Erie advisory board starts review of open-space protections tied to acquisition tax
An Erie advisory board said town-owned open space is generally zoned agricultural open space rather than reserved open space, raising unresolved questions about which parcels were bought with the town’s voter-approved Trails and Natural Areas tax and what protections apply.
Erie’s Open Space and Trails Advisory Board has begun reviewing whether town-owned open space acquired with the town’s voter-approved trails and natural areas tax has the legal protections residents may expect.
During the board’s June 8 meeting, board members and a council liaison said in public discussion that Erie’s open-space land is currently zoned agricultural open space rather than reserved open space, and that the board had been asked to examine what that means for land acquired with Trails and Natural Areas funding.
That matters because staff and board members said at the meeting reserved open-space zoning may provide a stronger barrier against a future sale or rezoning than the current designation does. But the same discussion also showed the town does not yet appear to have a public parcel-by-parcel answer to a central question: which town-owned open-space properties were bought with that tax revenue.
Erie’s current property-tax levy schedule lists a 4-mill tax for “Trails and Natural Areas Acquisition.” In a 2022 update about renewing the tax, the town said the TNACC fund “can only be used to fund the purchase of natural areas and open space, creates and connects trails, preserves wildlife habitats, protects natural areas around creeks, and conserves scenic landscapes.”
A 2023 Home Rule Charter Commission presentation posted by the town described one of the charter’s open-space guardrails this way: the town must maintain a fund for maintaining and buying open space, and “open space cannot be sold or rezoned without voter approval.” That presentation is the clearest public town document reviewed for this story on the voter-approval question, but it is still a presentation rather than the enacted charter text itself.
Based on the public record reviewed so far, stronger zoning could matter in any future attempt to sell or rezone open-space land. But the exact legal trigger remains unclear because the documents reviewed for this story did not establish whether voter approval would be required only for a sale or rezoning, or also for a broader change in use.
The town’s open-space program page lists properties Erie maintains as open space, including Coal Creek, Erie Highlands, Flatiron Meadows, King/Johnson, Linear, Longs Peak, Northridge, Reliance and Wise Woods open spaces, along with agricultural open-space properties such as Allan Farms, Schofield Farm/Strieby Open Space and Wise Homestead Open Space. But those pages do not identify which parcels, if any, were acquired specifically with TNAF or TNACC money.
Some official property pages do provide acquisition history for individual sites. For example, King/Johnson Open Space’s page says King Open Space was purchased by the Kenneth Kendal King Foundation and dedicated to the town in 2014, while Johnson Open Space was acquired through annexation in 1994. A town land-management summary for Reliance Open Space says that property was also acquired through annexation in 1994. Those records narrow which parcels may fall outside the tax-funded acquisition question, but they still do not produce a complete public list of TNAF-funded acquisitions.
The June 8 meeting also suggested Erie is unlikely to move quickly. Staff told the advisory board during that meeting that a full review of open-space properties, ballot language and code provisions would not realistically begin until 2027.
That leaves the near-term question of whether Town Council wants to accelerate the work instead of waiting for that broader timeline. As of the June 8 discussion, the review had been framed as a new assignment for OSTAB, not as a completed legal determination or a council-directed rezoning package.
What is clear now is narrower but still significant: Erie officials have publicly acknowledged that the town needs to determine whether open space bought with a voter-approved acquisition tax has the protections voters expected, which parcels are affected, and whether rezoning some land to reserved open space would better preserve a future public vote before any sale or rezoning.