Vicki Mead is a 52-year-old wife and mother who thinks she should start trolling XXX-rated shops for material and ideas on how to run her own pornography gallery in bucolic Allenspark.
“I guess I’ll be visiting successful porn stores and see what’s the best seller — maybe edible underwear or panties with slits in the middle,” Mead said.
She and her husband, Jeff, say they are not smut peddlers but frustrated property owners. They say pornography is the only way they can survive in Allenspark after Boulder County turned down their request to run an all-terrain-vehicle rental business in a building they purchased for $428,000 in 2007.
The two-story log building housed the Eastin Gallery and Studio for 16 years just off the Peak to Peak Highway. Since the gallery has been an approved use, Boulder County cannot object to a use dedicated to adult artwork, Mead said.
“We just were shot down and shot down by Boulder County until we decided this is the only thing that’s allowed where we might make some money,” she said. “We just got to the point where we will do something legal with the building even though it appears unreasonable.”
Neighbors say the couple has been anything but agreeable. They fought the Meads’ application for the ATV business because it would ruin the quiet nature of the area.
ATV use already has destroyed land, some of it private, around the homes in Allenspark, said neighbor Margaret Patterson, adding that both county and federal wildlife officials objected to the Meads’ ATV venture.
“They (the Meads) think we’re a bunch of prissy little mountain people upset over a little pornography,” Patterson said. What ATV users have done to a local meadow “is more obscene than any pornography.”
Jeff Mead has promised to open the porno gallery and sue Boulder County for violating his First Amendment rights if anyone tries to shut it down, Patterson said.
“That’s how he would make his money,” she said.
Boulder County has no grounds to stop the gallery, said Dale Case, Boulder County land director.
“This would be consistent with the use that’s been approved there for 16 years,” Case said. The county would object only if the Meads decide to expand the size of the building.
“We would be looking at the intensity of the use,” Case said, “but not on the actual content of what they are selling.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
