Niwot LID Adopts Strategic Plan
BY KIM GLASSCOCK
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Niwot Local Improvement District Advisory Board members adopted the first strategic plan for the group at the Dec. 6 meeting.

The LID’s strategic plan includes a mission and vision statement, guiding principles and value statements for how the group will operate. It also defines three LID funding categories: infrastructure, marketing and promotions, and economic development for the town.

The plan describes objectives for the use of funds in each of the categories, outlines how success will be measured and describes general parameters for the types of activities that can be considered for LID funding in each category.

 
Niwot Begins Journey To Sustainability
BY LIZ EMMETT-MATTOX
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If you go looking for the trash can at the next Niwot event, you’ll have a hard time finding one. Instead, you’ll find volunteers helping people sort waste into brand new compost and recycling bins.
These bins and the compostable dishes that you’ll see were purchased with grant money from Boulder County’s Community Outreach program and represent the first step in what Cottonwood Park West resident Kai Abelkis calls

“Niwot’s journey to sustainability.”

As NBA President Tony Santelli explained, the bigger goal is to make Niwot as a whole a more sustainable community. “Step one is the events. Let’s make all the Niwot events zero waste. Step two is the business community. How can the businesses in Niwot be greener? Step three is to expand to all of Niwot, the individuals. Wouldn’t it be amazing for Niwot to become the first zero-waste town? That would really be something special.”

Public Improvement District Meeting
BY KIM GLASSCOCK
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More than 45 Niwot area residents turned out for a Dec. 7 informational meeting about a proposal to create a public improvement district to finance road reconstruction and repaving of subdivision and local access roads in Niwot.

The meeting was sponsored by the Niwot Community Association, whose members voted in July to support moving forward with a ballot proposal to create a “front-loaded” public improvement district.
The PID would raise tax revenues to specifically fund road repaving and rehabilitation for subdivision and local access roads in Niwot. It would apply to property owners on those roads. Information efforts about the PID are being led by NCA members Dick Piland and Pat Murphy.

Paying for road repaving and rehabilitation has been a contentious issue for more than two years, after county residents were told that a provision had been added in 1995 to the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan that local access roads will be rehabbed and resurfaced by the users and local residents who benefit from using them. Despite many protests from county residents, the provision remains in effect.
In a fall 2010 advisory vote, 58 percent of unincorporated Boulder County residents rejected a county-sponsored proposal to create an overall local improvement district to collect taxes for paving subdivision and local access roads.

Left Hand Laurel: Dr. Neka Hafezzadeh
BY LIZ EMMETT-MATTOX
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When she was about four years old, Neka Hafezzadeh decided she wanted to be a doctor. Unlike many children who change their career aspirations as often as their favorite color, Hafezzadeh stuck with her childhood vision as she went through Niwot schools all the way from kindergarten at Niwot Elementary to graduating from Niwot High in 2001.
When it came time for college, Hafezzadeh stayed close to home and enrolled at CU. Her interest in medicine never faded and while she was a student at CU, she worked for an optometrist and found that she really loved it.

When she graduated, there were no optometry schools in Colorado, so she obtained her medical degree at Indiana University. But she always knew she wanted to come back home so she returned to Niwot and joined The Vision Centre, an established optometry practice in Longmont.

In optometry school, her rotations focused on different aspects of ocular disease. She learned that diabetes is the number one cause of preventable blindness. Uncontrolled fluctuations in blood sugar affect the blood vessels throughout the body.