Boulder County and Boulder Valley School District officials will soon look into their options for their lands alongside Twin Lakes Road in Gunbarrel in the wake of the county Planning Commission’s Wednesday night rejection of proposed land-use changes for those undeveloped properties.
The school district staff will be consulting with legal counsel to identify and review possibilities for the future of the 10 acres the district owns at 6500 Twin Lakes Road and 0 Kalua Road, Boulder Valley Superintendent Bruce Messinger said on Thursday morning.
“We’ve owned that 10 acres for quite a while,” Messinger said of the property, which its former private owners dedicated to the district in 1967 as part of a development agreement. “We need to determine what the best use of the land is.”
Messinger said the results of that staff-level research will eventually be presented to the school board.
Michelle Krezek, the Boulder County Board of Commissioners’ staff deputy, said that the commissioners “are very disappointed” at the Planning Commission’s 5-4 vote against making any changes in the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s current land-use designations for the school district’s properties and the Boulder County Housing Authority’s 10 acres at 6655 Twin Lakes Road.
Boulder County paid $470,000 to buy its 10 acres from the Archdiocese of Denver in 2013.
The Housing Authority staff “hasn’t talked about this yet” with the county commissioners, who also are the Housing Authority’s board of directors, Krezek said on Thursday morning.
As to whether the county and the school board will continue to pursue a possible affordable housing project for the land, Krezek said that “no formal decisions have been made, but Boulder County is still committed to working with the school district on an affordable housing project that would serve the needs of those in our community, including employees of BVSD.”
Messinger said that an affordable housing project “is still on the table” as one of the possible options for the district’s 10 acres, if that proves possible.
The Housing Authority and the school district had jointly sought a medium-density residential land-use designation for the 20 acres of land, which now is in unincorporated Boulder County, as a step toward seeking annexation by Boulder and a city zoning category and site-plan approval for development of affordable housing there.
Procedures for amending the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s land-use maps would still permit the county commissioners, the Boulder Planning Board or the Boulder City Council to ask the county Planning Commission to reconsider its Wednesday night action.
The Board of County Commissioners had already approved an earlier version of the request to change the properties’ designation to a medium-density residential category. Boulder’s Planning Board and City Council have not yet held their own public hearings or taken action on any changes for the Twin Lakes land uses but still could do so.
All four of those government entities, however, must agree on any change to the comprehensive plan’s current designations — low-density residential for the county-owned 10 acres and a public use such as a school for the school district’s 10 acres — in order to revise those on the comp plan’s map.
Boulder and Boulder County review requests for Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan land-use changes during periodic overall updates to the overall comp plan that the city and county conduct every five years.
The latest round of proposed comprehensive plan land-use changes were submitted to city and county officials in 2016. The process of getting the next round of requests wouldn’t normally begin until 2021.
Krezek, however, said on Thursday that the Housing Authority and the school district wouldn’t necessarily have to wait another five years to petition Boulder to annex the properties and get city approval of some scale of housing development or other uses of their land there.
Krezek said the Housing Authority and school district — separately or jointly — could do that at any time, notwithstanding the comprehensive plan’s present land-use designations.
Those properties “have been eligible for annexation since 1978,” Krezek said.
Messinger also said seeking annexation remains a possibility, as the school district explores its options and decides how its land can best be “developed in a meaningful way.”
He said those options do not, however, include building a new school on the district’s 10 acres, since officials have concluded that one isn’t needed at that location to serve the area’s families.
Messinger said that whatever the school district decides to do about some sort of development on its land, the district intends to try to be a good neighbor with the area’s residents — because “these are all families that are part of the Boulder Valley School District.”
Twin Lakes Action Group chairman Dave Rechberger, whose neighborhood organization opposes any medium-density housing development on the Housing Authority and school district lands, said on Thursday that his group’s members will continue to monitor the situation and continue to fight against any efforts to put a higher-than-low-density designation or zoning category on the land.
He said the Twin Lakes Action Group’s members also remain willing to work with the county and the school district on coming up with a way to buy the 20 acres from the county and school district and preserving it as permanently undeveloped open space or park land.
“We’re open to discussions on settlements that would be beneficial to all,” Rechberger said.
John Fryar: 303-684-5211, jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc
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