Summit County Considers Rezoning Process Changes for Cline Dahle Project

Tony Tyler arrived at a Summit County Council meeting with a straightforward pitch and an uncomfortable truth: the affordable housing project his company had been hired to build on the nearly 30-acre Cline Dahle parcel in Jeremy Ranch had hit a rezoning wall that the county's own code made nearly impossible to clear.

The math illustrated the problem starkly. The parcel, purchased by the county in 2017 for $3.7 million and designated for affordable housing and community uses from the outset, carried a Rural Residential zoning classification allowing just one dwelling unit per 20 acres. That made the county's own RFP vision of 21 single-family detached homes legally untenable under existing code. As Summit County Economic Development and Housing Director Jeffrey B. Jones put it in written comments, single-family detached housing "is simply not allowed in Summit County today" at any density beyond that one-per-20-acres limit.

Tyler, a partner with Columbus Pacific Development, the firm the County Council selected last summer to create The Settlement at Jeremy Ranch, said a subcommittee of developers and county officials had been making steady progress on the project and its legal agreements before the rezoning question stopped them cold. He pointed to other jurisdictions where developers could request a rezone as long as a project stayed within the scope of a county's general plan, without first producing a fully completed development plan. "That effectively would allow us to move forward in a much more streamlined way that I think would have net-positive returns to the balance of the community depending on how the new zone and the process is reworded," Tyler said.

County Councilor Chris Robinson, a member of the Cline Dahle subcommittee, backed the proposed code change, citing the stubborn difficulty of building affordable housing anywhere in Summit County.

Beneath the rezoning question sat a deeper financial concern. Jones, in his written comments on the draft RFP, warned that the project's planned mix of housing types and affordability restrictions would produce "a project that is not viable without substantial subsidies," calling the current design "aspirational and unlikely to be viable without a source of funding outside of a development partner." Jones said he was constructing a financial model to demonstrate the gap in real time using current construction costs.

Jones also identified a structural bind the county faced. Because existing code required a development plan before a property could be rezoned, the county could not simply rezone the Cline Dahle parcel ahead of issuing the RFP. But leaving the rezoning burden on applicants without defined county support meant any respondent would "discount the value the County receives for the land as effectively unentitled," an outcome that would diminish returns on the $3.7 million the county invested in the parcel years earlier.

Summit County discussed the draft RFP at a public meeting on November 13, 2024. Whether the county will amend its code to allow general-plan-aligned rezone requests, how it will close the funding gap Jones flagged, and when The Settlement at Jeremy Ranch might break ground remain open questions.