Red Feather Lakes planning for future

By Linda Bell
Red Feather Lakes Correspondent

Planning the future look of the Red Feather Lakes area--which could be a multi-year task involving scores of community members--will get under way in August.

Following a year of discussion with local residents, Larimer County Commissioners in July redirected $50,000 in the 2004 county planning department budget to start work on an area land use plan for Red Feather Lakes.

At a regularly scheduled citizens' meeting with County Commissioner Kathay Rennels on July 21, area residents started talking about how to initiate their planning effort.

Barry Messmer suggested that a "citizens meeting to define and begin the process of a regional plan for Red Feather Lakes" be held while summer residents are still in the area. That meeting will be on Aug. 18 at 7 p.m. in the Property Owners Association building. County planning representatives will be at the meeting to help guide the process and to answer questions, but not to direct the meeting.

Messmer, who has been attending the monthly citizens meetings with Rennels since late 2003, said a volunteer exploratory group grew out of those meetings to identify various issues, but the group has not been formalized. Messmer said they have been studying the LaPorte Area Plan, which could be used partly as a model for Red Feather Lakes.

The big challenge for Red Feather Lakes, Messmer said, will be determining which boundaries to include in the plan, and then to find the best people to represent that area on a future steering committee. The committee will likely be made up of both full-time and seasonal residents and representatives of the merchant community, local property owners associations and other formal groups.

Messmer said it could take two years just to establish the planning area boundaries, especially since all meetings would be public, and many residents in the community only live in the area part of the year. "One of the things the community can do with the seed money from the county planning department," he said, "is set up a web site and a list-serve e-mail address to keep all members of the community in the loop, even when they aren't available to attend meetings."

Based on the LaPorte model, Messmer said, the final steering committee might have 10 seats with an additional 10 or more subcommittee chairs. The number of people on subcommittees could number many more, limited only by time and availability.

A lot of people don't like or want change and are afraid of it, Messmer noted, but if the citizens don't protect the village they love now, change will happen anyway and they won't have any say in the matter.

"We've seen a tremendous impact in growth at the library in the past five years, and we've had to respond to that," said Marilyn Colter, Red Feather Lakes library director. "Many don't want Red Feather to change, but in fact, it is changing."

She said some kind of planning effort would help control that growth and maintain the community's quality of life. For instance, she added, where people build businesses and the kinds of businesses that come to Red Feather Lakes has a direct impact on everyone in the community. Adequate parking, for instance, is becoming a huge problem in the village, Colter said.

Bill Gilbert, a resident of Red Feather Highlands about 7 miles from the village, said he is interested in seeing a wide interpretation of a Red Feather Lakes land use plan. If planning is limited to the village, he said, future problems might spill over those boundaries. There are already commercial operations along the road, he pointed out.

"Who will say where a strip mall might go in anywhere along the main road if it's not in the plan?" he asked.

Dennis Frydendall, president of Red Feather Storage and Irrigation Co. Inc., a nonprofit that controls the private lakes and fishing in the area, said potable water is an issue that will ultimately have to be addressed in Red Feather Lakes, and his company is already starting to look at ways to provide water to residents in the community. He said Red Feather Lakes needs to do a plan, but without larger subdivisions like Crystal Lakes involved. He said any plan would have to factor in that 2,500 acres of privately held unplatted land in the village might eventually be developed.

The $50,000 the Larimer County Commissioners allocated to the Red Feather Lakes plan was already in the 2004 planning department budget, and originally set aside for floodplain mapping in the Big Thompson Canyon. Because federal and state agencies have reduced the size of the project, the county money is no longer needed.

The move came partly in response to a meeting the commissioners had with the community on June 16 that indicated residents were ready to talk about land use planning. At that meeting participants were asked to let the county know their priorities and visions for the future. A transcribed list of these ideas is available to read at the Red Feather Lakes Library.

Background on the planning discussions is available online at www.northfortynews.com (July 2004, RFL residents support planning). Related articles on that web site are in the archives (July 2003, Planning issues spark RFL Forum, and June 2004, RFL is county seat on June 16).

Jill Bennett, who guided the recent update of the LaPorte Area Plan, will be helping Red Feather area residents with their planning effort. Area plans help guide future land use decisions. Because neither LaPorte nor Red Feather Lakes is incorporated, final land use decisions are still made by the county commissioners. An area plan, however, gives local residents an opportunity to let county officials know how they want their communities to grow.