The City is Ignoring the Voters Once Again, and a Recreation Lobby Group Appropriates the Fort Collins Community’s Hard Work on Hughes

Update, March 13, 2023:

PLEASE donate to our legal and community education fund so we can conduct the next steps in our tireless effort to protect Hughes open space for the solitude and serenity of ALL Fort Collins community members, and for the protection our local wildlife. Together, we can stop the destructive development of an 80-acre BMX/MTB bike skills park at Hughes Open Space near ecologically sensitive foothills-to-plains wildlife habitat, and find another more appropriate location for a bike park.

It will come at no surprise that the City of Fort Collins’ community outreach regarding 164-acre Hughes Open Space has been abysmal at best. But, what most Fort Collins voters and residents don’t know is that the City's outreach process has been heavily biased toward a small, aggressive lobby focused on HIGH-impact recreation and a specific HIGH-intensity land use at Hughes. Over the last few months, this recreation lobby has been intent on usurping Hughes Open Space, and the years-long hard work of the Fort Collins community and organizers (PATHS),  for an 80-acre “large-scale”, “destination”, and woefully niche, BMX/MTB dirt bike skills park that only few will be able to enjoy. Sadly, if a niche BMX/MTB bike skills park is constructed at Hughes, it will irrevocably destroy the ecological integrity of the surrounding protected Natural Areas, and ruin the potential of Hughes to itself become a protected Natural Area contiguous with the existing Natural Areas, Maxwell and Pineridge.

City Staff and Council are dead set on ignoring five years of community outreach and public input about Hughes, where open space and preservation of the land was overwhelmingly favored by the community. The large-scale BMX/MTB bike park lobbying group is also shamelessly running roughshod over fellow community members and the well-established legislative intent of the citizens’ ballot measure. For those who may not be aware, the citizens’ initiative to protect Hughes passed in April 2021 with nearly 70% of the vote, following a grassroots citizen-driven petition effort that saw more than 8300 voters signatures collected to put the protection of Hughes on the ballot. The grueling petition effort took place in 2020 during the peak of COVID-19 and the amid ash and smoke raining down from the Cameron Peak conflagration. PATHS canvassed well over ten thousand residents and voters about their vision for Hughes, and the grand majority overwhelming supported the conservation of land and wildlife at Hughes and the extension of the natural habitat corridor, with ONLY LOW-impact recreational uses permitted, specifically a multiuse connector trail for all abilities, retaining the existing, decades-old low-impact disc golf course and the sledding hill, and the leasing a small wildlife rehabilitation and rescue center to the NoCo Wildlife Center where the old stadium once stood. A recreation-destination bike skills park was NEVER an intended development at Hughes.

Predetermined outreach and land use scenarios, especially the large-scale bike skills park (80+ acres), will be presented to council on Tuesday, March 14th, by the City staff and Outreach Consultant. There are better places to put a HIGHLY-intensive land use, like a BMX/MTB bike skills park. Please attend in person or watch online via FCTV, and please support our hard work with a donation to our legal and public outreach fund now. Time is of the essence. Thank you for your continued and undying support, Fort Collins.