“The authors specifically call out new construction that is significantly controlled by comprehensive plans or through more restrictive land use regulations “referred to as ‘compact development,’ ‘urban consolidation,’ ‘growth management’ and ‘smart growth.’” The thesis is that these places create housing that is unaffordable. And conversely, the places ranked as affordable – Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas – tend to be areas associated with sprawl development.”

Read the entire article at The Atlantic Cities: The Most and Least Affordable Housing in America.

Completely different from the typical Comprehensive Plan, Golden’s Plan is now based on the town’s values. It includes neighborhood planning, outreach, and indicators for measuring progress and effectiveness of the Plan. It also includes General Decision-Making Guidelines, a step-by-step process to evaluate whether a development proposal addresses and fosters Golden’s core values.

Read the entire article at the Orton Family Foundation:  Promising Magic, Delivering Results.

John Schlagel's corn at Niwot Farms. Photo credit: Lori Hobkirk

“Cookies anyone? Lemonade?” asked Ron Stewart, director of Boulder County’s Open Space Department. On the evening of July 13, he enthusiastically shared snacks and his knowledge of agriculture in Boulder as the second of four Cropland Policy Agricultural Tours departed from the parking lot of the Boulder County Fairgrounds. These tours are meant to inform the public and advisory committees about the issues relevant to the Cropland Policy. The Cropland Policy is designed to address the gap between the Open Space Department’s daily management practices and the County Comprehensive Plan’s directives regarding the management of open space and agricultural land. The policy will outline the guiding principles that county staff will use to make management decisions on open space properties managed as cropland.

The rural appearance of large swaths of Boulder County is not an accident. It is founded in a long and storied appreciation for the value of open land, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, but most recently codified in the 1970s via the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan and the creation of the Open Space Department. The County oversees more than 94,000 acres of open space. Of those, roughly 25,000 acres is leased to 85 farmers under various lease arrangements. So, on your next circle-Boulder-through-open-space bike ride, remember that some county-owned open space may be somebody’s private farm field that is also county-owned and will never be developed into anything else.

Our first stop was at Wyatt Barnes’s and Amy Tisdale’s Red Wagon Organic Farm. This plot showcases a new lease/buy arrangement that is the first of it’s kind. It is intended to help farmers with their biggest challenge: the high price of land in the county. Farmers can bid on the house plus one acre. The bid process is open to the general public, advertised in local publications and awarded based on the applicant’s ability to follow-through on the terms of the sale. Upon a successful bid, part of the sale contingency is a lease commitment to organically farm several adjacent acres. Can Barnes and Tisdale make money at it? Yes, but with very long hours and working against the tide of our culture’s—as Amy Tisdale put it—“undervaluing of food.”

At Niwot Farms, the second stop, John Schlagel was the first to farm on Open Space. His natural beef operation consists of more than 1,000 head of cattle. But, make no mistake, his is a feedlot operation. While cows do spend time grazing on grass, they also eat corn products such as distiller’s grain, which is a byproduct of ethanol production, and GMO corn he grows on site. The corn rows adjacent to the cow pens that stand tall and weed free allow him to keep his work load and staff to a minimum, making it economically feasible to farm as he does. His meat, processed and distributed by Meyer Natural Beef (formerly Coleman Natural), ends up at places like Whole Foods and Good Times.

Third generation Boulder County farmer Jules Van Thuyne, Jr. spoke to us on our third stop. Of his nearly 1,800-acre operation, 950 are leased from the Boulder County. He grows corn, wheat, sugar beets, sunflowers, pinto beans, and alfalfa. He is pioneering no-till farming in the county— an agricultural technique that increases the amount of water in the soil and decreases erosion, while maintaining the amount and variety of life in and on the soil. As the sun set behind a spectacular view of the Front Range with a dryland sunflower crop in the foreground, Mr. Van Thuyne spoke sentimentally of farming and of his soft spot for conservation easements as a method of addressing the biggest challenge to farmer’s today. Wikipedia defines a conservation easement as an encumbrance that creates a legally enforceable land preservation agreement between a landowner and a government agency (municipality, county, state, federal) or a qualified land protection organization (often called a “land trust”), for the purposes of conservation. It restricts real estate development, commercial, and industrial uses, and certain other activities on a property to a mutually agreed upon level. The property remains the private property of the landowner. Van Thuyne’s ability to buy his original farmland came as a result of a conservation easement, without which the land price would have made it impossible for him to own land. Which brought us full circle to the reason for the County’s lease/buy trial at Red Wagon Organic Farm.

Back at the fairgrounds, Ron Stewart stood at the bottom of the bus steps, collecting evaluation forms and bidding people good night. We hope the County gets high marks for these tours; this one was fun and highly educational. What a wonderful way to spend a warm summer evening.

If you’re interested in participating in one of the next tours on August 10 and September 20, register at least one week ahead of time at the County’s website.

In the last few years, the weakness of the Plan has become evident. In 2005, that council decided to “keep the 5 Year Update open” for some years in case they wanted to annex land in Area III – Planning Reserve for a big box store. This was a clear violation of the Plan’s procedures. But the County Commissioners were silent about this abuse, in spite of significant prodding. Just a few years ago, the Council wanted to put more dense development on the Washington School site than the Plan allowed, so they simply amended the Plan. In addition to being an ad hoc change to the Plan, what they proposed would have amounted to an illegal spot zoning. Fortunately, the citizens who live in the area were able to gather signatures from throughout the city to refer the Council’s scheme to the ballot, and the next Council created a process to balance needs of the neighborhood with those of the developer. And just last year, a very similar process occurred with the Boulder Junior Academy site on Fourth Street. This time, faced with an election, the Council that was pushing the development backed off.

These incidents exposed the fundamental flaw in the Comp Plan – the citizens have no power to enforce it. To identify a couple of other policies that are in the Comp Plan but are not enforced, there is a requirement that “growth pay its own way” (in the Policy section) and another for “zero growth in vehicle miles traveled” (in the Transportation Master Plan that is attached to the Plan).  The Council has not bothered to implement these policies in any consistent or complete way.

The current Comprehensive Plan update is supposed to focus on “sustainability.”  The notion is to come up with measures of economic, social and environmental sustainability, and then see how various plans measure up. This all sounds great, but based on what I have observed in the past, various interest groups in the City will want their favorite measures included. Many of these measures will conflict with each other – that is, what is sustainable under one group’s idea would not be under another’s – and many will also conflict with the real notion of sustainability, which is, “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  And after all this , the city council will continue to make decisions based on a majority vote, irrespective of what the Plan says. So the Update process will have added nothing.

To make the Comprehensive Plan meaningful again, the Council should grant power to the citizens to enforce it, and grant neighborhoods and the community at large the power to set limits on development that they can live with.  Doing this will force the Council to consider what policies and zoning they really want to be bound by and what the citizens actually want. Hopefully, then the Comprehensive Plan will return to being a truly useful document on which the citizens can rely.