Westminster council hears implementation plan for new state housing and planning laws; members raise water, staffing and local-control concerns

At a Feb. 3 study session, Westminster planning staff and the city manager briefed the City Council on implementing recently enacted state planning laws that affect parking near transit, housing capacity calculations and required updates to comprehensive and water-supply plans.

Long-range planner Andrew Spurgeon told councilors the presentation focused on three laws staff is tracking: “HB 24 13 o 4,” which preempts some local parking rules for multifamily housing near transit; “HB 24 13 13,” which establishes a formula and reporting process for a city-specific housing opportunity goal (HOG); and “Senate bill 24 1 74,” which prescribes methods and deadlines for housing needs assessments, comprehensive plans and housing action plans. Spurgeon said technical guidance from the state Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) is still pending and that DOLA has told cities they will receive no direct funding to meet the new requirements.

Why it matters: Staff warned the requirements could force substantial changes to Westminster’s zoning map, municipal code and permitting practice and would add multi-year staffing and consultant needs to meet statutory deadlines and ongoing reporting. Councilors repeatedly raised the possibility that local planning priorities, especially water-supply limits and the city’s strategic plan, could be sidelined by statewide deadlines.

Key details

- Deadlines and near-term work: Spurgeon said a preliminary community assessment report is due June 30 and that a required zoning/map submittal is due Dec. 31, 2026; a later step would require rezoning and regulatory changes following public hearings. He described the June deadline as imminent for staff work across departments.

- Scale of potential rezoning: Staff identified roughly 2,745 acres — about 12% of Westminster’s land area — commonly within the statute’s transit-area definitions as the parcels staff must examine first. The city currently has about 50,323 housing units, and staff said parts of the formula and the counts remain subject to clarification by DOLA.

- Costs and staffing: Spurgeon told council that fully complying on the state timeline would create staffing impacts through 2027–2028 and create a permanent workload to administer affordability and displacement-mitigation strategies and reporting. He said DOLA has indicated no dedicated state funding to pay for those tasks.

- Water and infrastructure conflicts: Multiple councilors and utility staff emphasized a key unresolved tension: the new laws separate (or can decouple) land-use approvals from local resource constraints, notably water. A water-utility representative warned that a city could legally adopt more intensive zoning but still lack the water system capacity to serve that development, producing an “impossibility scenario” unless additional water supplies or funding are found.

Council reaction and staff direction

Several councilors said they oppose proceeding quickly toward the state-prescribed rezoning and implementation steps, citing the city’s long, locally driven comprehensive-plan process and limits on local water supply. One councilor framed the discussion as a local-control question: whether Westminster will “let the state tell you what you’re going to do for your city.” Multiple council members urged preserving local discretion and slower, locally tailored approaches.

Council gave staff two clear directions: continue tracking DOLA’s technical guidance and webinars and refine staff analysis so council can make an informed policy choice, and separately consider parking-code changes locally (including whether to incorporate state parking preemption into the unified development code). Staff said they will continue monitoring DOLA guidance, refine the staff workload estimate and return with follow-up materials; council did not vote on specific compliance actions at the meeting.

What staff said they still need to resolve

- Final technical guidance from DOLA on the HOG formula and permitted exceptions (floodplains, cemeteries, public open space, etc.). - A comparability decision whether Westminster’s recent housing needs assessment meets the new statutory methodologies or whether the city should join a regional housing-needs assessment. - Legal analysis of how water-supply allocation, existing utility budgets and previous state laws on pacing/allocation interact with the new requirements.

Quotes

“This presentation will review the requirements of each of these acts … and the considerations that are unique to Westminster,” Andrew Spurgeon said as he opened the briefing. He told the council DOLA has provided some informal guidance but that “the exact determinations … are pending technical guidance from DOLA.”

City manager Jody Andrews reminded council of competing priorities when she summarized the council’s recent strategic-planning retreat and said staff will bring back draft revisions to the strategic plan based on council direction.

Next steps and local context

Staff recommended that council decide whether it wants the city to pursue the full compliance path now — a path that would require staff resourcing and legal and consultant work — or to take a more restrained approach emphasizing local control while continuing to monitor the state’s technical rules. Several councilors signaled a preference for the latter: tracking deadlines and guidance but not accelerating rezoning under the state schedule absent further council direction.

The council discussion made clear that any final city action will hinge on DOLA’s forthcoming technical clarifications, additional legal review of water-and-zoning interactions, and future council direction on how closely Westminster should follow the state-prescribed timelines.