Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Boulder County Public Lands & Trails

Boulder Area Trails Coalition

Note: This post was written prior to the creation of this blog and as part of an earlier stage in the ongoing public debate over Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks policies. While somewhat dated, the post still raises important issues which are still relevant.

It's encouraging to recreational enthusiasts that more than 2/3 of the land in unincorporated Boulder County is in public ownership (more than 60% of all the county land). The multiplicity of our public land management agencies and the diversity of the various rules and regulations can lead to confusion. Hopefully the following discussion will help clear things up.



The federal government is the largest public land manager with more than 1/3 of the county under Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service, or Department of Commerce control. The Boulder County Parks and Open Space department and Boulder City Open Space and Mountain Parks department are the next largest public land agencies (managing, respectively, more than 16% and 10% of the county). Other, significantly smaller, public land managers include Denver, Boulder, and Longmont utility departments and Eldorado State Park. Each of the land management agencies operates with it's own set of objectives and rules (and within it's own political and budgetary constraints). The table below contains some specifics of agency properties and trails.

Read the rest of this article.

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