Struggle to Protect Open Space Intensifies in Colorado Suburb

South Table Mountain looms so dominantly above this suburban Denver community that it appears on the city’s letterhead and even on special beer cans manufactured by Coors Brewing Co., the giant beer company headquartered here.

So when residents learned early this year that Nike Inc., the shoe and sports gear company, was negotiating to purchase several hundred acres atop the lava mesa for a 5,000-employee office building, they mobilized as if their very existence was at stake. Within days, a Save the Mesa protest group had been formed and began holding organizing meetings at a local coffeehouse. More than a thousand residents signed petitions opposing the proposed sale.

To their relief, Nike announced in April that, for reasons unrelated to the protest, it will go elsewhere. But the development threat underscores how hard it is becoming to protect open space from booming development as populations and land values soar in the communities that abut Colorado’s Front Range of the Rockies.

With the West experiencing growth rates far exceeding most of the rest of the country, the struggle to preserve open land--and the values that attract people here in the first place--is a mounting concern throughout the region.

Will Shafroth, who heads a Colorado state effort to conserve open space, refers to it as a fear of “the Fort Pueblo syndrome,” the prospect that a nearly 200-mile stretch of the Front Range from Fort Collins in the north to Pueblo in the south will be “a solid string of lights.”

Few places in the nation have fought so hard, so long or so well to preserve natural areas and wildlife habitat as Jefferson County, which sprawls west of Denver and over the foothills that serve as a gateway to the 14,000-foot peaks of the central Rockies. Since 1972, when it first imposed a half-cent sales tax to fund open-space acquisitions, the county that includes Golden has preserved about 30,000 acres from development. It plans to buy another 30,000 acres to protect its views of the Front Range and the canyons that pierce the foothills.

But with land prices rising at 1% a month, and development pressure rising just as fast, the county’s open-space program is losing ground, figuratively and literally.

“We have these wonderful foothills, these wonderful mountains, and if we can preserve it forever, we should,” said Greg Stevinson, who is both a developer and chairman of Jefferson County’s Open Space Advisory Committee. “But what we have been experiencing is property values rising faster than the income for our program.”

Jefferson County expects to have about $7 million a year available for open-space land acquisition in the next few years, but has about $160 million in property it wants to buy. Though sales tax revenue is growing about 6% a year, property values are rising twice as fast.

For the state, other counties with open-space programs, and private nonprofit groups that also work to preserve land, the story is often the same.

Six years ago, Colorado voters approved a state land preservation program called Great Outdoors Colorado, which is funded through state lottery receipts and which has spent about $111 million on about 40,000 acres. In the early years, the program received about $15 million a year, but its share will soon rise to $42 million a year.

That jump in revenue will help, said Shafroth, the program’s executive director, but in terms of real buying power, that $42 million is only slightly higher than the $15 million was early this decade. In Douglas County, the suburban county on Denver’s southern border with the fastest rate of population growth in the nation, property values rose 27% in the last year alone.

Rampant growth also is an escalating concern in areas outside metropolitan Denver, and has spurred in just a few years a sixfold increase in the number of privately funded land trusts that typically use conservation easements and other creative tax and financing mechanisms to preserve scenic vistas and open agricultural land.

Brad Udall manages one of them in Eagle County, home to the Vail ski resort, where land is appreciating as much as 20% a year. Conservation easements can provide hard-pressed ranchers with a slug of cash in return for agreements not to develop their land, plus reduce estate taxes by as much as 55%, but soaring land values make such arrangements more expensive.

But in places like Eagle County, which are magnets for the affluent looking for vacation properties, there is something of a silver lining, Udall said. “The flip side of skyrocketing land values is that we have many wealthy people who are very generous” in contributing to land-preservation efforts.

That is a luxury not enjoyed in areas that must depend largely on publicly funded open-space agencies. South Table Mountain is a case in point.

Jefferson County’s open-space program has had its eye on the mesa with expansive views of the foothills for several years. But the county has to operate within the constraints of its budget, a long list of priority properties and its philosophy of dealing only with willing sellers.

“Our approach has always been not to be pushy,” said Joy Lucisano, manager of open-space acquisitions for the county.

Much of South Table Mountain is owned by Coors and the family of its former longtime attorney, Leo Bradley. Although Bradley has sold other key properties to the open-space program, he has tried before to develop South Table Mountain as a quarry and was an enthusiastic advocate of the now-defunct Nike project.

Bradley says he is now willing to give the county a short time to buy the property for open space. But coming up with the $14 million or so it might cost remains a problem.

Open-space advocates hope that the Nike controversy will help them gain voter approval of a plan to increase the amount of money available for land preservation, either through an increase in the sales tax or through a bond program. Margot Zallen, who chairs a citizen watchdog group called Plan Jeffco, said the dust-up over Nike has “done a wonderful job of educating people that some of their favorite places are at risk.”