ELIZABETH — Forty miles from downtown Denver, where horse properties are plentiful and urban aggravations few, Elizabeth is starting to feel the city’s hot breath on its municipal neck.
Growth is coming — and some folks in this Elbert County town of 1,700 that butts up against the eastern edge of fast-growing Douglas County don’t want it. So much so that they have launched an unprecedented effort to boot from office the town’s entire elected government.
“We have a rubber stamp Mayor and Board of Trustees when it comes to pleasing developers with reckless annexations and approvals for anything that big money wants,” states a website promoting the recall election in Elizabeth. “Meanwhile, the townspeople of Elizabeth either suffer or give up and move.”
The slow-growth advocates point 18 miles up the road to Parker — a town of 55,000 that 30 years ago had fewer than 6,000 residents — as the kind of place they don’t want Elizabeth to become. It’s no accident their recall effort goes by the name “We Are Not Parker.”
This week, the town clerk verified the signatures on the recall petitions for the six town trustees and Mayor Megan Vasquez. But on Thursday, the board lodged a protest to the recall, meaning a hearing will need to be scheduled before an election date can be set, Elizabeth Town Administrator Matt Cohrs said.
Dwayne Snader, who lives just over the town line but has been a leader in pushing the slow-growth effort in Elizabeth, said the recall effort was born out of frustration over the perception that the town wasn’t listening to its residents’ growth concerns.
All people want is for Elizabeth to remain Elizabeth, he said, even if the population increases. The town should use its zoning power to stay in keeping with the rural feel of the area by requiring lots to be bigger and development less dense, he said.
“That’s the main thing — it’s gotta be controlled,” Snader said. “That will still preserve that rural feel.”
The town’s comprehensive plan, which has been undergoing a contentious public review over the last few months, anticipates a buildout population in Elizabeth of 20,000 — a more than tenfold increase from today — over the next two decades.
Snader said a comprehensive plan from a decade ago put the buildout population of Elizabeth at 16,000. He is concerned that current discussions on updating that plan inflate that goal by 25%.
Cohrs said he understands the sentiments of those intent on maintaining Elizabeth’s small-town feel. But there’s a larger reality at work, he said, as metro Denver’s population climbs above 3.2 million. Another 1 million people are expected in the metro by 2050, according to the state demography office.
Closer to home, neighboring Douglas County’s population is projected to climb from around 345,000 today to more than 442,000 by 2038, while Elbert County’s count will jump from 26,000 in 2018 to nearly 44,000 over the next 20 years.
“I sincerely get it — nobody likes change,” Cohrs said. “But it’s coming. We know it’s coming. We have to manage it, and if we don’t, it could be worse.”
He points to the Walmart on Colorado 86 — Elizabeth’s main thoroughfare — that opened just outside the town’s boundaries in unincorporated Elbert County following local opposition to the retailer’s plan to build in town. And then there’s the 900-home Independence subdivision that recently broke ground just a few miles north of town on county land, outside of Elizabeth’s control.
“We have a huge swath of unincorporated county land around us,” Cohrs said on a recent sunny afternoon inside Elizabeth’s unassuming town hall. “What we are faced with is whether we manage that growth that we know is coming to Elbert County. Or the town can say no to growth and it would come in all around us and we would get the impacts.”
Elizabeth can control growth by annexing adjoining land before it is developed. And it has, recently bringing into town two parcels totaling more than 500 acres. South of the Walmart, the first phase of 136-home Gold Creek Valley is wrapping up with new single-family homes filling in once-vacant land.
Located 40 miles from Denver, 49 miles from Colorado Springs and 16 miles from Castle Rock, Elizabeth fits the bill as a place within reasonable commuting time to major job centers.
“We’re poised to grow,” Cohrs said. “It’s not just us — it’s happening everywhere.”
At the opposite end of the metro area in Boulder County, another recall election fueled in part by growth plans and annexation talk is shaping up in Nederland. According to the Daily Camera, the mountain town’s clerk determined this week that signatures turned in by a recall committee to oust the mayor and two trustees are sufficient to place a measure on the ballot.
Increasingly, growth along the Front Range, which consumes prairie and agricultural acreage, obstructs views and worsens traffic, is facing resistance. This past summer, voters in Lakewood approved a measure to limit new residential construction while a ballot initiative to impose similar restrictions throughout the metro area is working its way to voters in 2020.
John Fussa, community development director for Parker, said his town in the 1990s is where Elizabeth is today.
“Growth has washed over Douglas County as it has moved south and east,” he said. “Right now, Elizabeth is on the edge of it.”
It’s critical, Fussa said, that the town gets ahead of it so that it doesn’t sneak up in ways that no one wants. Parker, which will have a population at buildout approaching 80,000, is planning out the final two large residential developments in this southeast suburb — for a total of nearly 7,000 new homes just east of Rueter-Hess Reservoir.
“We can’t turn off the spigot of growth under the law,” he said. “We direct growth to the appropriate locations and require that there be lots of open space in these developments.”
Don Means, an insurance broker who owns a commercial building in Elizabeth, said he doesn’t want his town to become Parker. But he doesn’t think closing the community down to development is a wise course to follow either.
“Growth is coming, whether we want it or not,” he said. “If we manage it and do it the right way, it’s not a bad thing.”
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Just a few feet from where Means stood on Main Street is The Elizabeth Brewing Co., the town’s only craft brewery. It opened less than a year ago in the historic Carlson Building, which dates to 1890. Means said it’s amenities like The Elizabeth Brewing Co. that will attract young families to the town, keeping it vibrant and evolving.
“I think it’s an exciting time,” he said.
So does Vasquez, who works with Means and was elected mayor last year. She said the recall process has been divisive and “extremely frustrating” but she recognizes that dozens of people in town feel strongly enough about growth prospects in Elizabeth that they signed the recall petitions.
She said the town — which is somewhat buffered from the metro area by rural, large-lot neighborhoods and ranchettes nestled among evergreen forests lining Colorado 86 — will never be Parker.
But how authentically it remains as a small prairie outpost on Denver’s exurban fringe, as it nears its 130th birthday, is not yet known.
“We are not Parker and we aren’t going to be Parker,” Vasquez said. “But we have to figure out how to grow as Elizabeth and be smart about it.”
