County commissioners approve four rental units outside Mancos

Montezuma County commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to let a former bed and breakfast on Highway 184 outside Mancos become four long-term rental units, over objections from three neighbors who asked the board to study traffic and density before deciding.

Graphic: Cortez Current. Source: Montezuma County Board of County Commissioners meeting video and agenda, October 20, 2026

The application came from Ruby Rose, LLC, whose agent the county’s public notice names as Bonny Wayman. It covers 20.22 acres on Highway 184 west of Road 38.7, land zoned for agriculture. Because the plan puts more than three dwellings on the property, it needed a high impact permit; the special use permit lets multifamily housing sit on agricultural zoning without a rezoning. The county’s Planning and Zoning Commission had recommended approval unanimously.

The planning director told the board the long building that was the bed and breakfast would be divided into three units and the garage converted into a fourth. Every structure already stands and would only be remodeled. Access is straight off the highway on a dedicated easement, and a surveyed permit area covers the north 10 acres of the parcel and the buildings on it.

What the applicant told the board

The property had been sitting vacant, the applicant said, and about 70 tons of trash had been hauled off it. The units would be long-term rentals with no short-term renting, and a manager would live on site in one of the middle units. She said neighbors’ concerns were going into the leases: no dogs running loose, no trespassing on neighboring land, quiet hours and a 25 mph limit on the driveway. Two of the units she described as a three-bedroom and a two-bedroom, each with two bathrooms, and said she hoped families would take them.

On traffic, she said the driveway permit for Highway 184 already allows up to nine households and that the three new units would bring the total to seven of the nine, so no further traffic study was needed. On utilities, she said the Montezuma Water tap that fed the main house stays and will now serve one fewer bedroom and bathroom than the bed and breakfast had; a separate permitted well was approved for the converted garage; the main house’s septic system, built for seven bedrooms, was inspected and worked on; a new permitted septic system was installed for the garage unit; and a new 400-amp transformer was put in.

What the neighbors said

Four people spoke. Three objected, and none of them is named here: county hearings put private residents’ names and home addresses on the record, and this paper does not republish them.

One neighbor said her family chose the area because it was rural, agricultural and quiet, and that her home sits about the length of a football field from the property. She read sections of the county’s own land use code back to the board — its stated objective of protecting the rural character of the county, the purpose of the permit process, and the predictability zoning is meant to give neighbors and buyers. The house had last operated as a bed and breakfast 13 years ago, she said, before any of the current neighbors bought in. Counting the bedrooms in the plan, she said renters would outnumber the owners living on the surrounding properties and the population density would more than double. She asked the board to require a study of the traffic and density impact before approving anything that could not be undone.

Another neighbor, who lives just north of the property line, said apartment buildings belong in town rather than in rural areas. He told the board a wildlife migration corridor runs close to the fence line, that deer and other animals use it in spring and autumn, and that hunters work that ground — so more people in the area raised the chance of an accident. He also pointed to a gate in the fence line and said he was concerned about people walking onto his property without permission and the liability that creates. He said he was open to talking about locks and gates, and the applicant said she was too.

A third speaker said he had lived on rural property his whole life and had watched his father lose a farm in the 1980s, and argued that landowners should be able to do what they want with their land within reason. “It’s their land,” he said.

The applicant, who said she grew up in the area and owns farmland, replied that the property is mostly treed and would not turn a profit as agricultural ground, and that cleaning it up would raise neighbors’ property values rather than lower them.

How the board decided it

The county attorney read the decision criteria for a high impact permit into the record: that the use conform to the code; that it generate no significant adverse impacts on other property in the area and be consistent with the code; and that utilities and services be available or able to be made available. If an application fails those tests, he said, the permit must either be approved with conditions that bring it into line or be denied.

Before the vote, one commissioner said he did not expect the impacts to be any greater than when the property was a bed and breakfast, and possibly less. “I don’t have any issues with it myself,” he said. The motion to approve passed with all three commissioners voting in favor.

New rules for written comments, from November 1

Earlier in the same meeting the board adopted, also unanimously, the land use procedures resolution it has been working on for two weeks — read into the record as Resolution 12 of 2026. It takes effect November 1, a date the county attorney said was chosen over “effective immediately” because setting the process up needs coordination between departments. The Current reported the draft on Sunday.

What the resolution does, as the county attorney described it:

• One comment period, two cutoffs. Written comments on a land use application go through the county’s planning portal. The period runs from the posting of the notice until seven days before the commissioners’ public hearing. A separate cutoff seven days before the Planning and Zoning Commission’s hearing decides what reaches that commission in its review materials. Everything filed and approved by the planning department becomes part of the record for the commissioners’ hearing and goes to the applicant as well.
• Who may comment. Written comments are accepted from individuals or organizations with standing — people who could be affected by, or have an interest in, the outcome — or from residents of Montezuma County. The attorney said the board had widened this from residents only after the chairman raised the case of someone who grazes cattle beside a project but lives outside the county, and who might have standing in a lawsuit.
• Nothing handed in at the hearing. No additional written submittals will be accepted from the public during a public hearing. A member of the public may use a map, photograph or other exhibit while speaking only if it was already accepted as a written comment by the planning department and given an exhibit number, which the planning department issues on request.

The attorney said the rules answer a specific problem raised in the Leaf Properties appeal, where one of the issues was that written documents handed to the board during a public hearing left the applicant without adequate time to read and respond to them — something he said the court identified as a due process issue. “It’s really not a good idea for the board to be accepting written comments during the hearing that are not already part of the record,” he told the commissioners.

Overweight trucks: inspections, not an ordinance

Commissioners decided against writing an ordinance to permit overweight and oversized trucks and designate truck routes, and told staff to inventory, inspect and map the county’s short bridges instead.

The county attorney said a draft ordinance written in late 2013 had been raised at Monday’s workshop, and that counties do have the power to permit such loads and set routes, but that the board’s view was a less formal approach would serve it better. Commissioners said enforcement is the problem — that the county would have to hire people it cannot afford, and that many of the trucks already run on state overweight or oversized permits, some from other states.

What the board does want is the structures checked. Bridges of 20 feet and longer on the off-highway system are inspected by the state; the shorter structures are the county’s own. “I don’t want a truck running over a bridge that hasn’t been inspected that’s rated at 15 ton instead of 50 tons,” one commissioner said. The instruction to staff, as the chairman summarized it, is to identify, inspect and map those bridges and identify the county’s truck routes, with signage put up where it is needed.

The question came up, commissioners said, because a producer told the Road and Bridge department that a particular route was its designated truck route. The county looked at the structure, found it inadequate, and could find no record that any truck route had ever been formally designated — because, the attorney said, Montezuma County has never passed the kind of ordinance that would produce such a designation. Traffic has been redirected to a route with no structure the county has not inspected. No resolution was needed, the chairman said.

Other business

• Wastewater case continued again. The board continued to Tuesday, November 17 at 9 a.m. its long-running discussion of an on-site wastewater treatment system on a rural property, the case it first continued in September. The county’s environmental health specialist said he had visited the property again the day before and seen no sign of black or grey water being discharged, that a portable toilet on site is being emptied regularly, and that in his opinion there is no current environmental hazard. He said a resident had offered to pay for an engineer and the installation of a septic system, and urged the owner to take the offer up as soon as the weather allows a soil test. The chairman noted the case is now 90 days old. The specialist recommended 30 more days at most; the board settled on the November date to stay clear of Thanksgiving week.
• Consent agenda. A patrol and detentions deputy lateral-rehire and sign-on bonus proposal passed as the only consent item. The commissioner who moved it said it makes no change to the budget. The sheriff’s office set out the plan at Monday’s workshop, where it said it is nine positions short.
• Road work. The board approved and signed a change order on the Highway 184 and County Road 25 intersection project, for rumble strips and striping, which exceeded both the chairman’s and the administrator’s signing authority. The chairman read the amount into the record as $15,267. The full packet had not reached the county administrator, so the chairman will sign off once it arrives.
• A drug dog, and how to pay for it. The sheriff’s office asked the board to fund a K-9 program in the 2027 budget. No decision was taken — the item was not on the agenda for one, and the budget is not adopted until later. The county administrator put the cost at roughly $60,000 and said that rather than buying a vehicle the county could retrofit one it already owns for about $13,000, with climate control and automatic door openers. The undersheriff said a dog would be a deployable asset 40 hours a week and would let calls that now need two deputies be answered by one. Commissioners said they did not doubt the program’s value but could not see where the money comes from, with the county already drawing about $2.6 million from reserves this year. Asked how he would fund it, the undersheriff said the program began in the 1990s on fundraising and a golf tournament, and offered to go after grants. Commissioners also asked what happens if a handler leaves; the undersheriff said handlers would sign a three-year commitment and repay a prorated share of the training cost, and that a dog works eight to 10 years. He said Cortez police do not currently have a working dog and the county’s dog would be available to other local agencies on request when the handler is on duty.
• No executive session. The agenda allowed for one and the board did not go into it.
• Short-term rentals. The county attorney said he and the planning department would put together a draft short-term rental ordinance this week.
• Court cases. Friday’s contempt hearing in the Ironwood case was vacated after the defendants moved to have a different judge assigned to it, the attorney said; a status and setting conference is set for Thursday at 8:30 a.m. to set a new hearing date, and he expects that hearing to go before District Judge Todd Plewe while the case as a whole stays with Judge Furse. The Current reported the judge stepping aside last week. Separately, he said the opening brief arrived Friday in Leaf Properties’ appeal of the county’s permit denial at the Colorado Court of Appeals, after gaps in the record were resolved and the district court supplied more documents. He said the brief raises the same issues as the district court case and that the county has about 35 days to file its answer.
• Public health director. The administrator said the vacant public health director post is drawing good candidates from around the country, including medical doctors.
• Shared IT services. Commissioner Kent Lindsay reported that he attended last week’s Cortez City Council meeting and that the council approved the shared IT services agreement between the city and the county.
• Ballots. The deputy clerk told the board that more than 1,000 ballots had come in on the first day of in-person voting. “Let’s get out there and vote,” the chairman said.

The meeting runs an hour and 36 minutes and is posted on the county’s YouTube channel; the agenda is on the county’s news page. The Board of County Commissioners meets at 109 W. Main St., Cortez. Written comments on land use applications go to the Planning Department at planning@co.montezuma.co.us.