Eagle County Commissioner Tom Boyd, who grew up in Vail and turns 51 in October, compares the development he’s seen here in the last half century to a bolt of lightning.

“The human habitation looks like a lightning strike that runs from East Vail and Vail Pass all the way to Dotsero where the Colorado River flows out of Eagle County,” Boyd said on a recent phone interview. “When I was a kid, that lightning strike was moving east to west, and it’s kind of (done that) now. And so now the branches are starting to go up the side valleys.”

If a lightning bolt is shaped like a tree branch, keeping that growth well-pruned and from spreading up those side valleys is complicated in a county where there’s limited private land and more than 80% of it is made up of publicly owned federal property in the form of U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management land.

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“I don’t think, generally speaking, that people want that (lightning-strike spread),” Boyd said when asked about preserving open space. “I think people think … let’s take conservation easements as part of a greater strategy to promote infill development, to build where our resources and our infrastructure already exists. First of all, it’s cheaper and can make things more affordable, and we need to encourage development in terms of transportation, too.”

For months, the commissioners have been wrestling with how to shape that sustainable growth for the next 50 years while engaging in what’s known as the county’s “Land Use Regulation Rewrite Project.” On Monday, the commissioners will hold a work session from 1:30-3:30 p.m. at the county building in Eagle to review the final draft of proposed new code.

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“If your population is growing, but you want to reduce the human impact on the environment, there are strategies for doing that,” Boyd said, focusing on plummeting wildlife populations locally. “Those are all the strategies we’re trying to employ with our Eagle County land use regulations, tied together with housing, tied together with our conservation dollars.”

The need for more funding

Last month, the commissioners decided to put off pursuit of a plan to ask voters to either lift the current cap on open space taxes of $7 million a year or increase the county’s mill levy for that purpose — or both. By pushing that effort off until the 2027 election, the county now has time to work with the Trust for Public Land to assess public opinion on the topic.

“If you look across our state and even our neighboring counties, Summit, Pitkin, their open space tax can be used for a broad diversity of projects, including land acquisition for protecting natural resources and wildlife and agricultural heritage and history, but then also managing public lands and recreation and stewardship and restoration projects, as well as recreation improvements, whether that be trailheads or a trail or signage or crews, boots on the ground, that currently the (Eagle County) open space tax does not fund that type of work on our ground,” said Vail Valley Mountain Trails Alliance Executive Director Ernest Saeger, a big proponent of TPL’s survey.

“There’s an interesting opportunity to hear what the community thinks in regards to how this fund can support those efforts in addition to the land acquisition,” Saeger added. “You look at our current mill levy for this is right around 1.5. And you look at Pitkin, theirs is at 3.7 and they bring in more than triple the amount (of money) on an annual basis and they’re able to accomplish more with that amount from a broad range of projects.”

Asked about controversial private development proposals either surrounded by or contiguous with public lands, and whether there have been missed opportunities in the past due to a lack of funding for conservation easements, Boyd simply said it’s his personal opinion that more could be done with more funding and that the current level of funding is inadequate.

“I don’t think we have enough money to get the job done right. That’s my personal opinion,” Boyd said, emphasizing he is not speaking for the whole board. “$7 million a year is not enough. If you look at when these two (open space) resolutions passed with flying colors, most everyone was in support of this. It felt like a lot of money. In this day and age, it’s not.”

Missed opportunities?

In 2008, the 680 acres of what’s now being pursued for private homes as Berliamont Estates north of Edwards sold for $9.5 million. That does not mean it was a candidate for a conservation easement back then, because experts in that arena will tell you the public needs to have a willing seller to make that happen. But it shows the minimum costs of trying to acquire such parcels.

When Jessica Foulis took over as executive director of the Eagle Valley Land Trust in 2020 after four years as trust’s stewardship and outreach manager, the trust began a process of gauging what the community wanted from its lead conservation organization.

“What we heard from the community is we need conservation to have a seat at the table when we’re having these land use conversations, when we’re deciding what happens to land in the community,” Foulis said. “We need that to be a really viable option and a voice at the table with capacity to have a conversation.

“So that’s really what we’ve been working on for the past five years is to gear up our capacity so that we have the skill set and the time and expertise to have a meaningful impact when these opportunities arise,” Foulis added. “It’s all predicated on a willing landowner, but we want to be ready and have the capacity when there is a willing landowner.”

Current conservation proponents don’t like to play the what-if game when it comes to private parcels such as the 4,600 acres of the Battle Mountain project near Minturn that listed for $19.5 million in 2017 and quietly sold to a private party in 2020. They prefer to look at future opportunities such as the 66 acres of Piney Ranch that Denver Water may “surplus” for sale.

“These decisions get made and we can’t go back in time and I can’t speak for decisions that were made prior to my time,” Foulis said. “But I think capacity is so important to actually be able to have these conversations. And now if there are opportunities that arise, and, as they do, we have the ability to step in and offer conservation as an option.”

An eye toward the future

Foulis said there may be a conservation role for the land trust if Denver Water is a willing seller of its 66-acre Piney parcel, which no longer has water rights associated with it but is a popular tourism destination with nearby trail access and recreation. The owner of a private outfitter operation on 40 of those acres is still trying to work out a long-term lease, and the town of Vail is carefully watching what’s happening at Piney.

“It’s a great community benefit and amenity,” the Mountain Trails Alliance’s Saeger said of Piney. “The fear is that someone comes in, a private developer, and there’s limited public access to no public access up there. There’re trails that start and end right near the entrance to that parcel that could be affected, and so that’s the fear of it not being a generally publicly accessible area.”

Saeger said the trails alliance has a trail counter on Red Sandstone Road (up to Piney from Vail) to understand how traffic impacts trail users connecting to North Trail, Middle Creek, Lost Lake and other trails in the area, and that the counter from late June through September registers 60,000 vehicles. Not all of them are Piney-bound, of course, but likely the majority.

That’s an example of a parcel Saeger would love to see kept public because of its access potential for mountain bikers, hikers, backpackers and trail riders in general. But he adds there are other pieces of private property that are worth preserving even without public access.

Public access vs. wildlife and water

“For example, the Nottingham Ranch one,” Saeger said. “It was a big price tag that just recently went through. But we offered a letter of support for that one stating the wildlife values that it has. It wasn’t opening up that property for public access or recreation … there’s no need or desire to improve recreation or trails or anything like that on this Nottingham parcel.”

A conservation easement on the Nottingham Ranch along the Colorado River near Burns is scheduled to close next month, with the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust the lead organization. Eagle County has committed $10 million toward the 9,480.49 acres of the ranch in the county, but its entire sprawling expanse of more than 18,000 acres extends into Routt County, which has also committed funding. In total, the price tag is estimated at around $30 million, although on the open market it could fetch $100 million or more.

“It should be conserved as it is with the scenic views and wildlife habitat and agricultural heritage that it has,” Saeger said. “Then, if you look at different opportunities like parcels that might be a little bit closer, concentrated within our core population of our valley, that’s where there might be opportunity to say, well, this parcel makes sense for a public access and recreation standpoint.”

In addition, the Nottingham purchase comes with significant water rights that have been in use since the 1800s and are as senior as they come in a time of extreme drought when Front Range cities are jockeying to secure more and more water to irrigate lawns east of the Divide.

“If there’s water and there’s a beautiful stretch of land in the Rocky Mountains, wildlife habitat, it’s pretty easy to envision that getting gated off and turned into a golf course community,” Boyd said of the county’s remaining ranchlands. “Now, I’m not against the gated golf course communities in principle, but from the time that I was born in this community to the time that we are now, 50 years later, I feel like we’ve probably done a good number of those. It’s not time, necessarily, to do more. We probably have enough of that type of development, right?”

But that’s the purpose of the community outreach and surveying the Trust for Public Land will be conducting over the next year or so — gauging the public appetite for lifting the open space funding limit and possibly increasing the mill levy and the scope of how the funds can be used.

“Some people will say no, that’s OK. Some people will say yes, and some people will be in between,” Boyd said. “I’d like to know what the community thinks. If the community is supportive, I’d like to go for that. If the community is not supportive, I don’t want to go for that.”