By Vince Phillips
Here in Chaffee County we are living proof of what happens when government refuses to set clear priorities. Our commissioners and planners keep telling us they support both affordable housing and strong environmental protection. Sounds good on paper, right? The problem is that when you try to do both at the same time without deciding which one comes first, the two goals end up fighting each other. The result is a free-for-all where nothing gets solved and taxpayers end up paying for both sides of the battle.
Take the new Revised Land Use Code that went into effect January 1, 2025. County leaders said it would balance growth with protecting our rivers, wildlife habitat, and open spaces. The reality? Stricter setbacks from streams and wildlife areas, bigger minimum lot sizes in rural zones, more environmental studies, and reduced development density. Developers and the Chaffee County Economic Development Corporation warned before the vote that these rules would spread homes farther apart, make building more expensive, and shrink the supply of attainable housing. One local critic put it bluntly: the code threatens the tax base it claims to protect and turns planning into punishment.
On top of that, Chaffee County adopted the 2021 International Building Codes, including the International Residential Code. These codes bring in higher energy-efficiency standards, green building requirements, wildfire mitigation rules, and other “sustainable” features. All of them sound noble, but they add thousands of dollars to the cost of every new home or addition. The same county government is also pouring money into the Chaffee Housing Authority, supporting the Chaffee Housing Trust, and talking about the urgent need for workforce housing in the 2020 Comprehensive Plan. They say they want more homes for local workers, but the very rules they pass make those homes harder and far more expensive to build.
This is the classic Funding Both Sides trap. One hand of county government pushes for more affordable housing and invests taxpayer dollars to make it happen. The other hand tightens environmental rules and adopts expensive green building codes that drive housing costs up and slow everything down. Environmental protections raise the price of development, which gets passed on to buyers or stops projects altogether. Housing pressure then pushes more sprawl or higher prices that hurt the very environment they are trying to save.
Another Fonzi Scheme. Government sets two opposing goals in motion, refuses to decide which one actually comes first, then just keeps smacking the symptoms with more rules, more studies, and more taxpayer money, hoping the whole mess will somehow cough back to life like Fonzie hitting a broken jukebox. The underlying conflict never gets fixed. Taxpayers just pay twice: once to create the problem and again to pretend they’re solving it.
If a higher priority had been selectedn, cleaner policy management would be possible. Instead we get a free-for-all. No real progress on housing affordability. No real win for the environment. Just higher costs, more bureaucracy, more studies, and wasted time and money for everyone.
If there were not so much excess spending floating around, these contradictory adventures would be a lot harder to pull off. When budgets are tight and every dollar has to count, you are forced to decide what matters most. But with endless grants, fees, and deficit spending, the incentives stay warped. Government can pretend it is doing everything while actually achieving nothing.
This same failure to prioritize shows up again and again. It is exactly the pattern we are exposing in the Funding Both Sides series. Part 1 showed how federal border policies and local public-health efforts work against each other on disease prevention. Part 2 brings it home to Chaffee County and the daily tug-of-war between housing and the environment. Stay tuned. Part 3 is coming, and it keeps peeling back the layers on how our own government uses our money to fight itself.
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