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A group of citizens wants to increase the amount of votes required to change the use of city open space to ensure a potential vote on the entrance to Aspen is not decided by just a handful of votes.
A citizen’s petition submitted to the city aims to amend the Home Rule Charter to change the required vote threshold from 50% to 60% to change the use of city open space. Under the charter, changes in city-owned open space only require a simple majority vote.
City Clerk Nicole Henning confirmed she approved the language for the petition on Thursday. The group will have until Dec. 4 to gather 305 signatures (5% of registered voters in Aspen).
The group behind the petition is not affiliating with existing open space interest groups. Listed on the petition are Terry Paulson, Barbara Pitchford, Helen Palmer, David Elgart and Stephen Ornowski. They were motivated by the 2019 Lift One proposal that passed by just 26 votes.
“All we want to say is, if you’re going to change open space or parks to be used for a purpose other than what it is being used for now, you’ve got to have a real majority,” Pitchford said. “So we just wanted to definitively say, is this okay, are the majority of the voters okay with this change of use on a city-owned property?”
For months, city leaders have discussed the path forward for the entrance to Aspen and the aging Castle Creek Bridge, which is over a decade past its useful life.
Aspen’s 1998 Record of Decision, a federal- and state-approved document, proposed realignment for Highway 82 that would replace the Castle Creek Bridge once it reached the end of its useful life. The realignment, called the preferred alternative, would reroute Highway 82 over a portion of the Marolt Open Space to cross Castle Creek and bypass the S-curves to merge directly with Main Street.
Outspoken members of the public and groups such as Friends of Marolt Park and Open Space have opposed the preferred alternative and are urging the city to explore options to replace the existing Castle Creek Bridge.
The preferred alternative as it is currently proposed would require Aspen voters to approve a new use for the Marolt Open Space. A 1996 vote approved the use of light rail over the open space, but an updated version of the preferred alternative replaces light rail with two bus lanes. The change would require another vote approving the use of buses instead of light rail.
In 2001, a ballot question changing the right-of-way over the Marolt Open Space from light rail to bus lanes failed 54% to 46%.
The Aspen City Council went back and forth for weeks about whether to include a vote on the entrance to Aspen on the November ballot. Council members ultimately decided against adding a question to the fall ballot during a Sept. 3 special meeting. They considered adding a question to the city’s March municipal ballot, but have yet to formally approve the question.
The group has until Dec. 4 — 90 days before the city’s municipal election in March — to gather 308 signatures from registered voters in the city. If enough signatures are gathered and cured, the question would appear on the city’s March ballot.
The language of the petition also requires votes on the use of city open space to be held only during statewide or municipal general elections.
The group initially submitted two petitions to the city, one of which was the open space use threshold vote. A second petition would have limited the authority of the city council to spend city dollars “advancing a new or realigned Highway 82 into the city from the west until the 1961 Castle Creek Bridge is rebuilt or replaced with a condition rating of at least ‘good’ or its equivalent,’” according to the petition language the Aspen Daily News obtained through a Colorado Open Records Act request.
The group decided against pursuing the second petition as the city begins looking into a new environmental impact statement for alternative entrance to Aspen plans.
A 2022 CDOT inspection rated the bridge fair (50.3 out of 100). CDOT conducted a routine inspection of the aging Castle Creek Bridge on Sept. 25, the results of which are expected to be available in the coming months.If the bridge falls below a rating of five (CDOT now uses a scale of one to 10 ranking), it will be considered poor and could be subject to weight restrictions.