Open space is coveted territory for hikers and mountain bikers. Hitting the trails in Westminster or Jefferson County can mean less traffic than a trip up the mountain to a crowded Rocky Mountain National Park.

Open space is wild-looking land set aside for preservation with the idea that it won’t be developed. Typically, voters weigh in on a tax to buy, manage and maintain it. And the city also doesn’t carve up the land into a park with picnic tables, baseball diamonds and jungle gyms.

The question is, how does something like this come about in a growth-hungry state like Colorado? E.J. Hassenfratz had never lived in a place that made such an effort and he sent Colorado Wonders to track that history down.

The ‘People’s Republic’ Sets The Tempo

Sixty years ago in Boulder, a more ambitious approach to the protection of wild or scenic lands emerged. For more than a century, local governments had made some preservation attempts but they were few and far between. Boulder residents though — stop us if you’ve heard this before — wanted to hold on to their city as they saw it and do something to slow development.

“The city council and city administration [at the time] didn’t want anything to do with it,” remembers 90-year-old Boulder resident Oak Thorne. “We got it on the ballot by citizens’ signatures. It was totally a citizens’ movement.”

The city’s population had nearly doubled between 1950 and 1960 with 37,700 residents. Today, 107,125 people call Boulder home. In 1959, a so-called blue line law forbade the pumping of water to new homes above a certain elevation. Ruth Wright, a retired lawyer and state legislator, called it a “stop gap measure” to keep growth from infringing on mountain habitat.

“There was always the thought that we needed to do more,” Wright said.

That opportunity came June 17, 1967, when Wright organized a conference on Boulder’s open space for city leaders. By the fall, Wright and supporters like Thorne landed a 0.01 cent sales tax on the ballot. Voters agreed for 40 percent of the tax to go to open space, with the remaining 60 percent going toward transportation.

Grace Hood/CPR News Boulder resident Ruth Wright helped organize a conference on open space that paved the way for a sales tax on the November 1967 ballot.

“Boulder was growing at an enormous rate… and so there was this in-migration of people,” Wright said. “We didn’t want to stop the in-migration, but we certainly wanted to protect what we had.”

The experiment caught on next in Jefferson County in 1972. Westminster voters adopted an open space tax in 1985, becoming the second city in Colorado to do so. The Denver suburb set a very specific goal to preserve 15 percent of its landmass as open space.