Dear Editor,

This letter is a short update and summary of town direction from a participant at town meetings since 1993, and a call for readers to witness and participate in the future of where we live.

IGA Update

You may have heard that the BOT allowed our land use planning IGA agreement with Boulder County to expire. The final decision was made last fall, and included the administrations of Mayor Larsen, Mayor Taylor, Mayor Mahowald, and Mayor Giblin, four mayors in as many months. During this time the town also accepted the resignation of Trustee Blakemore.

Why is the IGA important? It limits annexation and sprawl. This document supported our land use objectives as outlined in every comprehensive plan ever written for the town. Without it, even with the new ordinance that was crafted to substitute for it, the town could, in a matter of a few years, sprawl all the way to Cold Springs to the North, South to the Sundance, West to Eldora, and East to Hurricane Hill. Imagine the traffic jams!

Another, broader IGA with Boulder County is set for renewal in October. The IGA agreements offer the town a chance to ask for services from Boulder County. During negotiations a couple of years ago, Mayor Larsen went to the county with Town Administrator at the time Karen Gerrity and asked for concessions on the annexation restrictions and asked for nothing else for the town. And this is all contrary to our town planning documents, and was never authorized in a public meeting, nor does it represent the public sentiment on the direction of our town.

The town recently passed an annexation ordinance which will now govern annexations until further action is taken. One of the highlights of the ordinance: the planning committee has seven days to approve an annexation application, if they fail to act, it will default to approval and move on to the BOT. And, despite the overwhelming public comment favoring elections to decide on major annexations, our board has decided we don’t need to ask the people what they want in a free and fair election. The town posted a “survey on annexation” which did not even include the option of “no annexation”, which is what our planning documents already reflect is the will of our people. This survey was used as a partial basis for the new ordinance. Curiously, I was told in writing by a trustee that the vote would not take place at this meeting, that there would not be a quorum present. This was not the case, as a quorum was present, and the ordinance passed.

Public participation

The last two board of trustees meetings were advertised on the town website as taking place at the community center, with the option of attending virtually as well. When I went to the meeting in early January, the center was locked up. There was no meeting there. At the next meeting, Jim Reis phoned in a comment after encountering the same problem: the community center was closed for that meeting also, which he found out when he went to the center and found it locked.

At the January meeting I tried and failed to attend, virtual meeting not an option due to a computer glitch, the Town decided that they no longer needed to post notices of meetings at the post office. This goes in direct opposition to the stated and approved goals in Envision 2030, to engage the public directly. In goals and objectives, the committee placed a great deal of importance on the town offering notices and updates in hard copy in multiple places, beginning with the post office, where the town has sole use of a locked billboard, and also including updates at the library and community center. The town has been posting meeting notices at the post office for years. Why is this suddenly no longer an option, no longer practical for town staff?

Most importantly, where is our new comprehensive plan? In 2020, plans were made to begin work on it, and certain members of the town BOT decided, once the names of those who volunteered to work on the committee were in, to change the plan and instead have a “visionary” document which would serve to “guide” the next comp plan, something we still do not see on a timeline or an agenda.

Town dysfunction seems to be spiraling out of control. The police force, budget, personnel options and process are all in the realm of “emergency” for the last several months. The BOT ignored comments from the public, including myself, that prudence dictated that more than one candidate should be considered for the office of marshal. Now that the one person they offered has decided not to take the job after all, we are again roiling in a self-induced crisis of lack of planning.

I have been told by a former town employee who was fired that she was among about twenty people who were either fired or quit the town last year alone!

New trustees, having heard of the difficulties other boards have had in passing new ordinances, seem intent on pushing through whatever appears on the agenda. The last surprise was a moratorium on central business district projects and proposals, so that the town could scramble and revise ordinances - something that should have been in process for the last two years. Perhaps the moratorium was imposed with the very goal of impacting specific developers. As a court judge told former Nederland mayor Brian Brown years ago after he passed an after the fact ordinance outlawing cold storage of Dead Guys, “you cannot make up laws willy nilly to target and outlaw something that has already happened lawfully”, or words to that effect.

There seems to be real confusion on the part of the board as to what direction the town wants to take. Envision 2030, plans from 2013 and 2020, and even the 1994 comp plan, all speak to the geographic limitations on this town which make it a very poor candidate for sprawl and annexations, and voice the will of the people to develop a usable downtown and keep our borders wild. Town has already passed the ADU ordinance, which provides the opportunity for homeowners to add an additional dwelling unit on their property if yard and bulk requirements can be satisfied. The original intent of this was to encourage more affordable units, and that another water/sewer tap would not have to be purchased. But, because of the constant financial crisis in the town, that was modified to mandate the purchase of an additional tap ($40k or so), so that very few of these units have been built.

Call to action

Please let the town know where you stand on these issues. And, if you would like to be a part of the public engagement group which will meet with a trustee in an effort to move the process forward, please contact May Jarril at jarril.may@gmail.com, chair of the Envision 2030 public engagement committee, who is coordinating that meeting.

May Jarril

Nederland