The sheriff of Central City, Billy Cozens, was ready to settle someplace quiet. The idyllic home he and his new wife, Mary Cozens, built in the late 1800s was among the first homesteads in the Fraser River Valley. It became a popular stagecoach stop and ended up on the National Register of Historic Places.
Now the meadow along U.S. 40 that was once the Cozens’ backyard is a battlefield pitting Fraser residents against a developer. That developer, Clark Lipscomb, has plans for homes and hotel rooms there. The residents say a 2003 agreement promised that Cozens Meadow would be forever protected in a conservation easement.
The fiery fight over the historic meadow is headed to a trial this week as Lipscomb pushes proposals for more development in his Grand Park community in Fraser, just outside Winter Park.
When Amanda Erath moved to Grand Park in 2019, she would go cross-country skiing in the winter in Cozens Meadow. In the summer her neighbors play frisbee golf there.
Now Lipscomb has fenced and gated the area and filled the meadow with grazing cows. The latest proposals for homes and hotels in the meadow pushed Erath — and about two dozen of her neighbors — to plead with town planners to better protect Cozens Meadow.
“He is, piece by piece, destroying one of the most beautiful areas in our community,” Erath said in an interview. “We shouldn’t have this level of development without also thinking about how it will impact the community and addressing that at the same time.”
The complex fight over Cozens Meadow has implications for both historic conservation easements in Colorado and the ongoing challenges facing homebuilders in rural communities. Both sides are sure they are right and soon a Grand County judge could crown a winner.
To follow the twisting tale of protections around Cozens Meadow, let’s go back more than 20 years.
In 2003, renowned Colorado developer Robert “Buz” Koelbel and his partners at Cornerstone Holdings reached an agreement with the Town of Fraser to annex their roughly 1,400-acre Rendezvous property where they planned more than 3,300 homes, 1,400 hotel rooms and nearly 500,000 square feet of commercial space on both sides of U.S. 40 between Winter Park and Fraser. The deal included a plan for a conservation easement to protect 467 acres around Cozens Meadow and Elk Creek Meadow as open space.
The next year Koelbel split with his partner and carved off the property west of U.S. 40 for Cornerstone Holdings and the company’s head of real estate, Lipscomb. Lipscomb planned as many as 2,500 homes, 1,300 hotel rooms and 400,000 square feet of commercial space on 1,300 acres the company amassed for its Grand Park community. The deal included Cornerstone controlling the land around Cozens and Elk Creek meadows.
A 2005 agreement between Fraser and Cornerstone updates the Rendezvous development plan and notes 468 acres of open space around both Cozens and Elk Creek meadows. That 2005 agreement does not specifically reference a conservation easement plan. Lipscomb argues the 2005 agreement removes the conservation easement requirement and says all the development approved by the town since has not included requirements for an easement around Cozens Meadow. The Town of Fraser disagrees. Twenty years later, this is the critical legal issue in the trial that starts Monday in Grand County.
Lawsuits, stalled construction
As Cornerstone developed Grand Park, spending more than $100 million since 2005, homes were built around Cozens Meadow. In addition to homes, Lipscomb has built a gas station and a small market, a bowling alley and cinema, and donated land and infrastructure for the Grand Park Community Center.
A legal battle over open space protection launched in 2020 between the Town of Fraser and Cornerstone. In 2021, the town stopped approving new construction projects in Grand Park. That year Lipscomb closed public access to Cozens Meadow, arguing the land is private property. He sells homes in a neighborhood of Grand Park called Cozens Meadow.
“The town was trying to strong arm our company to stop these buildings — trying to get something they are not entitled to on our private land,” Lipscomb told the town board at its April 17 meeting.
Lipscomb has always argued that Cozens Meadow is private land “where Grand Park was allowing public use,” he wrote in a September 2020 letter to the Fraser town board.
“It is unfortunate that a small minority of residents have determined to attempt to undermine long-standing agreements and that those efforts have resulted in personal threats against Grand Park, me and my family,” he wrote in the 2020 letter. “We are very proud of the many community-wide projects Grand Park has been involved in. Please stand up and protect private property rights as well as those agreements we have all worked tirelessly to follow.”
Lipscomb did not respond to emails, texts and calls from The Sun.
Lipscomb sued the town, arguing the Fraser mayor’s 2020 approval of an 18-acre conservation easement for Elk Creek Meadow — not Cozens Meadow — met all the open space requirements for the community outlined in the 2005 agreement. The town sued Lipscomb, arguing the developer needs to follow the 2003 agreement and protect Cozens Meadow.
It was not the first lawsuit between Lipscomb and the Town of Fraser. Or the other town that borders Grand Park. The Town of Winter Park also sued Cornerstone in 2017 over infrastructure improvements, which resulted in a 2020 settlement.
Lipscomb’s work on commercial space — about 45,500 square feet of concrete buildings called Market Street where he planned restaurants, shops, music venues, office space and an indoor putt-putt location — stalled in 2020. The buildings sat unfinished for more than four years as Lipscomb and town leaders in Fraser wrangled over expired permits and sales tax incentives. Last fall the town reinstated permits for construction on the Market Street buildings, which Lipscomb has said will be completed by October 2025 and open by next winter, when the permits expire.
“Big picture we think this area is going to continue to grow and we want to be here and be a part of it and we want it to grow in a way that is healthy for the community, the residents and our tourists,” Lipscomb told the board at the April meeting.
Over the Christmas holiday last year, someone erected a large sign in front of the roofless, bare-walled buildings that read “It’s a beaut, Clark,” harkening to the quip from the movie “Christmas Vacation.”
In May, a Grand County District Court judge ruled in the lawsuits, siding with Lipscomb and Cornerstone on some claims and siding with the Town of Fraser on other claims. But District Court Judge Mary Hoak did rule “there are genuine issues of material fact” regarding how the 2003 and 2005 agreements intersect concerning open space protection at Grand Park and Cozen Meadow.
Hoak in 2021 ruled that Fraser had to continue reviewing Grand Park’s plans, despite the issue with Cozens Meadow.
New plans for homes, hotels in Cozens Meadow
And the most recent news in the Fraser vs. Lipscomb scrap landed last week when the Town of Fraser planning commission recommended the town deny the latest development proposal from Lipscomb.
Those plans for the Village at Grand Park — behind the unfinished buildings — shuffle and adjust allowed development and densities with two proposals seeking approval for an overall 245 homes, 550 hotel rooms and 175,000 square feet of commercial space along U.S. 40. The development would encroach on about 15 acres of Cozens Meadow.
More than 20 Fraser residents sent letters to planners before the July 24 meeting, urging a rejection of Lipscomb’s latest development proposals. Many letter writers own homes in Grand Park and suggested the new development did not align with the 2003 agreement. Many asked that planners wait for a court ruling in the pending trial before approving development in Cozens Meadow.
The planning commissioners recommended that the town board deny Lipscomb’s latest applications, saying the buildings proposed inside Cozens Meadow deviated from original development approvals and Lipscomb should ask the town board to amend the initial 2005 plan — with public meetings — before proposing the new construction.
Fraser Town Manager Michael Brack said Lipscomb plans to submit the plan to the town board — with the planning commission recommendation for denial — at either the Aug. 21 or Sept. 4 meeting. If the board rejects his plan, Lipscomb will have to wait six months to reapply. Brack said the decision by the planning commission has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
The proposed development “is not in alignment with what was approved in the 2003 and 2005 agreements. It was such a large change in use,” Brack said. “The town is definitely supportive of development where it is agreed upon and where it has been approved.”
The cows and locked gates at Cozens Meadow and the most recent development plans have galvanized a coalition of residents in a fight to protect the 2003 plan for open space.
“There was an extensive process in the late 90s and into the 2000s where all this was decided and if you start changing it now you are dishonoring that public process and those who came before us without a new, extensive public process going down,” said Fraser resident Joseph Landen, who supports the Restore Cozens Meadow campaign. “Will there be a settlement with Clark to put new development at the meadow? Or should we save every acre in the original agreement? That discussion needs to be very public.”
It’s important to note that the 2003 annexation agreement only included a plan for a conservation easement, not an actual conservation easement. (Lawyers for Cornerstone, in a trial brief filed last month, argued the statute of limitations bars the town’s complaints connected to the 2003 agreement.)
And there has never been a formal mapping with exact borders of Cozens Meadow.
“When I read the annexation agreement, it says that the town is entitled to 466, 467 total acres of open space,” Fraser planning commissioner Parnell Quinn said at the planning board’s March 27 meeting. “Cozens Meadow has never really been defined as to what Cozens Meadow is, which has been an issue. If we resolve that, this wouldn’t be such a heartburn for everyone and it would not be such a contentious conversation every time we go to plat the meadow. But we have not resolved that yet.”