Telluride building permits

Tips & gotchas

• Telluride is a home-rule town with its OWN Planning & Building Department, Building Division (Rebekah Hall, 113 W. Columbia Ave) — San Miguel County's own Building Department has land use and building authority only over unincorporated county land, per the County's own jurisdictional statements, and does not issue permits within Telluride town limits despite sharing a physical address complex (333 W Colorado Ave is the County's separate office).
• Telluride's entire town core is a National Historic Landmark District: HARC (Historic and Architectural Review Commission) Certificate of Appropriateness approval is required BEFORE building permit issuance for essentially any exterior work — erection, demolition, moving, renovation, restoration, addition to, or alteration of any structure or sign, and even for a straightforward re-roof. This is a genuinely distinct process from Building Division plan review, triaged into four review-intensity tiers (Large Scale, Small Scale, Minor, Insubstantial).
• Ground/roof snow load design criteria changed with the 2024 code cycle (Ordinance 1620, effective 9/12/2025): it is now determined 'per the ASCE Hazard tool' rather than the flat 75 psf figure used under the prior 2018-cycle ordinance — always confirm which cycle's design value a structural submission is using.
• Table R301.2 design criteria (Telluride Municipal Code 15-2-30, current 2024-cycle text): 100 mph Vult wind speed/Exposure B, Seismic Design Category B, Severe weathering, 48-inch frost line depth, None-to-slight termite, -16 F winter design temp, ice barrier underlayment REQUIRED, 2000 air freezing index, 40 F mean annual temp.
• The Town publishes NO numeric plan-review turnaround (days or weeks) for any standard building-permit category anywhere on its site — not on the Building Department page, the Building Codes page, the Applications/Forms/Permits/Resources page, the Building Permit Fee Schedule, or the Construction Mitigation Plan Manual. Colorado is home-rule with no statewide clock, and every permitType in this record is honestly null/unverified with a documented chase trail rather than an invented figure.
• A single Table 1-A valuation-based fee schedule, effective 1/1/2023, applies to Building, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing permits alike — each trade's own project valuation runs through the same table, rather than electrical being anchored to a separate state-mandated schedule. That makes multi-trade estimating straightforward here.
• The Green Building Fee (20% of the Building Permit Fee) funds the Telluride Energy Mitigation Program (TEMP, Ordinance 1372) and can alternately be mitigated on-site or off-site with an eligible renewable energy system rather than paid as a straight fee.
• The Building License Fee (construction cost x 0.007) does NOT apply to single-family, duplex, or triplex units built in the residential zone, or to deed-restricted long-term housing units built in any zone (Municipal Code Ch. 6, Sec. 6-1-20(5)) — most standard single-family residential permits in this record will not incur this fee, but confirm against your specific project's zoning and deed-restriction status.
• All contractors and subcontractors need a current Town of Telluride BUSINESS LICENSE (Municipal Code Chapter 6, administered by the Town Clerk's Office) to perform work within town limits, separate from any Colorado state trade licensure that may also apply.
• A Construction Mitigation Plan (CMP) is required, and must be approved by the Building Department before permit issuance or construction start, for any project disturbing 500+ sq ft of property or involving 500+ sq ft of demolition/renovation (interior and/or exterior) within any 12-month period — thresholds are cumulative across all projects on the same property. Contractor construction hours are separately limited to Monday-Friday 8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. under Municipal Code Section 7-2-20(b).
• Short-Term Rental (STR) licensing in Telluride is administered by the Town Clerk's Department (STR Program Administrator), not the Building Division — a separate regulatory/licensing process, not modeled as a permitType in this record.
• Accessory Dwelling Units, standalone Fence/Retaining Wall permits, and standalone Demolition permits are NOT modeled as separate permit types for Telluride: Telluride's own Land Use Code publishes a 950 sq ft general accessory-structure cap, while a conflicting, unsourced third-party '1,000 sq ft' ADU figure is not verifiable against the code text itself, and the published fence/demolition rules are zoning/historic-preservation review criteria (Land Use Code, Design Guidelines) rather than Building Division permit-type data with its own fees/documents/timelines. All three still require a standard Building Division permit (via Residential Building or Addition/Remodel) plus, for ADUs/demolitions, the separate HARC and zoning review described above.
• Use telluride.gov (no hyphen) for the Town of Telluride. The older telluride-co.gov address no longer resolves at all, so any saved link or citation using it will simply fail — the same pages are live at the equivalent telluride.gov addresses, including the Ordinance 1620 and HARC material. Municipal Code and Land Use Code text is hosted at telluride.municipal.codes, ordinance PDFs are in the Town's DocumentCenter, and telluride-co.civicweb.net still works.
• Telluride tracks commercial construction as a distinct permit path, visible in the Town's 2025 Issued Permits with Valuation ledger through two live SmartGov application-number prefixes: 'BLDG-ADDCOMM' (Addition to Commercial Building Permit, with real examples up to $16,963,258.00) and 'BLDG-ALTERCOMM' (Alteration or Repair to Commercial Building Permit, covering everything from a $5,720 roof patch to an $8,500 interior tenant build-out). Telluride does NOT maintain a separately named or separately priced 'Tenant Improvement' permit distinct from general commercial alteration and repair, unlike the 'Tenant Finish' checkbox that appeared on the Town's paper permits as recently as 2005. No 'BLDG-NEWCOMM' prefix appears anywhere in the 2025 ledger. The fee mechanism for both permit types (commercial-building-permit, tenant-improvement-permit) is the same Table 1-A schedule used for residential — but commercial permits are NOT exempt from the Building License Fee (0.007 x construction cost) the way SF, duplex and triplex residential permits are, and commercial or public-facility floor-area increases additionally trigger a formula-based Housing Impact Mitigation obligation (Planning Department worksheet) whose fee-in-lieu per-square-foot rate under Land Use Code Section 3-740.A.3 is not published and is left unquantified here.
• The Town does not publish a Building Division plan-review turnaround for any permit category — including the commercial-building-permit and tenant-improvement-permit entries, whose fees are fully verified from primary sources but whose timelines remain unpublished (hence their 'partial' confidence). Neither the Town's 'Developer's Toolkit' staff/applicant training PDF (telluride.gov/DocumentCenter/View/7030) nor the full Land Use Code text (telluride.gov/DocumentCenter/View/8822/LUC-full-2020-02; also hosted at telluride.municipal.codes) states one. The Land Use Code's Article 5 (Development Review Procedures, Sections 5-102/5-202/5-203/5-204/5-206) governs P&Z/HARC land-use hearings specifically (subdivisions, PUDs, variances, annexations, HARC review) and contains only public-notice windows (10/15/30 days) and a 10-day completeness-appeal window — no fixed-day completeness/compliance review clock and no provision reaching routine Building Permit plan review at all. Unlike neighboring Mountain Village, whose 'Development Guide' (townofmountainvillage.com) publishes review commitments, Telluride has no directly equivalent published document stating a 2-6-week-style commitment. Separately, on the LUC 3-740.A.3 Housing Impact Mitigation fee-in-lieu rate: the LUC text confirms the $/sq ft figure is NOT in the LUC but set by the Telluride Affordable Housing Guidelines (telluride-co.civicweb.net/document/51945/), whose Table 4 lists $70.45/sq ft for Town Impact Units — but that document's amendment history caps out at March 27, 2001, roughly 25 years stale against the LUC's own mandatory 2-year fee review cycle, so the figure is a historical data point only and is deliberately not recorded in the commercial-building-permit entry's fees as a current number.