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The Steamboat Springs City Council was right to hire an out-of-town mediator to help resolve a dispute in the Fairview Subdivision. It's easy to argue both sides of the Fairview issue. On one hand is a decade-old deal the city made with Fairview residents when that property was annexed into the city. On the other are new homeowners who paid market value for their properties and were unaware of restrictions that would keep them from building on those properties.

The issues here are complex enough that a mediator is the most appropriate way to resolve them. As Councilman Ken Brenner noted last week, both sides have to be willing to compromise.

The challenge for the mediator is to find a deal that honors the City Council's intent for the property and respects the property owners' rights. We hope such an arrangement can be reached. There is an overriding lesson here for City Council. It's a lot easier for future councils to interpret the intent of previous councils if that intent is in writing. Unfortunately, that apparently did not happen in the Fairview case.

In the 1990s, the City Council put together a team to negotiate the annexation of Fairview into the city limits. As part of the negotiated deal, the city agreed to sell several adjoining lots to residents of the neighborhood for the modest sum of $1,000 apiece.

Noreen Moore, who worked on the negotiating team, said the idea behind the sale of the lots was for it to be a transfer of stewardship -- the understanding was that the residents who purchased the lots would preserve them. Moore and then-Council members Paula Cooper Black and Loui Antonucci all said unequivocally that the council's intent was for those lots to be kept as open space as part of the annexation agreement.

The problem is, nobody bothered to put such restrictions in writing.

At the time, zoning on the land did not allow for secondary buildings, said Antonucci, who also is a member of the current council. "My guess is because the zoning was the way it was, we felt like we didn't have to define that," he said.

Defining it would have helped Ben and Marjie Wilcox. The Wilcoxes weren't in on the original $1,000 lot deals. Instead, they bought a small home with one of the adjoining lots years after the annexation, paying fair market value of $460,000. They had made no promises to the city and their intent was to build a new home on the lot and use the existing home as a rental. Nothing they read in purchasing the property prevented them from doing that.

Attorney Bob Weiss said that puts the Wilcoxes and other property owners in the driver's seat. "You've got deed restrictions and annexations," he said. "Nothing in any of these documents prohibits the construction of building on these properties. Period."

Maybe Weiss is right. But we are uneasy with simply dismissing the city's position out of hand. Several Fairview property owners got a great deal on their lots. In exchange, there was at least a promise that the land would be preserved as open space. That's a promise not only to the council, but also to their neighbors and to the taxpayers.

It's unfortunate the city didn't put that promise in writing. We can only hope that mediation produces a result that works for both sides, now and in the future.