Looking to the future, assessing the region’s housing may become more streamlined with Montezuma County’s encouragement and a supply of state funding.
On Tuesday, the Montezuma County Board of County Commissioners voted to send a letter of support for a grant that could help the region more efficiently account for the areas challenges behind housing.
Montezuma County, like many parts of Colorado, faces an ongoing housing shortage. In an effort to address the statewide issue, Colorado passed a housing bill in 2024, SB24-174, which requires local governments to conduct housing needs assessments every six years.
Included in that bill was a grant program setting aside money to conduct those assessments.
The commissioners voted unanimously on a sending a letter of support to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, asking the office to approve a housing planning grant for a branch of the Region 9 Economic Development District, known as the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments, which includes Montezuma County.
“Like many rural governments, we face limited staff capacity and tight budgets, which make it difficult to undertake this type of technical analysis every six years,” the commissioners’ letter of support for the grant reads.
The grant would help automate the data collection behind the housing assessment.
Montezuma County is required to conduct these housing assessments, but Shak Powers, Regional Programs Manager of Region 9 Economic Development District, who requested the letter of support from the commissioners in a meeting on Monday, said that general takeaways from state of housing in the area are already known.
“I could summarize the whole housing needs assessment for you in two sentences: We don’t have enough houses and what we have costs too much,” he said to the commissioners. “There you go, there’s your study.”
Certain jurisdictions lack capacity to do the required housing needs assessments.
The SWCCOG is looking for a firm that can design a more streamlined housing assessment.
Senate Bill 24-174 outlines the publicly available data sources that can be used for the housing assessment, Powers said.
“With the technologies we have now, it is possible to skim those and have an automated report,” he said. “We don’t see a need to do it manually every six years in perpetuity.”
