The following statement was made to the Boulder County Planning Commission on behalf of PLAN-Boulder County by Alan Boles on June 16, 2010.

Planning Reserve

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.