County planning board to review Valley Range next month

The proposed Valley Range Energy Park will come before the Montezuma County Planning and Zoning Commission next month, the commission’s chair told members at the end of their November 12 meeting.

“You’re all aware that we’ll be reviewing the Valley Range Energy Park submission next month,” the chair said, asking whether everyone had received the material from the planning department. One member said they had not. Told that more was coming, the chair added: “Please take the time and go through it.”

It is the first time the county itself has put a month on the first hearing for the solar and battery project proposed in the county. Accelergen Energy filed a roughly 1,000-page application with the planning department in early September and has said it expected a planning hearing in December and a commissioners’ hearing next year, but the county had not confirmed that. The commission recommends approval or denial; the Board of County Commissioners decides.

No date, time or place for the December hearing was given at the meeting.

“It’s an active application. Let’s leave it alone.”

The members got about ninety seconds into talking about it before the chair stopped them.

One member said they had not yet looked into the company and intended to, noting it is privately held rather than publicly traded, which makes it harder to find information. Another said the thing they had looked at most closely was the revenue the project would bring in, and that they were surprised how small it was on an annual basis — “sounds like a big number until you divide by the 35 years” the project is meant to be in service, the member said, adding that it was “not nothing.”

At that point the chair cut the discussion off. “We can’t discuss any more of this,” the chair said. “We’re in public and it’s not public yet.” Another member put it more flatly: “It’s an active application. Let’s leave it alone.”

The reason, as it was explained on the record, is procedural: “We can’t discuss it in public as a board because we don’t have the official agenda item in front of us for a public hearing.”

A member who said they will not be at the December meeting asked whether they could send written comments. They were told to send them to the planning department, which would pass them on, because members cannot confer with one another directly.

The project has been the most argued-over land-use question in the county this year. Empire Electric Association agreed in October to buy power from it; neighbors organized against it and gathered more than 1,200 petition signatures; and it ran straight through the District 1 county commissioner race, which Rodney Cox won.

Two subdivision changes recommended

The rest of the meeting was two public hearings, each ending in a unanimous recommendation to the county commissioners. Nobody from the public spoke at either one.

Hot Iron Minor Subdivision, between Road M and Road N near Dolores. The first was a subdivision amendment and boundary line adjustment affecting Lot 2 of the Hot Iron Minor Subdivision, on land south of Road N and north of Road M. Planning staff told the commission that one set of owners is buying about six acres from the other, that all the owners agree, and that the change leaves one property at about 38.75 acres and the other at about 105.6 acres. Both already have houses and infrastructure on them, staff said, and no new access is being sought; one property is reached from Road M and the other from Road N.

Because the smaller parcel is a lot in a recorded minor subdivision, the swap has to go through the permitting process to amend the subdivision rather than being handled as a simple lot-line change.

One member raised the one substantive point of the hearing: the properties may be crossed by recorded utility easements belonging to the City of Cortez, and asked that any that exist be carried forward onto the amended plat. The owners said they believed only an irrigation line ran through the land being conveyed, and that it would be cut and plugged at the new boundary. The motion to recommend approval carried that condition — that any public infrastructure or utility easements, if they exist, be shown on the new plat. The vote was 5-0.

Summit Lake West Unit II, east of Road 35.6 near Mancos. The second hearing was a subdivision amendment and AR3-9 rezoning application covering Lots 18, 21 and 23 — all one parcel — of the Summit Lake West Unit II subdivision, on 67.31 acres east of Road 35.6 and south of Highway 184.

The owners want to split off six or seven acres at the northeast corner of the property as a single lot, taking in a house that is already there. Planning staff said the surrounding land is agricultural and residential, with Summit Reservoir and Irrigation Company land and Bureau of Land Management ground nearby, and that all the infrastructure is already in place.

Two loose ends came with it. The county road and bridge department told planning that the driveway serving the existing house has never been permitted, and the owners will have to sort that out; they said the driveway was put in 13 years ago, when the road was not a county road, and that the county took the road over three or four years ago. Staff said it probably just needs permitting so the county has a record of where its driveways are.

The other is covenants. The developer of Summit Lake West Unit I had planned to carry the unit’s covenants over to Unit II and never did, staff said, so the applicants will have to draft covenants for the new lot. The county has a minimum set that owners can add to but cannot subtract from, and staff said a copy would be emailed over.

The recommendation passed 5-0, with three conditions: that the driveway question is settled with road and bridge, that the covenants reference the county land use code, and that wildfire mitigation is at least looked into. Staff said they would check with the county’s weed department and the wildfire adaptive partnership on what, if anything, is required.

The commission also approved its October minutes, 4-0 with one abstention.

A note on names

Montezuma County’s Planning and Zoning Commission is a recommending body, not a decision-maker, as the chair reminds the room at every meeting. The Current reports its members by role rather than by name here: the county does not publish the commission’s roster in a document this newsroom could check, and names heard only in a recording’s automatic captions are not printed.

Source: Montezuma County, “Montezuma County P&Z Meeting November 12, 2026,” posted to the county’s YouTube channel and linked from montezumacounty.gov; the meeting’s published agenda and public notices, carried in the video’s description. Property owners in land-use hearings are private individuals and are not named, and home addresses read into the record are not republished.