By Susan de Castro McCann

Redstone Review Editor

LYONS – Lyons faces big challenges in the coming year with serious budget cuts looming and the possibility of cutting some services.

Although sales tax revenues continue to decline, the Lyons Board of Trustees, BOT, has two big projects in the hopper which are paid for and will soon be completed. The biggest project the board has undertaken in many years is the completion of the Main Street project which has suffered numerous delays due to snow storms and cold weather.

The second big project is the approval by the board of the long-awaited new Lyons Comprehensive Plan, which has been underway for about year under the direction of the Planning and Community Development Commission, PCDC.

Both projects are expected to be completed in February if not before. The Main Street project, which many Main Street businesses think has gone on forever, is supposed to be completed by the end of January.

“The crews are working for as long as they can everyday that the weather permits,” said Karen Cumbo, interim town administrator. “Because the days are so short the work time only amounts to about a half a day. But we will crank ahead and get it done. The landscaping will be done this spring. The road crews need to be done soon because CDOT (Colorado Department of Transportation) plans to close Colorado Hwy. 34 to rebuild a bridge somewhere between Loveland and Estes Park and wants the highway through Lyons to be completed with signage and lighting in place, and wants the cones and detours gone by the middle of February.”

This incentive will put pressure on the crews from Lawson Construction to complete the Main Street project as soon as possible, but weather is still a wild card. “We also hope to have the sidewalks in place by that time as well,” said Cumbo. “They are putting in the bases for the light poles, but the stone work needs to be done before the lights go into the bases or the stone could shift.”

Cumbo said that the Main Street project was supposed to be completed the second week in December. “We had no way of knowing that there would be eight snow storms,” she said. “No one anticipated it would take this long. There is only so much we can control. Once Fourth Avenue is open and the signals are working, the traffic flow will be better downtown.”

The second big project is the comp plan.  The comp plan is the document that guides the town board when it decides new regulations. It is a guide for zoning regulations, land acquisition, developments and subdivisions. It is the document that the county looks to for direction when working with cities and towns to create on an intergovernmental agreement, and the comp plan also documents the growth planning area for the town. It addresses many other issues. It will be approved and adopted first by the PCDC, which is in charge of creating the new comp plan, and then it is scheduled to be adopted by resolution by the BOT on February 15 at a regular meeting and public hearing.

The old comp plan was approved in 1998 and it focused mainly on residential development because the Olson property was going to be annexed to the town and developed as residential property. However that never happened and Boulder County bought the property and created a trail through it to connect to the Heil and Hall Ranch Trails. The 1998 comp plan won the Governor’s Smart Growth Award and has been used as a model by the Denver Regional Council of Government, DRCOG.

“The focus of the new comp plan is economic development,” said Marty Hine, a member of the PCDC. “We are focusing on the eastern corridor and the land east of the intersection of Colorado and U.S. Highways 66 and 36. We have created a new planning map and we hope to renegotiate a new agreement with the county commissioners so we can annex that land on the eastern corridor to create more commercial development. We are calling for an inventory of all the land that the town owns. We are also stating that we want to grow our relationship with the county, which was somewhat damaged over the new trail head on Red Gulch Road. We also want to engage with residents in the expanded planning area. We want to put in a GIS, Geographical Information System, for the town and the whole area. And sustainability is one of the principles of the new comp plan.”

Hine went on to say that when the Main Street is completed it will be a huge asset to the community and the PCDC hopes that it will encourage walking and biking downtown. The old comp plan came under fire for costing the town $35,000 which was matched in funding by DRCOG for a total of $70,000. But Hine pointed out that the town received $4.5 million in grants because of that comp plan, so it paid for the initial cost many times over. . The new comp plan will cost closer to $95,000 but half of that, $47,500 was paid by a Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) grant and it is also expected to generate many times that amount in grants.   The Planning and Community Development Commission is expected to approve the new comprehensive plan by resolution on February 8 at its regular meeting and public hearing. The PCDC will hold two work sessions on January 19 with the BOT at 6 p.m. and January 25 with the BOT at 6:30 p.m., both at the town hall, to push the comp plan into a final draft for final approval by both the PCDC and the BOT. Public input is invited at all the public hearings. For more information call the town hall at 303-823-6622.

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