December 2022 will go down as the end of an era. The Nederland Board of Trustees exited from the Intergovernmental Agreement with Boulder County and passed an annexation ordinance. There once had been a shared vision for the landscape. Now the future of land use in the areas surrounding Nederland is rather unpredictable.

The 1970s into the 1990s was a time where growth of the Denver-Boulder area was accelerating. As the core filled in, outlying areas with vacant land became the next place for urban expansion. Boulder County is basically the northwest quadrant of the metropolitan area. The small towns of Louisville, Superior, and Lafayette were looking to annex land and expand. The City of Longmont wanted to ring itself with several tiers of neighborhoods. The Town of Lyons considered expanding its community into Dowe Flats.

Nederland did not escape the frenzy. In 1987 Nederland came out with its first comprehensive plan. It showed the Arapaho Ranch and Tucker Homestead as future growth areas. This was the last straw for Lee Evans at the Arapaho Ranch. In 1969 the Boulder Valley School District condemned 19 acres of the ranch for the Nederland Jr/ Sr High School. Growing suspicious of public entities, the Evans family placed a conservation easement on the vast majority of the Arapaho Ranch with Colorado Open Lands in 1987. The easement precluded additional development and other land uses that could adversely alter its ecological and scenic values. It was another layer of protection.

The response to rapid growth and development in the county included the passing of the County Open Space sales tax by its citizens in 1993 and the intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) with the numerous towns. The goals included minimizing urban sprawl, protecting wildlife habitat, retaining landscape connectivity for wildlife movement, preserving farmland, and maintaining scenic integrity. Urban growth should be funneled into towns that can best provide urban services. Areas outside of towns and cities should remain rural in character; the County did not want to be in the business of providing urban services.

This vision of the County provided the framework for not only open space acquisition but also urban planning over the next 30 years. The county acquired many of the larger ranches for open space - Caribou, Reynolds, Mud Lake, Hall, Heil, Rabbit Mountain, and Rock Creek to name a few. And towns updated their community comprehensive plans to reflect the overall vision, further demarcating the line between urban and rural.

Nederland was on board with these concepts. As stated in the current Nederland Comprehensive Plan, “Infill development and redevelopment will prevent Nederland from building outward, protecting undeveloped tracts of land for open space, wildlife habitat and watershed protection.” The concept of holding the human footprint constant is an often overlooked part of sustainability. With every expansion of the human footprint there is a direct loss of habitat - there is no win-win situation.

But now Nederland has exited the IGA with Boulder County and it is a bit of a crapshoot as to what land uses may occur on lands surrounding the town if annexed. The current Comprehensive Plan, which stresses infill over expansion, appears outdated if the town wishes to annex lands outside the town. Has the community decided to expand outward?

Before annexing lands outside of town the comprehensive plan should be updated. The decision to expand outside of town should be made through a community-wide process. If lands are deemed appropriate for expansion they are given a land use designation on the Future Land Use Map of the Comprehensive Plan, which tells everyone what will likely be there - there is a certain level of predictability. And people that live outside of town should be part of the planning process, as they will be directly impacted. It is important to find a shared vision.

Annexation is basically a negotiation between the property owner and the Board of Trustees. This is piecemeal, case-by-case land use planning, not comprehensive. It is not the appropriate vehicle to decide whether or not the town should spatially expand. The debate about expansion should first be held at the community level (comprehensive planning), not the parcel level (annexation).

Dave worked as a long-range planner for the City of Longmont in the early 1980s and was a planner for Boulder County Open Space for 35 years.