Residents Weigh In On County's Comprehensive Plan  November 2011
BY GENEVIEVE JACOBI
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Members of Boulder County’s Land Use Department held a meeting at the Left Hand Grange Oct. 5 to get community feedback about the county’s comprehensive plan. The Niwot meeting was the sixth and final public meeting held in a five-week period.

Next, the land use department will be making a draft of its recommendations to the county commissioners regarding the changes to the comprehensive plan.
The Boulder County Comprehensive Plan essentially sets the priorities and policies for land use in the county. It was implemented in 1978 as a response to rapid growth in the county which started in the 1950’s with the arrival of IBM, NCAR and Ball Aerospace.

The plan’s focus at that time was to counteract urban sprawl. To those ends, the county made a decision to maintain agricultural and open space land in unincorporated areas, keeping future growth largely in the existing population centers.

The Open Space Land Tax, first passed by Boulder County voters in 1992, has furthered this value by increasing county land holdings from 3,500 acres to the present day 85,000 acres.
Pete Fogg, planning division manager of the Land Use Department, said, “The plan has done what it was intended to do in keeping growth where it was anticipated. The new goals need to incorporate living sustainably within the limits we have agreed upon and to identify county-wide needs.”

Some of the new issues Fogg identified were the pine-beetle problem, watershed maintenance and the changing role of agriculture. Two short films were presented to the public about county growth patterns and the history of the Comprehensive Plan in Boulder. 

The opinions expressed by the audience members reflected strong sentiments on two central points. One was the way in which the comprehensive plan limited their property rights, and the other was the disempowerment of rural voters by the urban majority in the county.

Curtis Jones spoke about restrictive county regulation hampering people’s personal freedoms. He gave an example from his own life of not being able to put a hot tub on his property without installing an expensive solar system as its electric source. “I own a seed company,” said Jones later on in the evening, “What could be greener than that?”

Greg Mecca, who moved with his family to Niwot’s Meadowdale area a few years ago, expressed that his slice of the American dream was being eroded. He feels that county land use rules and regulations are stopping him from making environmentally friendly improvements to his property, ultimately resulting in a loss of value to his land.

Reached for comment after the meeting, Bill Davidson, a long range planner also with Land Use, summarized the process from here on out. “We will be studying everything we’ve got as far as feedback and response to see where the guiding principles might be for the next recommendation draft,” he said. An open house will also be held for the general public with a date to be announced for early November.