Planning Reserve
The following statement was read to the Boulder City Council by PBC Board member Susan Peterson:
October 12, 2010
To the Members of the Boulder City Council:
The intent of the procedure for the expansion of the Area II-Service Area into the Area III-Planning Reserve is to ensure that decisions about changes to the Service Area are based on Comprehensive Plan policies and city and/or county-initiated changes, rather than being “incremental, reactive, and applicant-driven”undefined as the City of Boulder and the County of Boulder agreed at the conclusion of the Area III Planning Project in 1993 that the process had become.
As you know, such an extension of the Area II-Service Area first requires the development of a Service Area Expansion Plan, which, among other elements, involves:
- identification by staff and community of a range of community needs, and four-body approval
- a determination of whether these needs can or cannot be met within the existing Service Area, and
- zoning and planning of needed streets and utilities if the Service Area is to be enlarged.
Regrettably, the proposals currently before you for a professional sports training complex on Dr.Villavicencio’s property and for a housing and truck gardening project on the Palmos’ property are exactly what the current procedure was intended to prevent.
1. The proposals are indeed “application-driven” and “reactive.” These proposals were initiated either at the instigation of the property owner or in close cooperation with the property owner based on needs purported by the applicants themselves. They were pointedly NOT initiated by and from the community.
2. The proposals are indeed “incremental.” They do not deal with the Planning Reserve as a whole, but only with the individual properties owned or to be owned by the applicants. One of the major purposes of the Area III-Planning Reserve process is to assure that a coherent plan for the entire area is developed before any single property within it. Assuming for the sake of argument that the community determines that it needs a professional sports training complex or a housing and truck-gardening complex, and that those projects could not be developed within the existing Service Area, then many questions remain:
- Where within the Planning Reserve would the best location for such facilities be?
- How would these two projects affect what would subsequently be developed in the Planning Reserve?
- Where would the roads and utilities be located?
- How would the entire Planning Reserve be zoned?
- What would happen to the city-owned land, which constitutes close to half of the property in the Planning Reserve? Would it still be appropriate for a park? If so, would it be in the best location for a park? Should it be exchanged for some of the private land in the Planning Reserve, and, if so, which private land?
Clearly, a lot of questions must be answered before any decisions can be reached about the current proposals. At the moment, you have gotten “the cart before the horse.” A sound public process for the possible expansion of the Area II-Service Area into the Area III-Planning Reserve would first need to be followed. Only after it has been implemented would the City of Boulder, the County of Boulder, the City Planning Board, and the County Planning Commission be in a position to consider any particular proposals.
The existing process has been attacked on the grounds that “community needs” may be very hard to ascertain. That is a reasonable concern. We do not pretend to know at this point exactly how they should be established. But we do know that they should be based only on a clear and broad community consensus, perhaps discerned from surveys, focus groups, and careful interviews with representatives of various segments of the community undefined and not by the clamor of any particular property owner or interest group.
It has also been criticized for inadvertently encouraging property owners to submit proposals which are destined to be automatically rejected, thereby causing unnecessary effort and expense. That critique also contains some validity and suggests that adjustments to the process would be appropriate, provided that its underlying intent is maintained.
Of the three options presented in the staff memo for this study session, PLAN-Boulder County supports Option 3: evaluate and propose revisions to the Service Area expansion process, while not pursuing Service Area expansion at this time. PLAN-Boulder County submits that such an evaluation should help to resolve the current ambiguities and inadequacies of aspects of the Service Area Expansion Plan and prepare the City and the County to consider some day far-sighted, community-based proposals that would serve the vital needs of future generations of Boulder citizens.
Boulder is regarded all over the world as a leader in environmental policies, thoughtful planning, and compact development. PLAN-Boulder County urges Council to continue to exhibit that leadership through our careful stewardship of the Planning Reserve.
Sincerely,
The Board of PLAN-Boulder County
The following statement was made to the Boulder County Planning Commission on behalf of PLAN-Boulder County by Alan Boles on June 16, 2010.
My name is Alan Boles, and I am here on behalf of PLAN-Boulder County. Before you are 26 requested changes to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan as part of its 2010 Major Update. I want to speak briefly about only two of them, numbered17 and 18 in your staff memo.
Those are requests from landowners to “move” two properties from Area III-Planning Reserve to Area II-Service Area designation. One of those properties, owned by the Palmos family, is proposed for development into a housing and truck gardening project to be called Agriburbia, and the other is proposed for development into a professional sports training complex to attract athletes from around the world. The Boulder City staff and the City of Boulder Planning Board both recommended that these proposals not be considered further in the 2010 Update. However, at its May 25 study session the Boulder City Council appeared confused by these requests and asked for additional information about the proposals, as well as information from the City staff about the contents of a work plan and a time line for considering expansion of the Area II-Service Area into the Area III-Planning Reserve to accommodate these requests.
As you know, expansion of the Service Area first requires the development of a Service Area Expansion Plan, which, among other elements, involves four-body approval and identification by staff and the community of a range of community needs, a determination of whether they can or cannot be met within the existing Service Area, and planning of needed streets and utilities if the Service Area is to be enlarged. The intent of this procedure is to ensure that decisions about changes to the Service Area are based on Comprehensive Plan Policies and City and/or County-initiated changes, rather than being “incremental, reactive, and applicant-driven”undefinedas the City of Boulder and the County of Boulder agreed at the conclusion of the Area III Planning Project in 1993 that the process had become.
Unfortunately, the requests numbered 17 and 18 in your memo are “incremental, reactive, and applicant-driven”undefinedexactly what the current procedure was intended to prevent. Neither of these proposals meets the criteria for a change to the Planning Reserve, including such criteria as the provision of a need agreed-upon by the community, minimum size, contiguity, and no major negative impacts. It should also be noted that the soil in the Planning Reserve is notoriously poor, rendering it particularly inappropriate for truck gardening. Furthermore, the proposed sports complex would be grandiose, including such facilities as a hotel, conference center, 50 units of temporary housing, restaurants, and equipment and clothing shops, and apparently designed primarily to fulfill the fantasies of its landowner-proponent, rather than an existing community need.
PLAN-Boulder County opposes these projects in the Planning Reserve. We are also disturbed by the strange, ad hoc nature of the request of the Boulder City Council concerning them. Although we recognize that you are not being asked by the staff at this time to do anything with respect to Requests 17 and 18, we nonetheless invite you now to express your disapproval of them. They represent misconceived changes to the Planning Reserve. Further work on them by the City staff and by County staff would be a mis-allocation of their limited time. We are asking you, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, to now “just say no.”
We would also like to recommend that, after the 2010 Update to the BVCP has been completed, the four bodies agree to adhere to the original procedure
created for changes to the Planning Reserve. That procedure would mean that the City and/or the County would first determine through a community-wide process what the community needs are and whether they can or cannot be met within the existing Service Area. Only after a particular community need has been agreed-upon that cannot be met within the existing Service Area would requests for proposals from developers be issued.
That scenario would help to ensure that changes to the Planning Reserve are community-driven, not “applicant-driven. “
Boulder is regarded all over the world as a leader in environmental policies, thoughtful planning, and compact development. We need to continue to show that leadership through our careful stewardship of the Planning Reserve.
