On the night of July 15, 2003, a crowd gathered outside the Main Street headquarters of a group called the Carbondale Town Mothers. Bottle rockets went up. A local radio station played a Commodores song as the tally came in: 787 votes against, 601 in favor. Carbondale had just killed the Crystal River Marketplace, a proposal for a 252,000-square-foot shopping center anchored by a 125,000-square-foot big-box store, by a margin of 57 to 43 percent in what the Post Independent called a record-turnout special election.
That vote killed the plan. It did nothing to the zoning. The 24-acre parcel along Highway 133 had already been zoned commercial since the early 1970s, when it was carved out of the 57 acres of Colorado Rocky Mountain School land annexed into the Town of Carbondale. The school had received that ranch land in 1953 from Harald "Shorty" Pabst, a rancher who would later become Aspen's mayor. Seventeen years and one more defeated referendum later, Carbondale's trustees approved a mixed-use development on that same parcel, under that same zoning, with no public comment at the meeting. That gap between what the zoning allowed and what the town would actually let get built is the thing worth understanding before you underwrite anything commercial in this market.
What Was Actually on the Ballot Each Time
The zoning designation never moved. What changed across three attempts was scale, use mix, and who the project was seen to serve.
| Year | Proposal | Commercial space | Residential units | Anchor | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | Crystal River Marketplace | 252,000 SF on election day (an earlier account of the same plan put it at 330,000 SF) | None proposed | 125,000 SF big-box | Defeated 787-601 |
| 2009-2012 | Village at Crystal River PUD | 125,000 SF | Up to 268 units | 60,000 SF grocery anchor, 16,000 SF office | Overturned by voters roughly 2-to-1 in January 2012 |
| 2018-2020 | City Market site plus Lot One / Main Street Marketplace | New City Market, a Builders FirstSource building supply store, 115 residential units | 115 units | City Market grocery | Approved with no organized opposition |
The developer behind the 2003 proposal, Brian Huster, had already revised the application once under 36 conditions from the town's planning and zoning commission before it reached the ballot, and it still lost by fourteen points. The 2009 version, shepherded by Denver-based Peregrine Group under developer Rich Schierburg, dropped the big-box format entirely in favor of a grocery-anchored plan with up to 268 residential units, a number the town's planning commission itself trimmed from 300 in exchange for more open space. Voters killed it anyway, by a wider margin than the first attempt.
The Detail That Explains the Third Try
Back in 2009, as trustees weighed the Village at Crystal River PUD that voters would later kill, Ben Bohmfalk, then a Carbondale trustee who would go on to become mayor, put his finger on the confusion running through the whole saga: "I think people lose sight of what can and can't happen on that property. It's not a question of should anything ever happen there. It's already zoned commercial, and the question for us was whether the underlying zoning is better, or a PUD." The zoning was never the question voters were actually answering. What they were deciding, twice, was whether a specific building served the town or extracted from it.
Carbondale's planning director at the time, Janet Buck, later pointed to the structural failure point: a large parcel had been zoned commercial decades earlier "without any specific vision for the future development of the property," which meant every new owner could propose something different and the town had no consistent standard to hold anyone to.
The town responded in 2013, one year after the second defeat, by rewriting its development code. The new code favored infill over large-format buildings, added sustainability standards, and required developers to cover their own infrastructure costs rather than push them onto the town through special taxing districts. That single fact matters more to anyone evaluating Carbondale commercial land today than either election result, because it means the standard that killed the earlier proposals is now written into the code itself rather than left to a referendum to discover.
By the time the site came back as a City Market anchor with a smaller residential component, the calculus had shifted for a second reason that had nothing to do with design. City Market is Carbondale's single largest sales tax contributor, and the town was watching shoppers drive to Basalt instead, where both a City Market and a Whole Foods already sat. Planner Bob Schultz, who had worked against the two earlier big-box versions, later helped shepherd the grocery-anchored version through, noting that a building supply store would coexist with the town's existing Ace Hardware and the Carbondale Co-Op rather than compete against them as a "category killer."
What Got Built Once Trust Was Established
Plans for the new City Market on the site passed with little opposition in 2016. Two years later, trustees approved site plans and architecture for 115 residential units on the portion of the property known as Lot One, part of a nearby parcel trustees had unanimously rezoned in 2017 out of an obsolete "planning community commercial" designation into the town's newer mixed-use zone district. The final subdivision, including the water allocation for the new City Market pulled from the Rockford Ditch that also serves Colorado Rocky Mountain School, cleared its last hurdle in July 2020 with no public comment at the meeting, a detail KDNK reported as notable given the site's history. The completed approval covered the grocery store, a Builders FirstSource building supply store, and the 115 residential units.
What followed was not a single project but a corridor. By 2023, the Aspen Daily News was documenting a broader build-out along Highway 133: the Hayden Place apartment complex north of the Main Street roundabout, a new mini-storage facility going up near the Highway 82 and 133 intersection, and a facelift on the Dinkel Building downtown. In that same reporting, Bohmfalk estimated roughly 300 apartments would be added along the corridor at full build-out. None of it required a public vote. The same zoning classification that had failed twice at the ballot box was now producing steady, largely uncontested development, because the format had changed to match what the town's own tax base and daily needs actually looked like.
What This Means If You're Pricing Carbondale Land Today
For an owner-user or investor looking at commercial or mixed-use parcels along the 133 corridor or in the historic core, the zoning map tells you what is legally possible. It tells you almost nothing about what will actually clear a public process. Three things from this history are worth carrying into any underwriting conversation.
Scale relative to the town's existing footprint matters more than the zoning district. Both defeated proposals were large-format, single-anchor projects that would have added a significant percentage to the town's total commercial square footage in one move. The approved version broke the same allowance into a grocery store, a building supply store, and a smaller residential component built out in phases.
An anchor tenant that plugs an existing leak, in this case grocery spending going to Basalt, reads differently to a planning commission and to voters than an anchor that imports a new retail format the town didn't ask for. If your pro forma depends on a big-box or category-defining tenant, expect more scrutiny than a project anchored by a use the town already needs.
The 2013 code rewrite is not a formality. It codifies infill, sustainability standards, and developer-funded infrastructure as baseline expectations rather than negotiable points. A project that reads as an exception to that code, regardless of its underlying zoning, is taking on the same kind of risk that sank the 2003 and 2012 proposals.
None of this shows up in a zoning printout or a comp set. It shows up in meeting minutes, referendum results, and the memory of people who sat through both defeats. That is the kind of research that has to happen before an offer goes in on Carbondale commercial land, not after.
FAQ
Does Carbondale still allow citizen referendums on approved commercial projects? The town's history includes two petition-driven referendum defeats on this specific parcel, in 2003 and 2012. The 2013 code rewrite addressed design and scale standards but did not eliminate the underlying referendum mechanism, so any large-format proposal should still be evaluated with that possibility in mind.
Is the Highway 133 corridor still building out? As of 2023 reporting, Mayor Ben Bohmfalk estimated approximately 300 apartments would be added along the corridor at full build-out, alongside the commercial space already completed. Anyone evaluating a specific parcel today should confirm current status directly with the Carbondale planning department, since individual projects move on their own timelines.
What happened to the original Home Depot proposal? The 2003 Crystal River Marketplace plan included a 125,000-square-foot site intended for a big-box retailer, commonly reported as a Home Depot. That format was defeated at the ballot and never returned in any later version of the project.
If you are evaluating commercial or mixed-use land in Carbondale or elsewhere in the Roaring Fork Valley and want a read on entitlement risk before you write an offer, Gabe Molnar has spent 25 years underwriting exactly this kind of question in this specific market. Let's connect.
