City has made preservation of mobile home parks a high priority, resources are spread thin to deal with properties outside city limits, Councilor Sumner Schachter said. One statewide nonprofit organization, Thistle ROC, has been able to work with residents and local governments to put together offers for the Mountain Valley and Aspen-Basalt mobile home parks in Carbondale and Basalt. But Cavern Springs has slipped “under the radar,” Schachter said.
Schachter suggested convening a regional group to address the situation with Cavern Springs and other mobile home parks that may find themselves in the same situation.
“In this case it’s clearly an emergency, but I don’t know where that help is going to come from,” he said. “There needs to be more public outreach on this.”
Childcare tax
Meanwhile, the regular agenda included a presentation from representatives of the Confluence Early Childhood Education Coalition about the upcoming ballot initiative to help fund childcare and preschools from Parachute to Aspen.
The measure, which will be on the November ballot in Garfield, Pitkin and Eagle counties, would create a 0.25% sales tax to support affordable access to childcare, explained coalition Director Maggie Tiscornia. That would raise an estimated $10 million per year to offset costs for families seeking childcare, and to increase wages for childcare workers, she said.
If the measure passes, the tri-county region would become Colorado’s first Early Childhood Development Service District under a new legislation allowing such districts to be formed.
City Council did not immediately take a position to endorse the measure, but will discuss it in a future session. The measure has received an endorsement from the Glenwood Springs Chamber Resort Association board, Tiscornia said.
On-demand transit
City Engineer Ryan Gordon updated the council on the Ride Glenwood On-Demand transit system. The transit option was launched in May, allowing people to schedule rides around the city through an app for $1.
Through July, Gordon said 7,350 rides were given, and the percentage of shared rides has increased from 21% at the start to 48%.
With increased demand, though, has come longer wait times for pickups, from an average of 11 minutes to start to now around 28 minutes, he said.
The ride service operates between 9am and 10pm. Common ride destinations include City Market, Walmart, Target, the Hot Springs and the Amtrak station, Gordon reported.
The service is being supported by a grant from the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority through 2026, after which the goal is for it to become self-sufficient, he said.