Sky-Hi News called me the other day for a raw, unedited interview to give voters an authentic and direct look into my views and my intentions as County Commissioner. I will be posting one question a day for easier reading.
You can read about the format and production of Sky-Hi’s 2026 Election Q&A here.
Question 7:
At the forum, you advocated updating zoning and land-use codes to allow more housing types and greater density where infrastructure already exists. What specific zoning changes would you propose, and how would you ensure they produce housing affordable to local workers rather than additional second homes or vacation rentals?
The changes that I’ve been saying have really been opening up planning and zoning to allow for and prioritize density. So where there’s already infrastructure, where there could be more infrastructure for maybe less cost, that is where I would want to concentrate new development, and that development would be cheaper, just by way of one, it’s multifamily housing; it’s density housing. So that’s multiplexes and duplexes and just smaller buildings that would lower the cost of construction. There wouldn’t be new roads; there wouldn’t really be much new infrastructure built to access those new developments. So I’m seeing that as if we’re just doing it based on the cost of the construction itself, the bottom line would be lower.
Again, I don’t believe the county should get into development. However, if the county has county land that they could commit to development, prioritizing locals, year-round residents, building them at cost as opposed to inflating the cost based on the developer’s whims, I think would be a really good step forward to encouraging and prioritizing the workers and the year-round residents of the county.
I would be interested in having the conversations around vacancy taxes or second home taxes or fees in order to demonstrate that Grand County is prioritizing our full-time residents and our workers without alienating a large block of our tourist economy. I’m sure the state would want to be involved if we were to say housing can only be sold to these people because that would restrict the free market. But if we were able to demonstrate our priorities and make sure that our locals, our full-time residents, and our workers kind of had first crack at things, especially if those houses- like condos, tiny homes and multiplex housing units, multifamily housing units, if they were built more in a concentrated area, I think that in and of itself would make them less appealing to second homeowners because they wouldn’t really be built as vacation homes; they would be built as full-time residences.
You can read the full interview here: https://www.skyhinews.com/news/qa-say-hello-to-jeremy-krones-running-for-county-commissioner-district-3/
