Historic Preservation Alteration Certificate (Historic District / Landmark, IN ADDITION to Building Permit) in Saguache, Colorado

Saguache requires a historic preservation alteration certificate (historic district / landmark, in addition to building permit) for: Triggered only for properties that are a Town-designated historic landmark, a contributing structure within a Town-designated historic district, or located within a Town-designated historic district (including vacant land) -- per Ord. 2025-1 Section VI, the Town Clerk determines applicability whenever an owner applies for a Building Permit or any other permit affecting alteration, removal, demolition, or new construction, and refers qualifying applications to the Historic Preservation Commission; GENUINE UNRESOLVED GAP: this session could not confirm via a primary source read directly whether the Town Board has locally designated the full Downtown Historic District under this ordinance's own Section III designation procedure, as distinct from the district's separate 2014 National Register of Historic Places listing (a federal/state action, not the same legal act as a local Town designating ordinance). The only Town-designated landmark confirmed via search (not read in full this session) is the Community Building at 525 7th Street, per Ordinance 2014-5. Confirm with the Town Clerk (719-655-2232) or the Historic Preservation Commission whether a specific property is currently subject to this ordinance before assuming it applies or does not apply.; If applicable, the owner must apply for the Alteration Certificate within 60 days of applying for the Building Permit or other permit (Ord. 2025-1, Section VI); Application must include plans/specifications showing proposed exterior appearance (texture, materials, architectural details) and names/addresses of adjacent property owners; Review criteria are technical, not administrative: the Commission (guided by the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties) must find the proposed work would not detrimentally alter, destroy, or adversely affect any contributing architectural/landscape feature, and must be visually compatible with the landmark/contributing structures/district in design, finish, material, scale, mass, and height; Normal maintenance work (repainting existing features, minor repairs not removing historic fabric, non-street-visible roofing, interior modifications, like-for-like signage repainting, landscaping) is explicitly exempted and does not require an Alteration Certificate; An exemption from the usual criteria may be requested if the applicant provides adequate professional documentation and at least two-thirds of the Commission recommends approval of the exemption. If your project isn't listed, confirm with Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) at 719-655-2232 before starting work.

In Saguache, the published Historic Landmark/District Designation Nomination Fee (NOTE: this is the fee to NOMINATE a property for historic designation, not a confirmed fee for the Alteration Certificate application itself) is: $25.00 (Ord. 2025-1; the superseded Ord. 2010-4 had set $25 with owner consent / $50 without owner consent, simplified to a flat $25 in the 2025 re-enactment). These are the jurisdiction's own published figures — see the fee schedule table and source citations on this page.

Saguache does not publish a plan-review timeline for this permit. Contact Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) at 719-655-2232 for current turnaround.

You'll need: Ordinance 2025-1 (Amending/Re-enacting Ord. 2010-4, Historic Preservation). See the required-documents checklist on this page for details on each.

Saguache requires 2 inspection(s) for a historic preservation alteration certificate (historic district / landmark, in addition to building permit), in order: Historic Preservation Commission Review, Town Board of Trustees Final Action. Schedule each through Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) (719-655-2232).

Apply through Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) at 504 San Juan Avenue, P.O. Box 417, Saguache, CO 81149. Phone: 719-655-2232, email: townclerk@townofsaguache.org. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., per the Town Hall page as preserved by the Wayback Machine (townofsaguache.org/town-hall-546.htm, captured 2025-12-10). NOTE: as of this review's live-site check (2026-07-06), the Town's website has been migrated/rebuilt on Netlify and no longer publishes this page or most of its prior content (see sources note below); hours/contact are carried forward from the last-known-good archived capture, cross-verified independently against ColoradoEnergy.org's own listed Town Clerk contact (matches exactly: 504 San Juan Ave, Saguache, CO 81149, 719-655-2232).. Official information: https://www.townofsaguache.org/.

Saguache, Colorado has adopted: NONE — ColoradoEnergy.org, a statewide Colorado building/energy code-adoption tracking directory maintained independently of any single jurisdiction, lists the Town of Saguache's Building Code status explicitly as 'No Building Codes' (coloradoenergy.org/codes/codes.aspx?City=Saguache), with a Town Clerk contact (504 San Juan Ave, Saguache, CO 81149, 719-655-2232) matching this file's independently-verified Town Hall contact exactly — confirming this listing is genuinely about the Town, not Saguache County. NOTE (2026-07-07 liveness re-check): coloradoenergy.org's HTTPS endpoint is currently hanging at the application layer, not blocked at the network layer — DNS resolves, TCP connects, and the TLS handshake completes normally (verified via a verbose curl trace), but the server accepts the HTTP request and then returns zero bytes indefinitely; plain HTTP (port 80) does eventually answer with a slow ~17s 301 redirect to the same broken HTTPS endpoint. This points to a stuck/overloaded backend on their end, not a DNS or network-path problem. Its own Wayback captures for this exact page stop at 2010, too stale to cite as current-state confirmation. The 'No Building Codes' finding is retained on the strength of the independent Town Clerk contact match above, not the ColoradoEnergy.org citation alone. Re-check coloradoenergy.org liveness in a future session.; UPDATE (2026-07-07): the Town's Municode Chapter 18 — previously flagged as unreachable (see prior note below) — was successfully read directly via a live browser render (library.municode.com/co/saguache/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=CD_ORD_CH18BURE; the site is a client-rendered SPA that returns an empty shell to plain HTTP fetches/Wayback, which is why earlier non-browser attempts failed). 'CHAPTER 18 - Building Regulations' is codified through Ordinance No. 2023-2 (enacted March 13, 2023) and contains exactly three articles, none of which adopt a model construction code: Article 1 (Sec. 18-1-10 through 18-1-90), Dangerous Buildings — an unsafe-structure abatement/demolition procedure whose text references 'the adopted building code' only as hypothetical boilerplate (comparing a damaged structure's remaining strength to what a new building would need), never naming or adopting the IBC/IRC/any specific code; Article 2 (Sec. 18-2-10 through 18-2-80), Flood Damage Prevention — a FEMA/NFIP floodplain-management ordinance adopted under Title 29 C.R.S. authority, unrelated to general construction permitting (this corrects an earlier speculative title guess of 'Field Approval,' sourced only from search-engine snippets before this chapter could actually be read); Article 3 (Sec. 18-3-10 through 18-3-50), Manufactured Homes, Mobile Homes, Mobile Home Parks and RV Parks — zoning/prohibition rules, not a construction code adoption. This directly confirms, from the Town's own primary source rather than the third-party ColoradoEnergy.org directory alone, that the Town has NOT adopted the IBC/IRC or any other model building code.; PRIOR NOTE (superseded by the UPDATE above, retained for audit trail): The Town's own currently codified Municipal Code (hosted on Municode Library, library.municode.com/co/saguache) does contain a 'CHAPTER 18 - Building Regulations' with at least an 'Article 2 - Field Approval' and an 'Article 3 - Manufactured Homes/Mobile Homes/Home Parks/Vacation Parks' (chapter/article titles confirmed via Municode's own site-indexed page titles across multiple independent search-engine queries). However, the verbatim text of Chapter 18 (including any fee schedule, permit-issuance procedure, or code-edition citation it may contain) could NOT be retrieved after exhausting every available recovery avenue: Municode's MunicodeNEXT platform serves this content exclusively via an authenticated Angular/API backend (library.municode.com/api and mcclibraryfunctions.azurewebsites.us/api both returned 401 Unauthorized to unauthenticated and referer-header requests); the Wayback Machine never captured real chapter content because Municode is a client-rendered SPA that legacy crawlers indexed as an empty shell (CDX lookups for library.municode.com/co/saguache* returned zero snapshots); Firecrawl (which can render JS) was unavailable due to exhausted account credits at time of this review; and Google/Bing search snippets surfaced only page titles, never body text, for this specific chapter.; No adopted electrical code (NEC) or plumbing code (IPC) edition was found attributable to the Town specifically; per Colorado's standard structure for small statutory towns without their own trade-permitting programs, electrical and plumbing work is presumed to fall to Colorado DORA state board licensing/permitting rather than a Town-run trade-permit program, but this file does NOT assert a Town electrical or plumbing permit process given the complete absence of any Town-published fee, form, or procedure for either trade (see localAmendments).. Local amendments apply — see the Saguache overview page for the full list.

Not one based on commercial USE -- the Building Permit fee, form, and process are identical for commercial and residential projects. However, if a building is a Town-designated historic landmark, a contributing structure, or within a designated historic district (which includes the Downtown Historic District, the Town's historic commercial core), a separate 'Alteration Certificate' from the Historic Preservation Commission is also required before construction, alteration, or demolition, in addition to the Building Permit. This is triggered by historic-designation status, not by commercial use specifically.