Larkspur – For many residents, the fall of this small Front Range town seems inevitable, a casualty of political warfare.
The great pillar of the municipal budget, the Colorado Renaissance Festival, is leaving after next year. The owner is weary of all the angst and accusations that permeate Larkspur.
When the festival bolts, 63 percent of the town’s roughly $1 million tax base will go with it, leaving 110 households and a smattering of businesses to find a way to pay millions of dollars to fix a water and sewer system that is near collapse.
“We’re broke,” said Councilwoman Kristin Cutbirth. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
All the while, town leaders publicly accuse one another of lying, cheating and neglecting public safety. Mayor Myrna Been says the town and county have granted too many “favors” to the Renaissance Festival. “Winky, winky,” she calls it.
But the stakes couldn’t be higher in this latest squabble with the festival. The medieval soiree of make-believe royalty and peasants brings 200,000 visitors each summer to this town of 273.
Opponents say the mayor and her allies are driving the town to ruin out of spite for political opponents and envy of a successful businessman, festival owner Jim Paradise Sr.
“The golden goose has been laying eggs in this town for 20-something years,” said Councilman Lester Burch, a supporter of the festival. “But you cut its legs off, throw it into court and harass him.”
Burch calls the town’s conflicts “‘the Larkspur syndrome’: If something is working right, mess it up.”
But the mayor and other town leaders say the festival owes more. The town and the festival are heading to court in February over $1.6 million in water and sewer charges.
Paradise said the bill and the mayor’s many accusations against him are part of a campaign to fleece his business to fix the town’s ailing water and sewer system.
“If somebody gives me a legitimate bill for something I owe, I’ll pay it,” he said. “But don’t throw a bill at me … because somebody else has a problem they can’t afford.”
Larkspur is perhaps the last vestige of an Old West community in the merging metro regions of Denver and Colorado Springs on the Interstate 25 corridor. The town should be poised for a boom, with cheap property among the fruited plains and rolling green foothills – a setting suitable for Camelot.
But finding enterprises to replace the festival’s tax dollars won’t be easy, given the town’s costly, undersized plumbing and leaders’ penchant for not getting along, say county politicos and economic developers.
“A lot of people are primarily interested in going into a community where the leaders are pro-business and have their act together,” said Trish Layton, vice president of the Southeast Business Partnership, the economic-development organization for Douglas County. “From an economic-development standpoint, I suggest they get a handle on their political issues.”
Accusations abound
Been campaigned in 2002 on a promise of addressing the town’s water and sewer problems. The 67-year-old has served numerous terms on the council since the town started 26 years ago. She has been the target of some recall elections and the instigator of others.
She has repeatedly asked state and local agencies to investigate deals between the festival and previous town administrators and county officials over building permits, fire and health codes and tax assessments.
But the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department has never found evidence to support criminal charges, said John Topol nicki, chief deputy district attorney for Douglas County.
“There are a lot of allegations but very little proof,” he said.
In 2003, Been found fewer than a dozen county building permits among hundreds of booths.
Officials with the county building department said many of the structures were too small to require permits, while saying others had been lost – stored in a misplaced green notebook.
The mayor also believes the tax assessor’s office cut the festival a huge tax break for years. Its 250-acre site was assessed as a farm or ranch until 2003. The year before, the site had been valued at $274,346. The next year its value soared to $1.9 million, and its tax bill grew from $7,646 to $46,730, when the festival was reclassified for its commercial use.
The mayor said her questions exposed the tax break; the assessor’s office said it was the result of reappraisal, when numerous rural properties in the fast-growing county were reclassified.
Been also says Paradise offered her a bribe to drop demands for hundreds of thousands of dollars in water and sewer charges.
“He came in and said, ‘What’s it going to take, Myrna, 50 (thousand)? A hundred? A hundred and 50?”‘ Been said. “I said, ‘I want what you owe the town, not a penny more, not a penny less.”‘
Paradise says the conversation never happened.
“I think (the mayor) has gone senile, just making things up,” Paradise said. “It’s ridiculous the things she’s come up with. Really, I just can’t work with her anymore.”
Next summer’s show will be Paradise’s last in Larkspur, ending a 10-year agreement between the festival and the town. Been scoffs at his plans to leave such a prime spot between the state’s two largest cities.
“He didn’t get rich by being stupid,” she said.
History of conflict
The festival conflict is just the latest saga in a political drama that stretches across three decades. It’s the stuff of Shake speare – with enough character assassination, power plays and bitter loss to fill a Bard tragedy.
No blow seems too low, regardless of the topic.
In a discussion of raises during an August council meeting, Been called out an employee by name, claiming the woman wasted time at work “looking for men” on the Internet.
In June, the mayor accused Cutbirth and Councilwoman Florence Burch of “almost attempted sabotage of the town” by asking a banker to revoke Larkspur’s line of credit, an unresolved charge they have denied.
Such warfare is a pastime for the regular cast of officeholders, said former town clerk Brenda Anderson, who stepped down in 1997 after she was falsely accused of theft, the accusations outlined in a flier tacked up at the post office and signed by a council member.
“These people have no life,” Anderson said. “No, their life is fighting with each other.”
Mistrust runs so deep that the council mails the meeting minutes, often verbatim, to every home, so “the town’s people can see what’s going on,” said Councilman Marvin Cardenas.
Future for a fading town
Paradise, meanwhile, is already scouting new locations between Colorado Springs and Denver. He intends to sell his land to a developer, though Been was quick to note that any owner would need the Town Council’s approval for development.
Beyond the political scraps, selling a town lacking good water and sewer, with no way to pay for repairs, is a tough task, said Layton, the economic planner.
“Infrastructure drives development,” she said. “When you can provide water and sewer is when you can have economic development, not the other way around.”
Former County Commissioner Jim Sullivan, who was elected to the state legislature last year, says Larkspur is a prime location for development in south Doug las County. The towns of Castle Rock to the north and Monument to the south are already thriving.
“It’s the next logical spot,” Sullivan said of Larkspur. “But I don’t know anyone who would want to go into that situation.”
The festival’s departure will be felt in other ways. Each year, the festival opens its gates, at no charge, for the elementary school’s Fall Festival, which raises about $15,000 for computers, supplies and other aid for needy students.
“If we don’t have this place for the festival, it will just kill it,” said Lisa Leitmayr, the festival’s chairwoman this year.
“I don’t know what we’ll do when this is not here.”
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
Larkspur’s battles
As a community, Larkspur “enjoyed a peaceful existence,” according to the Douglas County history book “Fading Past.” But once Larkspur incorporated, the town exemplified “the effects of big-town politics in a small-town atmosphere.”
1979: Larkspur incorporates over the boundaries of “Larkspur Heights,” a defunct municipality that formed in 1912. Bob Arfsten, a council member voted off the board six months after incorporation, has claimed for years that Larkspur was the product of forged names on a petition. His argument has failed to sway a judge.
1987: A “junk ordinance,” requiring about one-third of residents to tidy their property or face a $300- a-day fine, leads to an unsuccessful recall campaign against the mayor and council. The ordinance is never aggressively enforced.
1996: The town approves a 10- year tax-sharing arrangement with the Colorado Renaissance Festival to keep the event and head off a tripling of residential water bills to maintain its water and sewer system.
1997: Then-Mayor and current Councilwoman Florence Burch is accused of limiting council members’ access to town hall by keeping the only key to the building. She relents and makes one copy for council members to share but changes the locks on file cabinets. “I don’t trust them,” she says of the other council members.
1998: Residents vote 68-37 to reject a proposed railroad underpass, even though traffic slows drastically as trains creep through town each day, leaving some residents cut off from the fire station. Some leaders claim the county, which offered $3.5 million to build the project for regional development, is meddling in town affairs. Residents approve an ordinance banning underpasses.
1998: Then-Mayor Wandalene Hertz has a sheriff’s deputy shut down a roadside soft-drink stand near the Renaissance Festival because it lacks a business license. The stand is operated by young daughters and a niece of political opponents.
2001: Hertz and three council members retain their seats after the town’s third recall election in five years. Current Mayor and former council member Myrna Been leads a campaign claiming the council failed to repair water lines, overspent funds, abused power and acted unprofessionally. Hertz tells the town attorney in a recorded meeting to “pull out every big gun you can and just shoot the snot out of” town gadfly Bob Arfsten.
2003: Been demands that the festival pay $1.6 million for unbilled water and sewer charges, and for taps for its future use. The festival refuses and instead sues the county over the bill.
JOEY BUNCH
