Brighton residents who live in the homes that surround Ken Mitchell Park say they have been waiting and waiting for the former gravel mining site to begin its promised transformation into an open space and regional park, and years of delays have them restless.
“We want it done. Everyone wants it done,” said Traci Francis, who has lived in the Platte River Ranch subdivision off Goldeneye Lane for about 10 years with her husband and two sons. “These people bought these homes 19 to 20 years ago thinking this was going to happen in a couple of years, and now it’s 20 years later and they’re saying it will be 20 more years.”
Ken Mitchell Park is still a work in progress. located roughly south of Colorado 7 and north of E-470 between Riverdale Road and Brighton Road has been a gravel mining site for 30 years, operated by local construction materials company Boral.
The mining operations have ended, and now Boral is working to fulfill its state mining permit requirements by remediating the site. Today, crews are grading two of three former mine pits, filling them with dirt and packing it down to get them to their original elevation so that they can be filled with storage water for the city, and so the shores around them can be sewn with native grasses and restored as a natural habitat.
Another Platte River Ranch area resident, Benjamin Donovan, was standing in his backyard holding his 1-year-old son, Gabe, on a recent day watching bulldozers barreling back and forth along a massive hole in the ground that he said should have been a full fishing lake now.
“They’re saying that this is going to be a 20-year project now,” Donovan said. “Gabe is going to be 21-years-old by then.”
Donovan and his wife moved across from Ken Mitchell Park about a year a half ago. He said the plans for Ken Mitchell are what ultimately convinced him to buy his home in Brighton.
“The whole project seems like it is taking forever to complete even one task,” Donovan said. “My neighbors and I always talk about the project and wonder when it’s going to be done. Year after year, nothing really changes.”
Gary Wardle, Brighton’s director of parks and recreation said that the city can’t go in and build the park until Boral is finished with its reclamation work.
“Depending on when they seed that and how much moisture we get, we could have grass established this fall, or it may be a year from now,” Wardle said. “However, we’ve got funding in place to build a trail this fall. It may not open to the public until spring though, because we need to get this mining permit released.”
The city has planned to finish Brighton’s connections to the Colorado Front Range Trail through Ken Mitchell Park. Once three segments are taken care of this fall and next spring, that 10-foot wide concrete trail will fully connect pedestrians to Chatfield Reservoir in Littleton. , but delays with Boral have pushed it back.
Joe Lamanna, general manager of Boral Construction Materials, said that the bulldozing will be done in the next few months, and residents can expect all the heavy equipment to be pulled from the site this summer.
“We’re very actively backfilling two of the pits right now. We should have them both completed this spring, and then we’re going to put some topsoil on them and seed them,” Lamanna said. “We have to get 70 percent vegetative cover on the ground before we can get released from the reclamation bond and that usually takes two or three seasons. We might have to go in and reseed it again depending on how it takes.”
And Wardle said that the pond that will be used for fishing will start to fill up again starting April 1. However, most of the free snow pack water needed to fill the pond must come from the South Platte River, and warm conditions all winter may make filling it a challenge too.
“If it stays as warm as it is now, we may not get any free river water because it may melt slowly and we won’t have free river conditions,” Wardle said. “So we just have to wait and see what Mother Nature does for us.”
Francis said: “We just want to see something better, even a little something. We’ve all waited so long, long enough.”