BOULDER COUNTY - Boulder County Parks and Open Space (BCPOS) personnel held their second and final public meeting regarding the Middle Boulder Creek Fuels Reduction Partnership Project on July 31, 2025, at the Nederland Community Center.

The purpose of the meeting was to respond to public comments after the first meeting and unveil the Project Scope of Work document, which will be used in the request for bids in the next phase of the project.

Laura Hickey from CDR Associates acted as the facilitator for the meeting and moderated the Q&A portion. Nederland Fire Department Chief Charlie Schmidtmann was a participant at the meeting. Colorado State Forest and Boulder County Wildfire Partners representatives were also on hand to answer questions about their various programs.

The meeting started with an overview of the project by Julien Blundell from the Boulder Watershed Collective (BWC), one of the partners in the project. Blundell went through the objectives, timeline, and funding sources for the project.

He said the primary objective is to reduce fuel loads in the area and the risk of a severe wildfire bordering the town of Nederland.

Scott Golden, Senior Resource Specialist for Boulder County, led the review of comments already submitted to the BCPOS website. These were grouped by areas of concern.

The first concern that Golden addressed was: Balancing mitigation investment with level of impact on risk reduction.

Golden started his response by stating that the Tucker and Elk Draw (TED) forests are considered community forests because they are located in a Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) area.

The BCPOS response to balancing mitigation investments was to mitigate to a level where fire personnel could mount a defense of the area with reasonable safety. The objective is to decrease fuel loads in the area for safer fire control operations in them.

Golden said that it is a multi-pronged approach that includes implementing the objectives of the Boulder County CWPP with home hardening and private landowner outreach and education.

Golden brought up the benefits of landscape treatments with the preservation of legacy trees and functioning wetlands. One by-product of a successful mitigation investment would be more resilient forests.

The second concern: Long term success requires prescribed fire and data-based decisions.

The BCPOS response was to use pile burning for the slash, lodge pole regeneration management, post-mitigation monitoring for invasive plants, and preparing for prescribed burns.

The rest of the concerns are addressed in the project FAQ which is on the project website. The link is titled "Middle Boulder Creek Fuel Reduction Partnership Project FAQ."

In the second section of the meeting, Jessica Hawkins, Boulder County Forestry Specialist, gave a detailed review of the Project Scope of Work document and highlighted some of the specifications. The document is accessible on the project website.

The document specifies that the majority of the project will be done using mechanized thinning, but areas designated as sensitive will require hand thinning. The work will be done in the winter, when the ground is frozen, to minimize ground disturbance. Logs that are too big to be burned in a slash pile will be transported to a sorting yard in Longmont.

The final portion of the meeting was a Q&A segment about the Project Scope of Work presentations or other issues or concerns about the project.

There was a question about the creation of unauthorized trails that would follow pathways that the logging equipment left behind. The concern was that dirt bikes and hikers would start using these tracks.

Golden said that doing the work in the winter would reduce ground disturbance and the contractor would perform restoration work in the spring. He said that BCPOS also plans on removing the existing social trails in the TED forests. There will be an emergency services road through the middle of the project that will be maintained.

For more information about the project, see Boulder County's webpage at bouldercounty.gov/open-space/management/middle-boulder-creek, with a link now for public comments on the Project Scope of Work.

Public comments on the Scope of Work document can be submitted through Friday, August 15, 2025. All submitted public comments can also be viewed from the webpage. There is a link for the initial comments and a second link for comments regarding the Project Scope of Work.

Under Additional Resources at the bottom of the webpage are three articles that discuss the current methodologies regarding landscape-scale fuel treatments and their efficacy. These articles also have links to more articles discussing the subject the same way the Boulder CWPP story map (boulder-county-cwpp-bouldercounty.hub.arcgis.com) allows for drill-downs to more detailed information.

There is a separate article analyzing the impact of the Cal-Wood fire on previously mitigated land at assets.bouldercounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/fuels-tratments-impact-carbon-stocks.pdf.

The analysis conclusion is complicated by the fact that the mitigated fuels in some areas weren’t removed, so the fuel load wasn’t reduced prior to the fire in those mitigated areas.

Questions regarding the project can be directed to either Michael Agena at magena@bouldercounty.gov or 303-413-7771; or to Julien Blundell at julien@boulderwatershedcollective.org or 720-501-8588.