Okay I am ready to type this in a word doc and copy and paste. I keep getting interrupted and then timed out and losing what I wrote.
Yesterday was the hearing for a retreat center in Boulder County to be approved. The history is really cool, the land was originally held by the state botanist who built a guest lodge for 'well behaved' people to experience the natural environment. Now there is the Nature Conservancy, Boulder county and a historic designation involved to work with and keep it going as a place to experience nature but as a Buddhist center. A church owned it most recently and did a lot of similar things to what we are proposing. Some things the county wanted conflicted with how retreats work and that was worked out pretty quickly, like asking us to have a commercially inspected kitchen or not allow people to cook food. There were some agreements from the beginning to work on the caretaker's cabin and remove some additions and restore it. A medium sticky point was how many people could be there in a day or overnight based on the septic system. We got the higher number, there are 3 bathrooms in the lodge as compared to 1 per room or guest like some lodges. We are able to have 30 overnight and 40 per day.
The sticky part was the parking lot! It has been a parking lot for the entire time this property has been used this way (since the 1930's) however it needs to be covered for fire mitigation. Right now it is a weedy area that can have 22 spaces. The county wanted off-site parking and shuttle service. There is no off-site, this is off a dirt road and out of cell phone range. Plus people come and go on retreat or day-long events. However the historic restrictions around moving or excavating make it hard. Eventually they brought in the historic person and she said it wasn't that big of a deal to cover it in gravel from the site. So yeah, we have parking!
Several neighbors to the property spoke highly of the project, 2 neighbors weren't happy, mostly because one hiker walked onto their property one time. Many of us spoke for our 3 minutes, I accidentally signed up (I thought it was just an attendance sheet) to speak and it was okay. I think that helped, here are a lot of people who want to come up and spend most of the day not speaking. Of course when they called names to speak they balked at mine, you guys don't know my last name of course but it is not easy to say.
If you want to check out the amazing property and center it is called Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center RMERC
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