Hard road for planning regionally

This is no time to be pointing fingers.

For whatever reason, people and companies are moving to Boulder County in droves, and now cities in the county with fundamentally different views on growth and development must work together on a regional growth management plan.

The Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) got the ball rolling about seven years ago with Metro Vision 2020. According to population projections released in July, DRCOG, a voluntary association of local governments including all of the cities in Boulder County, found that the county accounted for 19 percent of the growth in the eight-county metro Denver area.

Metro Vision 2020 is an attempt to “maintain our quality of life and to be able to provide the infrastructure necessary to meet the needs of actually a very large number of people,” says Longmont Mayor Leona Stoecker, who is also chairwoman of the Metro Vision 2020 steering committee.

But it’s not an exact science.

When DRCOG committee members started their lofty goal of growth management, they expected an additional 750,000 people in metro Denver by 2020. But DRCOG reps were off by about 10 years and 250,000 people. Estimates now are that the region will see 750,000 people by 2010 and 1 million people by 2020.

So does regional planning work? That depends.

Broomfield and Longmont officials say it works. Boulder city and county officials don’t think so but say it’s better than nothing. Speaking of developers is a different issue all together.

Boundaries to areas

Urban growth areas (formerly urban growth boundaries) are seen as an important tool in the Metro Vision plan. Individual cities were to establish lines that they would not cross for new developments, the idea being that by establishing such lines, cities in the metro Denver area would prevent the Californiazation of Colorado. It was to stop cities from sprawling into one another.

Getting cities to draw those lines was and remains a feat. In 1995, the metro Denver urban area was approximately 535 square miles, and long-range plans showed build-out, considering individual cities’ comprehensive plans, at 1,100 square miles. DRCOG wanted to contain new development within 700 square miles but compromised at 730 square miles.

Boulder has some of the most restrictive lines of all of the cities that DRCOG represents, which might explain why commercial land in the city of Boulder is so expensive and why developers increasingly are attracted to offerings in Broomfield, Lafayette or Louisville.

“Once you limit land area, it’s the supply-and-demand issue,” Stoecker explains. “Prices go up.”

As an incentive, DRCOG awards points to cities that adopt urban growth areas, which could put the cities in better standing when they want money for transportation projects. But it’s all voluntary. “This was the first real attempt to encourage the behavior for Metro Vision,” says DRCOG Executive Director Bill Vidal. “We have no authority to make anything mandatory.”

That’s what bothers Boulder city and county officials. DRCOG is similar to the United Nations, says Boulder County Commissioner Paul Danish, “and about as effective.”

Don’t cross that line

The problem, Danish says, is that cities aren’t legally bound to keep their urban growth boundaries, and most of the 50-some cities served by DRCOG “are like the girl who can’t say no.”

Danish says the only way to hold cities to regional plans are the creation of intergovernmental agreements where neighboring cities might commit to contribute money toward open space purchases or promise not to annex land without permission of the city that might be affected. Boulder County has agreements with several of its individual cities, and those agreements can’t be amended unless all of the signatories agree.

“So you don’t change that plan just because some shopping-center developer comes along and says, Oh, gee, I know you spent all this time and effort trying to plan your city, but I have a very special project,’ ” Danish says. “Well, of course, the bigger the project, the greater the impact, and the more likely they are to be very special, which is one of the problems comprehensive planning always has.”

Pointing fingers

No, we shouldn’t point fingers. But what Boulder officials typically view as sprawl, others say is their tax base.

Boulder Mayor Will Toor says Broomfield’s FlatIron Crossing and Interlocken Business Park are only going to make a bad situation worse with transportation issues. People are going to be coming from all over to work in Broomfield, he says.

But Broomfield Mayor Bill Berens says he doesn’t understand how Boulder city and county officials could blame Broomfield for the transportation mess.

Berens says Boulder set it all in motion by not providing enough affordable housing and forcing its workers down the corridor to live in Lafayette, Louisville and Broomfield. Now that these cities are trying to diversify their tax bases and keep jobs at home for their residents, Boulder complains, he says.

“Anyone who says, I don’t think Broomfield’s or Westminster’s growth is appropriate’ is somewhat hypocritical,” Berens charges. “Don’t you think Boulder went through its growth cycle? They went out and annexed IBM.

“The city of Boulder’s thought process around growth is, Leave it for somebody else. I will take the commercial and the industrial and the business but I don’t want the residential. Then I’m going to criticize Lafayette, Louisville and Broomfield for their growth and their sprawl because I haven’t and I won’t build the residential.”

To a degree Toor agrees. He says he’s all for rezoning Boulder’s leftover commercial and industrial land for residential use, but says it’s not that easy.

“That’s probably the biggest mistake Boulder has made over the years — allowing the high level of commercial growth that we had without allowing residential growth,” Toor concedes. “We really have created that problem. But, unfortunately, the rest of the county seems to be doing their best to repeat our mistakes.”

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