The draft Master Plan for Denver's Mountain Park system is now available. Download files at the Master Plan website. Comments are due by September 19th, 2008.
The goals of the Master Plan are to:
- establish how often Denver residents use Denver Mountain Parks and whether they consider them important to their quality of life
- create a solid plan of stewardship—funding, communications, and regional partnerships
- chart ten years of improvements, such as new trails and programs for kids
Here are a few questions to get you started:
- Are there any outstanding issues you don’t think the plan addressed?
- Are there any recommendations that you would like to add?
- Are there any statements or recommendations with which you strongly disagree?
It's our first Master Plan in more than 90 years! Please let us hear from you...
p.s. When you comment, please record your county and/or zip code. Thanks!
1 comments:
My family lives in Clear Creek County at the foot of Hick’s Mountain and we have often enjoyed this amenity and support the idea of preserving the natural beauty of this area. However, the Master Plan offers the following recommendations for the Hick’s Mountain park land (by way of its categorization as a Conservation/Wilderness Park):
• Considers its primary role as scenic backdrop or a natural resource only.
• Proposes to identify and close social trails into the park and recommends that any trails be obliterated.
In other words, the stated goal of the Master Plan is to eliminate human activity in the Hick’s Mountain Park.
Page 2 of the Master Plan states, “What an unforgivable irony, civic leaders noted, it would be to lose the priceless beauty of the mountains to development or be denied recreational access.” I cannot see how the drafters of the Master Plan can reconcile their position on human access to the Conservation/Wilderness Parks with the above mission statement.
In my area, access to Hick’s Mountain is being actively prevented by surrounding private land owners, not as stewards of the public land, but as part of the formation of enclaves for gated communities that “wall off” the rest of the public from what is supposed to be a public resource. The Master Plan recommendations as currently drafted only assist them in this effort.
I would ask the City and County of Denver to consider public land (all of it) as just that and encourage rather than block public access. The best watchdogs for the preservation and protection of the remote or less accessible properties will be the people that will make the effort to explore these areas (if access is blocked, who will be watching?). The Master Plan should promote public easements into the Conservation/Wilderness Parks rather than actively prevent access.
Zane Dennis
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