In a valley with diminishing buildable land, Breckenridge officials seek to halt what many consider an unfavorable trend by tightening the reins on regulations for new property construction and demolitions. 

Concerns raised by the 2007 Breckenridge Town Council resulted in the implementation of a Neighborhood Preservation Policy that mandates residential builds stay under a certain square footage depending on their location, including an overall maximum of 9,000-square-feet in size.

The policy applies to homes without a platted building or disturbance envelope in more than a dozen subdivisions in Breckenridge — like Highlands, Weisshorn, Warriors Mark, Warriors Mark West, Gold Flake and more.

Fifteen years later, the increasing popularity of a trend that officials have dubbed “scraping” — or demolishing smaller homes in order to build larger and more imposing ones — prompted concerns from members of Breckenridge Town Council in 2024. 

Over the past several months, town staff members began revisiting the current policy and looping in the building community and residents before introducing proposed changes to officials at a July 22 meeting. The refreshed policy will likely apply to the same subdivisions, but in a recent public comment, some residents wondered why it didn’t apply to all neighborhoods in town.

The proposed changes — which assistant community development director Chris Kulick said local builders showed general support for — take aim at: building ridge heights, heftier setback requirements and changing the points awarded for adding electric vehicle chargers and certain landscaping.

In relation to development, Breckenridge has a point system where positive points are awarded if a person goes above and beyond what the town’s building code requires and negative points are subtracted in instances where people go against a relative town code. The town has “absolute” building codes that cannot be broken and “relative” building codes that can be broken under certain circumstances. The end point score is meant to reflect the benefit a certain development will bring to the community.

Many officials wanted the proposal to adjust positive points awarded for vehicle chargers. Aside from infringing on view corridors, officials also want building regulations to meet certain sustainability parameters because studies show scrapping a smaller home to replace it with a larger one can have environmental consequences since materials from demolition get thrown away and because larger homes require more energy. 

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“I think we’ve seen on planning that three (positive) points can erase a lot of sins,” council member Jay Beckerman said in relation to the positive development points that could be acquired under town code by adding an electric vehicle charger to a development. “At the same time, I think there is still a desire to see a move or an incentive to move to electric.” 

Council members Dick Carleton, Steve Gerard and Todd Rankin said they’d like to see one positive point available for installing electric vehicle charger, no matter how many are installed. 

Mayor Kelly Owens, who has a background as an environmental analyst, said electric vehicle chargers are a “tiny fraction of alternative energy options” and wondered if they should be held in such high regard on their own. She asked staff if they could find a way to lump electric vehicle chargers in with additional alternative energy options builders could opt to incorporate in order to boost their positive point count. 

“Every positive point that we put on the table for people to receive covers a sin, and I think we want to be careful,” Gerard said. The concept of providing variances and positive points worked its way into discussions at a July 8 meeting, where officials commented on the seemingly high number of variances they gave to Breckenridge Grant Vacations for its 16-duplex project on Park Avenue. 

Beckerman said, with the town surpassing 93% of the build-out limit set by local officials, the town could be at a point where negative points could become more common. He said buildable lots remaining might not be the most ideal, and therefore they could be more susceptible to incurring negative points due to disturbances needed to be made to the site. 

Council member Carol Saade did support eliminating the positive points for landscaping requirements and electric vehicle chargers. She pointed to local builder and developer sentiment, included in the staff memo for the July 22 meeting, that indicated they would rather see positive points for actions like choosing a renovation over a full demolition and scrape, or adding elements to a project so the property is more resistant to wildfire. 

“Looking at what’s truly advancing the town’s goals, what’s providing community benefit, the fact that all those ideas are from architects and are opportunities to provide positive points, I feel like are more meaningful to neighborhoods, to advancing our goals,” she said. 

Council member Marika Page, who attended some stakeholder meetings with local builders, said many favored the idea of more incentives for building homes that are more resistant to wildfires. Carleton also wanted to see emphasis on this.

According to the July 22 staff memo, the town wants to foster diversity in architecture and homestyle with the Neighborhood Preservation Policy, and it’s not meant to dictate what homes can look like. These regulations are for residential developments, not commercial.