City of Greeley opts not to pursue open space tax, leaving parks department to ask: where will money come from for new and existing open space as development continues?

By Dan England

In the early 1970s, when Curtis Mayfield released “Superfly,” bell bottoms were in and beer was canned, not crafted, Jefferson County approved an open space tax. 

It was the nation’s first by a county, and Boulder, Fort Collins and Larimer County followed. Many other communities have joined in. Greeley, admittedly, has taken baby steps, but in February 2021, the city developed its first-ever strategic plan to guide the city’s natural areas, trails and open spaces for the next five years. One of the main goals of the plan was to find sustainable funding. 

On Tuesday, the Greeley City Council told the city to keep looking. 

The first step for a quarter-cent sales tax — estimated to be $40 a household — was given a thumbs down by four members of the council during a work session. That first step was a poll asking residents their willingness to approve the sales tax for open space.

The vote was unofficial, but the message was not: We don’t want a tax. 

“You can look at what other communities have done, and you can see the results,” said Justin Scharton, superintendent of the natural areas and trails division of the culture, parks and recreation department. “But what might work in one community may not work in others. Greeley is a different community. But it’s hard to have much of a meaningful conservation without a dedicated funding source.” 

Scharton, instead, said in an interview that he will ask the council for a $500,000 budget to maintain the 2,000 acres of natural areas and 30 miles of trail it already has. He will do this soon, as the city works to put together its 2023 budget. 

That money would allow Scharton to do more mowing, install more signs and hire a restoration specialist who could get a handle on noxious weeds and restore some of the lands back to their natural condition.

Until now, he’s had to rely on portions of the city’s general fund until a sustainable pot of money could be found. Now he’s given up on any kind of sales tax for another two years, and after years of speculation, he’s resigned to finding a small budget that would at least allow him to complete “the basic day-to-day maintenance of the existing amenities out there.” 

If you’re familiar with Josephine Jones, the top portion, aka the hill that winds down to a bridge that crosses a ditch, is a natural area. The area beyond that, with a small playground and a blanket of grass, is more of a park. The concrete Poudre Trail makes up most of Greeley’s 30 miles, although Sheep Draw is another example. Some of the more famous natural areas in Northern Colorado include Horsetooth Mountain Open Space outside of Fort Collins, Devil’s Backbone outside of Loveland and the Chautaqua Trail area in Boulder. 

Councilman Tommy Butler pushed the open space tax more as a way to give Scharton’s division more direction, but he also wanted to let residents say yay or nay on it. Polling in the past has indicated that residents were in favor of it, though in the last poll in 2020, which included questions about the Food Tax, the margin was only 48 percent in favor. 

“It’s gotten more than 50 percent support in other times,” Butler said. “If they want it, we should let them vote on it.” 

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Cities poll residents before they try any kind of tax ballot issue to see if it’s worth the ask and what message they should bring to voters. The Trust for Public Lands offered to pay for half of the roughly $30,000 the poll would cost, but Dale Hall, Brett Payton, Ed Clark and Johnny Olson said no. Mayor John Gates, Butler and Deb DeBoutez were a yes.

Butler and DeBoutez were the tax’s most ardent supporters. Butler, in a separate interview, brought up how open space also acts as a so-called community separator. City planners have said for decades that growth could make Greeley resemble those Denver area cities that bleed into one another. But most of his argument, and DeBoutez’s as well, had to do more with maintenance and finding a dedicated funding source for natural areas. 

“We don’t have the budget to maintain the properties we acquire,” DeBoutez said during the work session. “We keep putting off this decision as more and more development is coming in. We need some sort of mechanism to pay for what we’ve got as far as maintenance and be deliberate about how we grow.” 

Maintaining what the city has will be a bigger issue in the future, even if rejecting the tax means Greeley may not acquire much else. Greeley and Windsor recently acquired nearly 1,000 acres of open space north of U.S. 34 and Colo. 257. The Shurview property could bring more than 17 miles of trail and possibly connect to the Poudre Trail. It also includes the Missile Park campground. Greeley will start working on the property next year. 

Greeley also will have a series of reclaimed gravel pits that, once used, will become small lakes ready for recreation. Becky Safarik, assistant city manager, has repeatedly said throughout her career that those will be “a string of pearls.” Those lakes will also need to be maintained. 

That wasn’t enough to convince four councilmen. Ed Clark simply said “it’s a bad time to be asking people for money,” probably in reference to gas prices and inflation. Councilman Johnny Olson showed how confusing open space can be to the general public when he expressed skepticism for several reasons.

“Buying property on developable land while trying to build economic vitality is difficult,” Olson said. “Just buying land for space? I don’t know if our constitutues would want that.” 

Staff clarified with Olson that nearly all the land that becomes open space or would become open space wasn’t developable, but that didn’t change his mind. 

The Shurview property was a special purchase. Parks staff called it a “once in a city’s history” get, and Gates called it a “home run.” But Scharton also said without a dedicated funding source such as the tax it won’t happen again. The city purchased it in part because of a $1.25 million federal grant and a $1.25 million grant from Great Outdoors Colorado, the state lottery fund. Greeley probably won’t get another grant like that for a while. The city will still pay $2 million over the next two years. 

“There aren’t any more Shurviews without funding,” he said.