City of Boulder Open Space Analysis

by Peter Bakwin

For many years I have visited the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) on a daily basis. During this time, I have noticed that OSMP has acquired a lot of land, but has opened very few new trails. I wondered if it is possible to quantify the priority that OSMP has placed on acquisitions vs. trails, so I started looking at the numbers.

First, some basics: OSMP employs 85 people with a budget of $22M per year, 9% of the City's total budget. In 2008, $3.4M is allocated to new acquisitions, $11M for debt service and $450,000 for visitor infrastructure (new trails and trailhead facilities). The budget is two-thirds acquisitions and just 2% for trails!

Since the first open space sales tax in 1967, OSMP has spent $337 million (inflation adjusted to 2007) to acquire over 38,000 acres of land, and together with the original Mountain Parks (Open Space merged with Mountain Parks in 2001), OSMP has protected 45,000 acres. Including debt service, the city has spent well over $1 billion on open space acquisitions in the last 41 years.

I looked at the 398 OSMP property transactions during 1967-2007 and determined whether or not each parcel was open and accessible to the public.Closed space consists of conservation easements (CEs), some agricultural lands, sensitive habitat from which visitors are excluded, and parcels that simply have no trail access. Currently, about half (48%) of all OSMP land is open and accessible to visitor access for passive recreation. What is surprising is that 91% of the land acquired in the first decade of the open space program (1967-1976) is open and accessible. Land acquired subsequently is increasingly inaccessible to the public: 51%, 29% and less than 4% of land acquired in the second (1977-1986), third (1987-1996), and fourth (1997-2006) decades of the program is currently open to visitors (see figure). This startling trend points to a major shift in the way open space is managed, and represents an undeniable movement away from the balance of open space uses that existed at the beginning of the program.



One factor in this shift is an increasing reliance on acquisition of CEs and development rights, as opposed to purchasing property in fee. Overall, about 11% all OSMP holdings (not including Caribou Ranch, which is managed by the County) are CEs or development rights, and this proportion is increasing. Other factors include acquisition of parcels that are increasingly farflung and discontinuous, the glacial pace at which OSMP evaluates new acquisitions for trail suitability as part of the Visitor Master Plan, and managementfs philosophy of keeping parcels closed unless they are specifically open.

In the next Newsletter I will look at how the OSMP trail network has evolved over the past few decades. In future, I plan to evaluate the Boulder County Parks and Open Space program using similar criteria, and to compare these programs to others along the Front Range. I can use help on this: contact me if you are interested in participating in this research.

Contact me at pbakwin@comcast.net if you would like a copy of my full report on this work.