A pair of successful citizen-led petition drives targeting development in Estes Park will force the town’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday night either to enact the changes the petitioners want or send them to the Nov. 4 ballot and let voters decide.

“We’re not trying to stop anything. We’re not against attainable, affordable or workforce housing,” Kristine Poppitz, founder of the group Preserve Estes Park, told BizWest on Monday. “We just want to give the citizens a say.”

One of the initiatives would require written approval from a two-thirds majority of property owners within a 500-foot radius of a property undergoing rezoning or a Planned Unit Development before the change can be approved.

The other initiative would repeal a section of the Estes Park Development Code that provides density bonuses in multifamily residential zones as incentives for the construction of affordable, attainable and workforce housing in multifamily residential zones. It also would repeal the associated building height limits.Because the Preserve Estes Park petition gatherers collected more than the required 246 signatures, or 5% of voters who cast ballots in the last municipal election, state law requires the Board of Trustees either to enact the ordinances outlined on the petitions or refer the questions to voters. The town staff had discussed joining the general election in November with Larimer County election offices and received an estimate of approximately $6,000 to $20,000 to put the questions on the ballot, depending on whether the state or county have questions about the language.

If the proposed ordinances were to go into effect, they could have an impact on several developments initiated by the Estes Park Housing Authority to address the tourism-dependent mountain town’s need for affordable workforce housing, including its Fall River Village and Fish Hatchery workforce-housing projects, as well as the controversial Planned Unit Development proposal from Elkhorn Lodge west of the downtown area.

“We’d like to keep higher density and density bonuses out of residential districts,” Poppitz said. “It changes the community. It changes the neighborhoods.”

She also contended that density bonuses often don’t achieve the desired effect, pointing to a three-story apartment building atop a hill that was the recipient of such a bonus but remains only 40% occupied and has been “detrimental to the wildlife corridor there, where deer and elk used to cross Highway 7 there.”

Zoning “exists for a reason, and it’s getting ignored,” Poppitz said. “Once you go and build, you can’t go back to the natural environment. You can’t build your way out of these problems.”

Poppitz said “density bonuses should be used in the zones where they are allowed, not through rezoning.”

However, Scott Moulton, executive director of the Estes Park Housing Authority, argued that “land is not getting cheaper, and neither is cost per unit. Our ability to right-size development and use density bonuses are a critical tool to bring costs down. The more difficult we make that, the more expensive we make that, and the less opportunities members of our community have.”

Poppitz said the ordinance would require approval by two-thirds of voters within 500 feet of a property to be rezoned before a rezoning application can be submitted. The property owner seeking the rezoning would have to collect the signatures, she said.

Such a requirement is important in an area where many owners aren’t year-round residents, she said, because “these rezoning applications get submitted while the nearby homeowners aren’t in town, and then they come back and say, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t know about this.’”

Moulton charged that the process Preserve Estes Park wants amounts to “another form of redlining and economic segregation.”

He questioned the proposed ordinance’s legality, and added that “I don’t think moving land-use approvals into a scenario far outside the very established and cumbersome approval process is the right path.”

Also concerning to Moulton, he said, is that “in my mind, both these initiatives are driven by fear. The fear is that Estes will grow, but you can’t stop change.”

He noted that the town’s year-round population has dropped from 6,000 to 5,700, causing a drop in school enrollment. “Twenty years from now, if initiatives like this pass,” he added, “it would be effectively turning Estes into a bedroom community that isn’t a year-round community on any level.

“Instead,” he said, “we need to come together as a community and openly discuss how we believe the built environment should look. Leaning into solutions is better than fear.”

Poppitz disputed charges that the proposed ordinances are unconstitutional and that “Preserve Estes Park is trying to stop all development. We’re not.

“But registered voters signed to get these petitions before the Town Board,” she said. “If the citizens hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t even be discussing this, so it’s obviously wanted.”

The successful petition drives in Estes Park are the latest in a series of citizen-led revolts against actions by municipal governments along the northern Front Range:

A Greeley citizens group is collecting signatures in an attempt to repeal that city’s approval of a complex financing plan for a $1.1 billion sports and entertainment project on the city’s western edge, part of an ambitious development called Cascadia.

Residents in Fort Collins are collecting signatures to designate the former site of Colorado State University’s Hughes Stadium as a natural area, preventing any development on the site including a proposed bike park. An earlier successful ballot issue forced the city to buy the land in 2021 to keep CSU from erecting a housing development there.

A pair of successful citizen initiatives twice forced the Fort Collins City Council to repeal massive changes to the city’s land-use code it had approved, including the virtual abolition of single-family residential zoning.

A citizens group in Timnath successfully led a petition drive in 2023 to keep a Topgolf golf and entertainment center out of the proposed Ladera development.

Voters in Loveland in 2023, incensed by how their City Council had handled the Centerra South development, soundly approved a measure that gives voters the final say on urban-renewal plans.

Windsor voters in 2023 overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that created a permanent parking zone downtown, over the objections of the property owner and town government, which planned to redevelop the area for apartments, commercial and restaurant uses.

Voters in Louisville, in an April 2022 special election, repealed the City Council’s previous approval of the Redtail Ridge redevelopment project.

One citizen-led petition drive that failed at the ballot box was a 2022 effort that aimed to repeal Boulder’s annexation agreement with the University of Colorado for the CU South property. When 54% of voters rejected the measure, it meant that the CU South property remained within Boulder’s city limits, and the city’s flood-protection project at the site, along with other aspects of the annexation agreement, could move forward.

This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2025 BizWest Media LLC. You can view the original here: Estes trustees may send citizen-sponsored initiatives to ballot