Castle Rock – Douglas County is giving Denver some ideas, and money, to aid its neglected mountain-park system.
Denver and Douglas officials have been working for years on a plan to fix Daniels Park, a historic 963-acre ranch north of Castle Rock that has been part of Denver’s mountain-park system since the 1920s.
Since acquiring Daniels Park, Denver has provided only a ribbon of dirt road to access the site in an area now budding with tourism and booming with residents.
“They haven’t had any money to do anything with the park,” Douglas County spokeswoman Wendy Holmes said of Denver. “But for us, it sits in the heart of a cultural corridor in Douglas County.”
Daniels Park is one of Denver’s largest sites and includes a herd of plains bison, historic ranch buildings, an early American stone shelter and TallBull Memorial Grounds, a historic site used for Indian ceremonies. The park is bordered by the Highlands Ranch backcountry, the historic Cherokee Ranch, The Sanctuary Golf Club, and the Castle Pines North and Castle Pines Village communities.
Denver acquired its mountain parks in the early part of the last century. Kim Bailey, Denver’s parks and recreation manager, said working with local communities may be the way parks are improved over the next century, based on the Douglas County master plan for the park.
“It launched an opportunity for us to think about our whole system. How we provide for it, how we manage it,” she said.
Douglas County officials have discussed adding up to $9 million in improvements, including paving and other traffic improvements on Daniels Park Road, pullouts to view the lush scenery and bison herd, as well as restrooms, an elaborate nature trail and other amenities over the next decade.
Denver’s share of that cost would be $600,000 over 10 years, according to the current proposal.
In addition, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office would provide security at the park.
For Denver, the proposal is a way to augment a strapped budget. The city and county budgeted $780,000 this year to manage 31 named parks and 16 wilderness areas on 14,000 acres in Douglas, Jefferson, Clear Creek, Summit and Grand counties. That equals just $55.71 an acre for the year, or 15.3 cents a day per acre.
A Denver panel recently reported critical maintenance needs at the city’s mountain parks. The parks, however, were left out of Mayor John Hickenlooper’s $550 million bond package for infrastructure, which is expected to be on the Denver ballot in November.
Jefferson County has supplemented its Denver parks, but not in such a formal plan or to the funding level that Douglas County is proposing for its only Denver-owned site.
The public can have a say about park plans at a meeting at 7 tonight at Timber Trail Elementary School in Castle Rock.
