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VOLUME 22, NUMBER 5
LYONS, COLORADO
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JUNE 16 / JULY 14, 2021
B •R •I •E •F •S Special Town Board Meeting LYONS – A special Lyons Town Board Zoom Meeting will be held on Thursday, June 16 at 5:30 p.m. The special meeting will be a discussion and direction requested by Summit Housing to request a fee modification associated with the current development agreement. Summit is building an affordable housing complex in Lyons. Representatives of Summit Housing Group have requested a meeting with town officials to update trustees on the project and request consideration of eliminating the fees for all water and sewer taps, electric development fees, and building permit fees for a total of $1,122,500. In addition, Summit is requesting the elimination of permit fees for project utility calculations, if not included, and Use taxes.
Tubing ban in effect LYONS – In the interest of public safety, the North St. Vrain and St. Vrain Creek will be closed to tubing and single-chamber flotation devices for the immediate future. The Sheriff and/or Police Chief is authorized to order a Partial Use Restriction prohibiting the use of single-chambered airinflated devices on any waters of the state when such operations constitute or may constitute a hazard to life or safety. The closure started on June 9 and will go through June 25, 2021 at 12 p.m. The closure encompasses the North St. Vrain and St. Vrain Creeks from Apple Valley Road/ County Road 71 (upper Apple Valley Road) to North Foothills Highway including through the town of Lyons. Sheriff's deputies will be posting notices and advising recreationists of the closure.
Follow St. Vrain run-off and levels LYONS – The Colorado Division of Water Resources (DWR), monitors streamflow and water use throughout the state. For the St .Vrain (after the confluence of the North and South), there is a gauge station near Black Bear Hole to monitor discharge levels, water temperatures and more. Bookmark the website to follow runoff and other water data at https://dwr.state.co.us/tools/stations. Continue Briefs on Page 4
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I •N •D •E •X LYONS MAYOR’S CORNER INTEREST OPTIONS EDUCATE INSIGHT CORNERSTONE A&E ANALYZE CONSIDER STABILITY LOOK AHEAD WHAT’S COOKIN’
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Mary Magdalena is offering 11 children’s workshops this summer at Hart Family Farm, 2154 Apple Valley Road. Open to kids ages 5 to 12 years, classes are limited to six, two days each week from 9 to 2 p.m. Cost is $165. She offers art experiences in sculpture, drawing and painting, with the underlying theme of learning about the Native Americans. Kids will create their own totem poles, power shields, Anasazi clay structures, drawings and paintings of the farm animals there. Contact Hart Family Farm on the web or through Facebook. At this session, the kids made a scarecrow and then created great paintings of it. Picture left to right: Samson Blanca, Henry Holzman, Frances Holzman, Rumi Hollingsead, Aisling Moore, and Dakota Fairchild. PHOTO BY MARY MAGDALENA
Town Board welcomes Prickly Pear, Community farm project, return to in person meetings and other issues By Susan de Castro McCann Redstone Review Editor LYONS – During a Lyons Town Board workshop early in June, the board heard presentations from broadband communications expert Ken Fellman and Kevin Mahoney, owner of Lyons Communication, a broadband company that he bought last year. Fellman talked to the board about some options for expanding broadband in the Lyons area pointing out how other communities teamed up with communications companies to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much money they wanted to invest in it. “The more money you put into it, the more control you have over the system and the less money you invest the less control you have,” Fellman said. He told the board how Longmont has hooked up every household in Longmont to high speed Internet. Mahoney told the board that Lyons Communications offers residents both inside and outside the town TV, phone and broadband options of 100, 500 megabyte and 1 gigabyte options. Their services are expanding all the time and now they offer service in Stone Canyon, Apple Valley, Blue Mountain Road, Spring Gulch, Longmont Dam Road and other areas. He said, “People working at home now want business class services.” They are working to get the town hall on fiber optic cable. After the broadband discussion, Mayor Nick Angelo talked about US Rep Joe Neguse’s visit to Lyons, saying what a fine man Neguse is and described the tour that they took around Lyons, showing Representative Neguse the projects, both ongoing and some completed, in Lyons. Attorney Branden Dittman told the board that all the motions to dismiss the lawsuit by Lyons against Honeywell International Inc.
have now failed and the case is moving to arbitration. Honeywell is the company that was hired to redesigned/upgrade the Lyons wastewater treatment plant. Attorney Dittman said there is an increased potential for a settlement, but he declined to talk about it in an open meeting. He said if there is more information, he would talk to the board in an executive session at the next board meeting. The town board granted a liquor license to a new restaurant, Prickly Pear Tavern, located at 160 Main St., the former location of the infamous Lions Den. The owners are Shirley Oliver and Jason Reiff. Reiff told the board that they want to open a family-oriented restaurant and offer American comfort food with a European flair with meals in the medium price range. He said they plan to have music, but said they are meeting with the neighbors to find out what is agreeable to them because he said they are well aware of the problems with the previous owners at the former Lion’s Den at that location. The members of the town board congratulated them on their new business and wished them well. The board then went on to discuss Spirit Hound Distillers’ request to purchase Lake McIntosh water shares to fulfill their requirement for their increased water usage at their current location and at their proposed new building to be built at their current location, 4196 Ute Highway. The business can use Lake McIntosh water shares because their business constitutes economic development, which Trustee Mark Browning pointed out. If the business did not constitute economic development, they would be required to purchase the more expensive Colorado Big Thompson (CBT) water shares. Spirit Hound expects to use the equivalent of a
2-inch water tap when the expansion is completed. Currently they have a 1 quarter-inch water tap that they are using. The board went on to discuss the Community Farm Project. A group of Lyons residents presented the town board with a proposal to use one of the flood buyout parcels for a Community Farm Project. The Lyons Community Farm Project (LCFP) is a nonprofit organization whose members include: Vasi Smith, Adrean Kirk, Florine Valerie, and Tyler Stellern. They are interested in a buyout lot license for a community food forest concept at 315 and 319 5th Ave. 315 and 319 5th Ave. were conceptualized in the Flood Buy Out Properties plan as part of an orchard, so a food forest is a compatible objective. The Town Public Works team investigated both lots and located an existing water meter pit that could be activated on 319 5th Ave.; this could provide water if a yard hydrant were installed. The LCFP would like to ask the Board of Trustees to fund the installation of a yard hydrant for this meter pit and to grant wholesale water rate for watering the proposed food forest. To provide water rights for this property, it would also require a water share. According to Utilities and Engineering Director Aaron Caplan, when the town advised Longmont that the taps on the flood buyout properties were removed, Longmont provided the town with credits for the CBT shares that were dedicated for those properties; these credits are called Flood Damaged Property (FDP) shares. The town also retained three service connections from the 27 buyout properties: one is being used for the Botanic Garden, one is currently unused for a community garden Continue Town on Page 13