Bennett leaves legacy of service to Larimer County

By Dan MacArthur
North Forty News

Jill Bennett has witnessed the action shift to the north and west during her tenure as a Larimer County planner, and she's been right in the middle of it.

Now retiring after 30 years, she takes particular satisfaction from helping residents of LaPorte and Red Feather Lakes develop plans guiding development and preserving the unique character of each community.

She worked with the first LaPorte Area Advisory Committee to develop a land-use plan for the area. Bennett acknowledged that it was a challenge given the often-strong differences of opinion, but a common denominator developed through the long process.

"It's been my experience there are many shared ideas," she said.

Bennett believes the greatest contribution toward cohesion was construction of the bypass that removed the highway traffic that literally split LaPorte down the middle.

"That gave them the opportunity to think about what that center of the town could be," she said. "That was a big thing."

"I think they're ready for additional development," Bennett continued, noting that LaPorte is an attractive place to live with lots of vacant land.

Red Feather Lakes, she said, already was more cohesive as a community with a school, library and meeting places. But Bennett said building consensus was no less difficult given the complicated composition of the community split between year-round and part-time residents.

"They have very different ideas about what would benefit the community," Bennett said. But in a process starting a decade ago with residents protesting that they were being ignored, a shared vision emerged that evolved into development of their own area plan.

That plan, Bennett said, reflected the village's desire to remain a family and recreation community, combined with the consensus that businesses should be directed to the "downtown" rather than along Red Feather Lakes Road.

Bennett predicted that change will come much more slowly for the community until water and sewer issues are resolved.

"There are just too many constraints," she said, pointing to the dependence on septic systems and wells vulnerable to pollution. Bennett said it came as a real eye-opener when the library was required to chlorinate its water.

A Wyoming native, Bennett earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics at the University of Wyoming. She worked for the state of Wyoming, the city of Cheyenne and Laramie County before being hired as a Larimer County planner.

Bennett said she believes her background brought a valuable perspective to the special projects team aimed at drawing on the strengths of the staff. "I think the economic viewpoint is different than other people on the team," she said.

Bennett said she also enjoyed the hands-on kind of planning such as the housing rehabilitation program in which she and the building inspector personally assessed mobile homes eligible for replacement of dangerous aluminum wiring.

Bennett also played leading roles in developing the county's first economic development plan, its enterprise zone program and its master plan.

On the cusp of her departure, Bennett is wrapping up the county's process of adopting 1041 regulations, giving it greater control over large-scale projects including wind farms, pipelines and solar-collector arrays.

Bennett said she has no grandiose plans for her retirement from a career that took hold of her in a way she never could have predicted.

"I didn't expect to stay this long," she said.