Boulder – Residents are discussing townhomes vs. stacked apartments and mixed-use development vs. big-box retail as part of the planning for a new look in the eastern part of the city.
Their goal: Create a plan for what will become the second busiest transit hub behind Denver’s Union Station.
To that end, about 80 people met last week as part of a series of public meetings designed to gather opinions.
“This is a place where we are anticipating a great deal of change,” said city planner Louise Allen Grauer during a Wednesday night gathering. The meetings are “a way to look at a vision for the area in a comprehensive manner.”
The Boulder Transit Village area is a 450-acre area around the proposed bus and commuter rail station at 30th and Pearl streets. It is adjacent to the Twenty Ninth Street development.
At the meeting, planners divided everyone into five subgroups and asked the people there about different design styles.
“It’s different, and that’s why I liked it,” said Jim Rettew, 35, about a funky angular residential building. “But it is different in the way that the rest of Boulder is different.”
San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit agency principal planner, Peter Albert, told the group he wished his city could have had the same kind of public input about 30 years ago.
“I don’t think you see enough of this,” he said. “When you involve people like this, the community doesn’t just request a plan, they fight for it.”
While no plans are solid, preliminary designs for the area stirred controversy. Functional problems with putting a rail platform along a curve in the rail line forced planners to place a platform a quarter mile away.
The move surprised the City Council, in what one member called “the most serious failure on staff’s part.”
Mayor Mark Ruzzin said the plans still could change.
“I’m not so sure it has worked itself out completely,” he said. “We are still looking hard at what could be done there.”
Ruzzin said a picture on the Transit Village’s website – submitted by a resident – show a Zurich, Switzerland, rail station along a curved rail.
The next meeting is scheduled for Saturday. Grauer said planners hope to have a plan adopted early next year.
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 720-929-0893 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
