Boulder County’s commissioners have tabled plans for a Lyons-to- Boulder trail, citing the lack of cooperation from the water district that owns the land where the proposed trail was routed.
In a letter published Friday on the county’s website, the three-commissioner board said the trail is “not feasible at this time.”
The county’s transportation department spent 10 months and $100,000 studying three potential alignments for the trail, two of which paralleled the Boulder Feeder Canal.
The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District owns the canal and the property on both sides of the waterway, which transports water between Lyons and the Boulder Reservoir. Last winter, the district’s board told the county it would have an “open mind” toward the trail plan and gave the county guidelines for how best to plan a trail along the canal.
“Last month there was a significant change in tone and communications,” said Boulder County’s transportation director, George Gerstle. “Maybe in retrospect we should have had some sort of formal agreement, but they would be unlikely to agree to a trail alignment until they had seen the analysis.”
Without support from the water district, the trail, which was first envisioned three decades ago as part of Boulder County’s plan for a regional network of recreational trails, would follow roads and traverse county open space between Lyons and Boulder.
“Such a trail would be far less appealing, more costly, and more environmentally destructive than using portions of the feeder canal which offer existing cleared stretches of land, sweeping views of the plains and mountains, and a continuous path from north to south,” reads the commissioners’ Sept. 18 letter.
County leaders said that although the Lyons-to-Boulder Regional Trail may be suspended, it is not dead. All planning progress so far can be used again, should the water district have a change of heart, Gerstle said.
“It’s not been a waste of money. It’s just not that we will be able to get this done as soon as we had hoped,” he said. “It makes too much sense not to do at some point.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, Boulder County transportation
director George Gerstle’s first name was incorrect.
