The last big thing you need to know about city council candidates

We’ve reached the end of our city council candidate analysis, Preservers! (Huge sigh of relief!)

Here’s our final newsletter on what the candidates are thinking, and we believe it’s a big one because it deals directly with one of Preserve Lafayette’s key issues: annexation.

At the Oct. 13 League of Women Voters’ Lafayette City Council candidate forum, each candidate was given 60 seconds to respond to the following question submitted by a member of the public:  

What is your position on the proposed annexations such as 119^th and Baseline and Arapahoe and U.S. 287? How do you approach decisions like these that often have competing priorities, such as open space, affordable development, traffic, etc.? 

Here are the candidate’s answers, in the order in which they responded.

ERIC RYANT

“Well, I’m very strong about open space and believe in it. I think it’s really important for our community to continue to save our open space. It makes a lot of sense in many areas—besides wildlife, it’s definitely really good for fire mitigation and other areas that do make a difference. I do feel like you’re getting pulled in a lot of different directions in a city council. I definitely would have to study it and look at it to really see which direction the residents want to go, because really, at the end of the day I represent the community. It’s not my decision.”

SAUL TAPIA VEGA

“First and foremost, I just want to say as a sitting member of city council and someone who hopes to continue my time on city council, I cannot publicly speak on any of the annexations. Actually, all of us have been warned against this, so I won’t speak to the annexations in particular. But I will speak to my campaign and what I want to do and what I’ve been doing, which is responsible growth. I think our city is not averse to growth, but that is for every city in the Front Range, and that is for every city across the state. But when we grow, we need to do it responsibly. And that means reaching out to our community, seeing what our community needs—a community-driven approach to not only fit our needs but to fit our future. We want to build a sustainable and resilient Lafayette. We want to build a Lafayette that not only fits our needs today, but also fits our needs in the future. And yes, this means looking into open space; yes this means looking into pretty much everything across the board that we have now that is the way it is. And that small-town feel we have is because our council has done an incredible job of already making sure that when we grow, we do it responsibly. That’s one of the tenets of my campaign, and it’s something that I hope to continue doing as I go forward. Thank you.”

ROB GLENN

“I appreciate you kicking off,” gesturing to Tapia Vega, “because at the forefront there’s a lot going on when it comes time to those annexations and information. But I will say in general, I am humonguously pro open space. I had the opportunity to go on an open space tour with the Chair recently, and there’s a lot of beautiful areas that I didn’t even realize were there. That’s where my thought is, but as you go to my website to learn more about my running and platform, it’s really important as we make smart growth. We really do need additional growth in units—as we heard talked about in affordable housing. And there’s never like perfect places for that, but we’re going to need to be very smart on where we do that. We talk about great ideas on redeveloping our already vacant spaces, and then also dwelling units, tiny homes and mobile home parks—these are all sources to help toward that larger goal of focus on sustainable, smart growth.”

KYLE BEAULIEU

“Echoing Rob’s thanks to Saul for doing the piece on what we’ve been admonished to not get into, so I’ll just talk about philosophically. I very much agree on the priority of protecting open space—that’s what makes Lafayette special—but we do need to explore how we grow, and I agree that infill is a key element to prioritize. For me, I’m really interested in resilience, and some of that resilience comes from keeping defensible space around where people live. And that could be open space; it could be broad areas. Coming back to how a good chunk of Nederland burned down last week; it’s a miracle that the fire didn’t spread further.  We’re coming up on four years after the Marshall Fire, and we’ve had a lot of rain lately, but we are a vulnerable community to peri-urban wildfires. And so thinking about how we can really invest in resilience, it would affect any decision I made on annexation or another business investment. And then lastly, coming back to a point raised earlier about how many workers who work for the city cannot afford to live here, so that needs to be front and center. We want our labor to be able to thrive and live in Lafayette rather than having to commute.”

ANNMARIE JENSEN

“So there is a natural tension between preserving open land and building. We can’t do both of those things. I think our open space board has done a good job of identifying key parcels that have wetlands or wildlife or other natural elements that they want to preserve, and I have a respect for that work. But as Saul said, we need to grow smart. Affordable housing continues to be a problem; we gotta find a place for it. But sprawl is not the answer, and moving toward the edges of town is sort of the definition of sprawl. And so to the extent that we can redevelop and develop infill, I think that’s better off. And we can be smart and do more mixed-use development so that people can get out of their cars.”

CRYSTAL GALLEGOS

“So, I’m also a city councilmember so I can’t comment specifically on those specific parcels mentioned, but I can give a general overview of my thoughts. There are not many parcels of land left in Lafayette, and I also believe in responsible growth; we shouldn’t approve every single development that comes before us. We do need to think about it. We need to make sure that any development is balancing the needs of the community and advancing our comprehensive plan. We also need to make sure we have the infrastructure to support any new development. I love our open space. I live within walking distance of Waneka Lake; I visit it often, and I couldn’t imagine a world without our open space. But at the same time, we do have a comprehensive plan and some affordable housing goals that we’re hoping to achieve.” 

MIKE WATSON

“Like everybody else, I need to insert my legalese disclaimer on how I will approach every single problem with an open mind and I will be open to the discussion in a quasi-judicial setting. That being said, I mean how many parking lots do we need at the expense of the paradise that is around us? I mean this is Indigenous Peoples Day, or Columbus Day depending which side of history you want to be on. I was wandering around Boulder one time and there was some random homeless guy that came up to me and wanted to talk to me about the curse of Chief Niwot. I was new to town and I didn’t know anything about it. And I think we’re living that, right? This is a beautiful area and because of the beauty, everybody wants to move in. And as more people move in and we develop our businesses, we just pave over everything. We have nothing left but just concrete canyons and then monuments of glass and steel. Let’s preserve our open space. Let’s keep Lafayette livable, not just for humans, but also for the animals that call Lafayette home. Thank you.”

ADAM GIANOLA

“Thanks everyone for doing the work of the lawyer (gesturing to himself) up here.” (Candidate laughter). “When I look at developments, I look at what is the community vision for Lafayette? What do we want Lafayette to be? We rewrote our comprehensive plan a few years ago, and that really outlines the plan that the community has for Lafayette—what do we want it to look like in the future? So I think we revisit that when we’re on council and look at that as kind of our guiding light. For me personally, with sustainability being such an important thing for me, I  think the focus on infill, the focus on adaptive reuse are ways to kind of minimize the energy that is put into developing, and are the best things we can do from the sustainability standpoint. We also have a land use code, that we can dedicate a bigger part of new developments to the public land dedication.”

LUKE ARRINGTON

“I’m a big open space advocate. As part of LOSAC, we have been fortunate, and I’ve been fortunate to be around. when we got to purchase some key parcels of land between Waneka Centennial Farm and some of the lands around 119^th. We were able to secure a buffer around the parcel on 119^th that exists currently to help keep the edge of town feeling like it’s the edge of our town and not kind of blend in with surrounding communities, because we like having it known this is Lafayette; this is not Lafayette. That’s important to me; I think it’s important to a lot of people. Open space is always a thing that ranks very highly when you ask residents what they want. It’s one of the reasons we’re here. I do think that with public land dedication, there are already tools in place to make sure we can maintain open space and get money to purchase these things, so it’s a very high priority. It has to be in the right place; not everything needs to be open space, but I’m very pro open-space acquisition and maintaining that.” 

JOSH BERYL

 “The open spaces in our town are a big part of why people live here. We love to go for a jog, ride our bikes, walk our dogs. There’s a woman on South Boulder who walks her goats sometimes, but that’s not particularly open space. But it’s not just people that use that space. As we’ve heard some other folks mention, there’s wildlife—that’s animals, that’s also flora. There’s plant life that needs that space and nutrients that they get from those areas. We have wetlands as well that need to be protected. These things have to be taken seriously. And of course there is push and pull, this tension of development that we’ve heard about, that exists. But I don’t think we can just cow to large companies and big corporations that want to develop our town and put up big buildings, especially when those are not what the community wants and it’s not benefitting the people who live in those neighborhoods.