Virtual Town Board Meeting: June 22, 2020

Virtual Town Board Meeting: June 22, 20206 min read

Hi neighbors! In Monday night’s Town Board Meeting, we heard a presentation from the Boulder County Sheriff, heard a presentation from our CAPS committee, decided to move the public hearing for the final plat of the Resolute Property to July 13th, and continued a public hearing on the Parq at Rock Creek, which will be continued once again to our next Town Board Retreat on Monday June 29th. Ready to find out more on what happened? As usual, you may read this post in written form, subscribe to the Laura for Superior podcast, or scroll to the bottom for a video recap.

Disclaimer: While I do my best to represent an honest and accurate portrayal of meetings and events, the following should be considered an editorial that represents one person’s interpretation of the meetings. At the request of my fellow Board members, I am keeping their points anonymous rather than trying to attribute my interpretation to them personally. For the most unbiased and complete information, I would encourage residents to watch the meeting video itself and draw their own conclusions – visit the town website at SuperiorColorado.gov for the official meeting video and meeting minutes. Finally, I’d also encourage you to check out EngagedCitizens.us, which is a fantastic free tool created by one of our own residents. Engaged Citizens includes a repository of agendas, documents, and meeting videos, and allows you to search within a video to jump to critical parts. I hope you find it as helpful as I do!

2020-06-22_Word_Cloud

Item 2E – Public Comment

During general public comment, we had several complaints about noise – one relating to drag racing on US-36, and one regarding Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport complaints.

Item 2F1 – Presentation – Boulder County Sheriff

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office provides law enforcement services for the Town of Superior. In light of recent events, our Board invited Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle to present on the Sheriff’s Office operations and procedures. Sheriff Pelle opened by noting that the killing of George Floyd does not in any way reflect the position of the Boulder County Sheriff; Sheriff Pelle’s statement on the killing of George Floyd can be read in its entirety here.

Sheriff Pelle walked us through the eight policies that are part of the #8CantWait campaign to reduce the harm caused by police.

Eight_Cant_Wait

Of these eight, the only policy that Boulder County police does not comply with is an outright ban on shooting at moving vehicles; however, Sheriff Pelle noted this is strongly discouraged and only permissible in limited situations. There is some concern that with the number of large running and bike races in Boulder (e.g., the Bolder Boulder), a vehicle could be used as a weapon for a terrorist attack, as has occurred in Manhattan, and the Sheriff’s office wants to ensure they are able to shut down such an attack.

When asked what we can do to support the Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Pelle said that his staff right now is pretty demoralized by the anti-police sentiment; anything we can do to encourage our local peace officers would be very welcome.

Item 2F2 – Presentation – CAPS Committee

Our Cultural Arts and Public Spaces (CAPS) Advisory Committee chair Debbie Yeats presented progress that the committee has been making on various initiatives – public art to decorate the bus shelters, a Superior Snapshots photography project to document families living through COVID19, and artist-painted prairie dog pop-up sculptures. We reviewed preliminary designs for each of those projects. The bus shelter art will start being put up this week, the Superior Snapshots will start being captured in July, and the prairie dogs will start being decorated in August.

Item 3 – Consent Agenda

Next, our Board unanimously passed the entire consent agenda, which included meeting minutes of the Town Board and Advisory Committees.

Item 5 – Public Hearing on the Parq at Rock Creek

The bulk of our meeting time was spent on item 5 – the continuation of a public hearing for a final subdivision plat (FP) and final plat site plan (FPSP) for the Parq at Rock Creek, on the 24-acre property commonly referred to as “the Zaharias property”, between highway 36 and 88th Street. The proposed FP would divide the land into one 15.4-acre development lot (Lot 1, Block 1); one publicly dedicated tract of land (Tract A) at 3.8 acres for use as open space; two privately owned tracts of land for use as open space and storm detention; and 0.97 acres of publicly dedicated right-of-way (ROW) along the eastern edge of S. 88th St. This land is currently all zoned as Commercial, though it has never been developed, so some members of the community erroneously believe it is Open Space. In conjunction with this is a request to zone Lot 1, Block 1 to Residential, so that the applicant could build 180 apartments along with the associated private streets, public and private utilities, as well as landscaping and site improvements.

We began with public comment, since that’s where we left off in our last hearing, and asked to hear only from those who didn’t speak at the last meeting. We then offered an opportunity for the developer to respond to all the comments thus far, and then returned to Board Q&A of the applicant. At 10pm, we went back to public comment once again, this time offering the opportunity for everyone to comment (even if they had already commented at our last meeting or commented earlier in the night). We then unanimously agreed to continue this public hearing on Monday June 29th, when we were already planning to meet for our quarterly Board retreat.

One noteworthy item that was uncovered on Monday night is that the Town of Superior does not currently own all of the land needed to complete the current work happening on 88th Street – though when our Board considered the options for improvements and approved a contract for the work, it was not made clear that we would need to acquire land for the ROW (with any of the options we were considering). If we do not approve the rezoning, we would need to acquire an acre of land from the Zaharias property for this ROW, at a likely cost of $100-300K.

As this application is still pending, I cannot comment further, but will certainly share my opinions and rationale after the rezoning decision is made.

Item 4 – Public Hearing for the Final Plat of the Resolute Property

The Resolute property (northeast of the intersection of Coalton Road and South Tyler Drive) was rezoned in 2016 from Regional Activity and Employment Center (RAC) to residential; in 2018, a FP and FPSP plan were approved for Urban Green Development to build 94 condos. Despite receiving approval to develop, Urban Green Development never acquired or pursued developing this property. Now, Superior Shore Townhomes / Koelbel Urban Homes is requesting to subdivide the 7.2 acre property into 94 individual lots to build the 94 dwelling units as townhomes.

We moved this on our agenda to be after item 5, and came back to it before the close of the meeting to continue this to our next Board meeting on Monday July 13th.

Wrap Up

Thank you so much for taking the time to read / listen to this recap – I hope it is helpful! Our Board is always open to hearing your comments, questions, and concerns – you may always email your feedback to townboard@superiorcolorado.gov, or to me specifically at lauras@superiorcolorado.gov. As a reminder, any messages sent to a government email are part of the public record and will have your name attached; if you feel the need to write in anonymously, you may always comment at the bottom of my blog post recaps.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *