Aug 25 Western TSA Meeting

To all members of the Boulder Outdoor Coalition, environmental recreation groups, and the at-large trail community:

Please join us Monday, August 25, 7pm at REI to discuss OSMP's upcoming West TSA.

At the July BATCO meeting we continued our discussion of strategies for reframing the debate over public land management issues in ways which will yield better decisions for all concerned. Meeting participants expressed strong support for a new "Trails Connect" initiative which we will be pursuing over the next few months.

We spent also spent a considerable time thinking about how best to approach Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) upcoming assessment of the ways in which it will manage the "Western Trails Study Area (TSA). This large area extends west of Broadway between Eldorado Springs and Linden Drive including the Flatirons, Green Mountain, Bear Peak, Flagstaff, and Sanitas. The process will literally determine how the "Mountain Parks" vision of the last century will be carried forward into the new 21st-century Boulder.

We have focused on figuring out how we can best contribute to the success of this process in the near future, and hereby offer a series of three open meetings to consolidate the community's thinking.

We propose to start the first meeting, August 25, by soliciting and compiling your ideas for managing the area -- trails, facilities, and practices to maintain and possible improvements to make. The second half of the session half of the session will be devoted to developing a list of questions for OSMP about their plans and assemble suggestions about ways in which the process might be structured most effectively.

At the following BATCO meeting, September 22, we plan to invite OSMP representatives to come tell us about their plans and respond our questions and suggestions.

In a final meeting, October 27, we propose to develop, for presentation to OSMP and the larger community, a more concrete set of recommendations, including detailed maps, outlining our thoughts on how the area might best be managed. In doing this we will try to craft a plan that will simultaneously advance the full range of interests represented in our community (including those traditionally associated with the various recreation, environmental, and land use groups).

We believe this initiative will remove a lot of the usual rhetoric and will streamline the TSA process for the department and the public alike.

So, mark your calendar and plan to attend the August 25 meeting. Bring a friend! Spread the word! We hope to see you there.


Guy Burgess

for the Boulder Area Trails Coalition (BATCO)