The Jefferson County planning board has rejected a plan for a lift-served mountain bike park, calling it incompatible with surrounding land uses in a rural neighborhood near Conifer.
The Jeffco planning commissioners late Monday voted unanimously to deny a special use permit for a controversial plan to build Colorado’s first lift-served park just for mountain bikes on Shadow Mountain Drive above Conifer. After nearly 18 hours of impassioned testimony and deliberations across three meetings, the county’s planning board is recommending that county commissioners reject the project special use permit request.
“You have a fantastic idea,” Jefferson County planning commissioner David Duncan said, noting that allowed recreational rights in the county zoning for the region was for public use, not commercial. “I’m not convinced it’s compatible with this location.”
The backers of the Shadow Mountain Bike Park, Phil Bouchard and Jason Evans, are seeking a special use permit, which the county defines as a use that is “generally compatible” with zoned permitted activities and uses. The land is zoned for agriculture, which Jefferson County says can include minimal recreation facilities, but does not allow motorized recreation like a chairlift. The agricultural zoning allows one home for every 10 acres so the 230-acre parcel could accommodate 23 homes.
The land is owned by the Colorado State Land Board and the developers of the park have inked a possible lease that will deliver payments to the board based on revenue generated by the bike park.
The long-term lease depends on county approval, but Bouchard and Evans’ early projections for revenue and lease payments estimate the park could generate $3 million to $4 million in its first years and up to $12 million when fully developed and hosting as many as 70,000 visitors a year. The park could deliver annual payments of $251,000 to $572,000 to the land board, which is tasked to lease its land to generate revenue for Colorado schools.
Bouchard said on Tuesday that “it’s highly likely” he and Evans will present their plan — even with the planning board recommendation for denial — to Jefferson County commissioners at board meetings Oct. 1 and Nov. 12.
“A lot of the people we are working with on this have reached out today and said we think you should take this on,” Bouchard said, noting that, while rare, county commissioners have not always aligned their decisions with recommendations from planning commissions.
Bouchard and Evans are childhood friends from New Hampshire who live in Denver. They grew up visiting the Highland Mountain Bike Park at an old ski hill in New Hampshire north of Boston. The 18-year-old, lift-served mountain bike park offers more than 30 trails and draws as many as 50,000 visitors a year during its April-to-November season. The park sells weekend tickets for $72 and season passes for $599.
The pair said they began noticing crowding on Jefferson County trails four years ago, as well as user conflicts and degrading single track. They started planning a lift-served area just for mountain bikes at a park closer to metro Denver than several ski areas that offer lift-served biking in the summer. The pair’s plan calls for a chairlift and 16 miles of trail descending about 830 vertical feet, along with a day lodge and parking lot for 300 vehicles. The two suggest Shadow Mountain Bike Park could host as many as 1,200 visitors daily. Operations would be closed from January through April.
Jefferson County planning staff recommended that planning commissioners deny the request for a special use permit, citing its lack of conformance with the existing land use plan.
Bouchard and Evans propose employing roughly 20 workers earning a total of around $1.5 million a year. They have created a wildlife and wildfire mitigation plan, a traffic plan that includes a turn lane on Shadow Mountain Drive at the park and a parking reservation system to limit cars on the road.
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In their four years of planning, the two have held public meetings with residents in and around Conifer. The proposal has stirred vehement opposition. Several dozen members of a group named Stop The Bike Park spoke at two county planning commissioner meetings in September as part of a well-orchestrated opposition presentation.
A petition organized by the group has collected signatures from more than 6,500 people and 700 letters in opposition to the park proposal.
“This is not just NIMBY neighbors complaining. There are serious issues around the impacts of this proposal that cannot be mitigated,” said Mary Parker, who serves on the Jeffco school board.
Randall Breunlin, who lived nearly 44 years on Shadow Mountain, said the park would be a “devastating change to our neighborhood and our way of life.”
Resident Vera King said the two bike park planners “openly declared war on us.”
“We need you to stand up for us in this war,” she told the commissioners.
After the first two days of testimony Sept. 11 and Sept. 12, Bouchard said he and his team expected the opposition and they have worked to adjust the project for the neighbors.
“There’s a lot of tension in this community between wanting to retain the rural lifestyle and understanding that community is going to grow and how to best handle that growth,” Bouchard told The Colorado Sun. “Jason and I are smack in the middle of it. We don’t feel like we are making a pitch for a bike park as much as we are pitching responsible use of land. People riding their bikes for a certain number of months a year is a responsible use compared to building homes or something else.”
Compatibility and wildlife are top concerns
Several residents opposed to the bike park cited studies from other bike parks showing that 1,200 visitors a day would likely result in two injuries a day requiring transport via local emergency services.
“The proposed development could monopolize all EMS services,” Pam Rothman said.
The developers say they will have emergency medical services on site, similar to a ski patrol at a ski resort. The proponents point to other managed bike parks that estimate fewer than 1% of annual visitors require transport in an ambulance.
Troy Nicholson, a 27-year paramedic who lives in Evergreen, told the planning commissioners that the bike park would be a strain on local 911 services when call volume in the region increases in the spring and summer.
There are about 2,000 cars a day on Shadow Mountain Drive and adding another 500 roundtrips to the top of the mountain would increase accidents on the rural road, several speakers warned.
The park owners are expecting as many as 500 roundtrips on weekends and half of that on weekdays. They are planning to build a turning lane off Shadow Mountain Drive. They would use parking.com for vehicle reservations with a maximum of 300 cars.
Many residents said the bike park would impact wildlife on a parcel that has become a refuge for birds, bears, elk, deer, moose and fox. Others said the project would injure wetlands and riparian habitat in the area. Several residents spoke about trouble with the park’s plan for water drainage on the property.
Bouchard and Evans have acknowledged that the project will impact wildlife. Though they plan to close the park from January through April, Colorado Parks and Wildlife suggested a better plan would be to remain closed until July 1 to protect habitat.
“We would be willing to look at concessions where we commit to a longer seasonal closure,” Bouchard told the commissioners Tuesday as they deliberated.
7 million annual visitors to Jeffco open space and parks
Not all the nearly 120 speakers at the Sept. 11 and Sept. 12 planning commission meetings were opposed to the bike park.
Gary Moore, the head of the Colorado Mountain Bike Association, said trails are overcrowded and conflicts are increasing in Jefferson County open space, which hosts somewhere around 7 million annual visitors on 262 miles of single track. New downhill bike trails on Floyd Hill, near Black Hawk and coming to Idaho Springs are very popular and the Shadow Mountain Bike Park could accommodate that demand while easing conflicts on existing trails, Moore said.
Melanie Swearingen with the Conifer Chamber of Commerce said the bike park’s impact on the local economy “would be just amazing.”
Resident Taylor Carpenter said if the bike park was rejected, the land board could find another developer who might have a plan “with a far greater impact than the bike park.”
“If this bike park is not approved, it will go to the highest bidder,” Carpenter said.
Bouchard said the bike trails likely would have less of an impact than building a community of 23 homes. The bike park consultants said trail design would be adjusted to reduce impacts to wildlife and protect habitat.
The park consultants said the forest is too dense in the area. It has not burned in more than 100 years and clearing the understory and some trees would improve the ecosystem.
“Keeping all these trees is actually negatively impacting this forest,” a consultant hired by Bouchard and Evans told the planning commissioners Monday night.
Jefferson County has 262 miles of trails in 27 parks and most of those trails are multiple use with only 5 miles set aside only for bikes. Last year the county opened Rutabaga Ride in Lair O’ the Bear Park with 3.5 miles of trail for downhill bikes. It sees an average of 263 daily visitors. In the past 14 months there have been two accidents requiring emergency transportation, Tom Hobe, the head of Jefferson County Open Space, told the commissioners Monday night.
Hobe said his agency did not comment on the bike park because it was not adjacent to county open space and not part of the county’s mission to protect and preserve open space.
The wildlife impacts were a critical issue for many of the planning board commissioners at Monday’s meeting, which stretched for nearly six hours as they heard a final presentation from the park planners and discussed the project. All the commissioners praised Bouchard and Evans’ team, saying the application was well crafted. They just couldn’t balance the increased use of the parcel with what’s there now.
“I’m of the opinion that Jefferson County and Colorado in general is in desperate need of additional recreational infrastructure,” Commissioner John Messner said. “We need areas where we can concentrate recreation uses in different parts of the state. So conceptually I really like this idea. But for me, wildlife is the issue here.”