NOT IN MY BACKYARD

Boulder County considers ending a 40-year-old conservation easement to meet housing needs

BY WILL MATUSKA

When Vic Pizzo moved into a southwest Longmont neighborhood five years ago, it quickly became home.

He calls Clover Creek a “nice place to live” — the local kids who play on the streets remind him of his childhood neighborhood. The nearby path running along a swath of prairie is a great place to walk his dog and look at the distant mountains.

In a city that’s grown by nearly 20,000 residents since 2010, this area on the edge of Longmont is quiet, less developed. But that could change soon.

On July 6, the Boulder County Commissioners will vote to end a 40-year-old conservation easement over the Kanemoto Estates prairie, located less than 1,000 feet south of Pizzo’s neighborhood. If the easement ends, the city of Longmont will move one step closer to transforming the 38-acre plot into a “100% attainable” housing development named Somerset Village.

The review process was initiated by the landowner and developer Lefthand Ranch LLC, requesting to terminate the easement, annex the land into Longmont and develop a residential neighborhood.

Some say the parcel is an ideal place for Longmont to expand as it attempts to meet increasing demand from a growing population and fewer residential development sites.

David Emerson, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of the St. Vrain Valley, hopes to build homes for the organization on the property if the opportunity arises. He says the area needs more affordable housing.

“We’re just trying to bring in the voice of those who are working in our community who can’t afford to buy a home,” he says.

But other Longmont residents, like Pizzo, have a different perspective.

Keep Airport Road Environmental & Safe (KARES) is a coalition of 70 community members staunchly opposed to ending the easement. While members live across the county, many of them live in the Clover Creek subdivision adjacent to Kanemoto Estates. They’ve raised more than $14,000 to support hiring a legal team.

“It will absolutely destroy the peace of the neighborhood,” says Pizzo, bringing more traffic and congestion. If the development continues, Pizzo says he’ll move out.

In a county with more than 100,000 acres of open space, a booming population and a dearth of affordable housing, the argument around developing the Kanemoto Estates easement is the latest installment in an ongoing debate around development versus conservation, with all the trappings of a good Boulder County landuse argument: confusion, NIMBYism and minute detail.

PRESERVING LAND?

The nearly 40-acre Kanemoto Estates property is located on the east side of Airport Road, half a mile north from the intersection of Airport Road and Diagonal Highway (8702 N. 87th St.) in unincorporated Boulder County.

The conservation easement was established in 1982 between the Kanemoto family, who owned the land at the time, and Boulder County Parks and Open Space because the Kanemotos wanted to build another home on the property. Boulder County land-use policy required 75% of the property be set aside to preserve agricultural land through a conservation easement.

This created three parcels on the Kanemoto Estates subdivision — two tracts with residential homes totalling just under 10 acres, and an approximately 29-acre lot with a non-urban planned unit development (NUPUD) conservation easement.

A conservation easement is a voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and a qualified holder, such as a land trust or government agency, to restrict use on the property to protect natural features, agricultural potential or historical significance. Boulder County’s conservation easements protect more than 40,000 acres and nearly 850 private properties. On its website, the county says it “holds hundreds of conservation easements that are designed to remain in effect for perpetuity.”

But the Kanemoto Estates easement is one of 133 across the county that include language allowing the easement to end in favor of development — which will be decided by the Boulder County Planning Commission and the County Commissioners.

Randall Weiner, a lawyer with

Weiner & Cording representing KARES, says a common misconception is that conservation easements will be protected in perpetuity.

Members of the KARES group claim residents near Kanemoto Estates were wrongly informed, either by city or county staff or realtors, that the conservation easement would last forever.

Joe and Cheryl Stasiak bought their Clover Creek home 15 years ago with that understanding. When they found out the easement could be developed, they were “surprised and dismayed.”

“This was wrong to start with, to put the word conservation on something that wasn’t, according to the city and county, intended to be conserved at all,” says Joe, who is a member of KARES.

If commissioners vote in favor of termination, it wouldn’t be the first time. The county told Boulder Weekly about four other properties near Longmont where conservation easements were ended in favor of development, amounting to nearly 200 acres of additional subdivisions.

Dale Case, director of Boulder County Community Planning and Permitting, says there have been “several” other easements terminated over the years as Longmont annexed