 Good evening, and welcome to the Longmont Museum, a center for culture in northern Colorado where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. How about them apples? I'd like to thank the folks who make these programs possible. The scientific and cultural facilities district, the Colorado Humanities, the Stewart Family Foundation, the many donors to the Longmont Museum, the friends of the Longmont Museum, and our museum members. Do we have any museum members with us this evening? Yes, we do. Oh, yes. We love us some museum members on and off stage. Thank you. We simply can't do all that we do without you, so thanks. Tonight's program is being presented as part of our Thursday nights at the museum series. You'll never know, never guess why we titled it that. Yeah, keep guessing. I'm going to hold you in suspense there. I'm not going to answer that question. So tonight's program is visionary Longmont, 150 years of looking ahead, just by way of introduction. I'm not from here. Not even close. I'm a Californian. I was first attracted to Boulder in the 90s by the Naropa Institute and all those beatniks who congregated there. Back then I was honestly a little afraid of Longmont. Perhaps too gritty for this guy coming from Los Angeles, the hard streets of Los Angeles. Anyway, I returned to LA in 2001 and then as Chief Niawa promised, moved back to Boulder in 2015 and then of course to Longmont in 2018 and I have no plans to leave ladies and gentlemen. Boulder tends to get all the attention. Thanks. Should wait at a moment there. Boulder tends to get all the attention for its forward-looking progressive everything, but those in the know understand that it's really its neighbor to the northeast that's historically been ahead of the curve when it comes to its infrastructure. That's right. From some of the best water rights in the state to next light, for the last 150 years and counting, Longmont has been steadily ahead of the curve. So tonight we wrap up a year's worth of celebrating Longmont's sesquicentennial with a special look at Longmont's dare I say visionary approach to planning for its future with some folks who really know what they're talking about or so they told me. Paula Fitzgerald has been a Longmont resident since 1981. She was born and raised in Colorado and has lived up and down the front range of the Centennial State. After graduating from Colorado State University, she practiced landscape architecture as a landscape architecture as a consultant prior to her tenure with the city of Longmont. Paula worked for the city as senior project manager overseeing park and trail design and construction for over 20 years. She was honored and privileged to have the best job a landscape architect could help for. And just in case you didn't know Paula is the author of stories of our Longmont Parks, which turns out to be a real page turner. If you'd like to we did a nice little chat about that which is up on our Facebook channel, believe it or not, it worked that night. Eric Mason was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado. If you guys know Eric and has been fascinated with history since his parents hung a poster of the US presidents over his crib. Quick, who was the 17th president in the United States? James Polk. Is that right? He received a BA from Colorado College and Colorado Springs and an MA in history from Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York. He has worked for the Longmont Museum for more than a hundred, I'm sorry, for more than 20 years. And is currently curator of history responsible for preserving the museum's historic object in archival collections. He is the author of course of, he wrote the book on Longmont basically, Longmont the first hundred and thirty years old. And Dale Rodemacher. This is the bio I have for Dale. Dale is the deputy city manager for the city of Longmont. And he has been an employee with the city for 20, 39, 38. God, I knew I was going to screw that up. For 39 years and 30 years. Anything else you want to say about yourself, Dale? Other than like my peers on the stage here, I'm a local boy. I was born here in Longmont at the new hospital as it was known then. And fourth generation, I was born here in Longmont. Looking forward to heading back to the farm. It's been a fun ride in Longmont though. Will you really go back to the farm? Yes. Is there a family farm still? Yes, I still live on it, yes. Oh, you do? Yep. Where is that? You can take the farmer from the farm. Where is it? It's east. It's east of Longmont. St. Green Bay. It's east of Longmont. It's east of Longmont. You can take the farmer from the farm. Where is it? It's east. It's east of Longmont. St. Green Bay, but just east of Longmont. Okay. All right. Please welcome our panelists, ladies and gentlemen. So we have a marvelous slideshow for you this evening that we cobbled together with the help of all of these folks in an incredible outline that Dale provided me with. I don't know if you can read that, but he said he put that together in five minutes. I'd like to see what would happen if we gave him six minutes. It may have been six minutes. It may have been six minutes. Okay. So tonight we're going to be kind of tooting our own horn a bit here about Longmont's accomplishments. And we're going to start off at the beginning with land. Eric, take it away. So Longmont began as a very visionary idea in 1870. A group from Chicago had this idea to create a new town in the west. And it was their plan to lay out a community that had a lot of the features that we enjoy today. But not only did they do that, they also pooled their resources to purchase tens of thousands of acres of land in this area that then they could resell for agricultural use and basically to make the community what it is today. So Longmont started with a vision of those folks in Chicago. And I think that all of the subsequent leaders and all the subsequent people in this community have really built upon that original vision of the colony founders. And I think this plat really shows some of those elements. And maybe Paula can talk a little bit about some of the things we see in this plat that show those founders' vision. Yeah. So you'll notice on the plat there are three parks, originally called Lake Park, now Roosevelt Park, Collier Park and Thompson Park. And so for a community, I don't know, Eric, 1,500 people and the original founders? Maybe 800. Okay. Maybe 800. So that's a huge investment. We're talking tonight a little bit about infrastructure. And one thing that a previous Parks and Open Space director, Don Bessler, he opened my eyes to this fact, which is that even in undeveloped countries where there is no water and sewer and defined streets in their communities, they have a soccer field or a community gathering spot in the center. It just shows you that that is a real human need to build community and to have those places where you can join together and celebrate, recreate, just enjoy your town. So this one has that. And kind of taking off on this visionary thing. I mean this is the era when shortly after City Park was built. Cities were polluted. They were overcrowded. There was a lot of squalor. People really desperately wanted the wide open spaces. They wanted the opportunity to build up something new and more inspirational and healthier. So, yeah. Mission accomplished. Yeah. So here's another picture of Longmont. You can see this is a little later because on the top kind of center of this photograph you'll see an oval track and that is when Lake Park became Longmont Driving Park and then later finally to Roosevelt Park. And then on the very left side, upper left side you'll see where Sunset Park is. Sunset and Price Parks are. So that's the water infrastructure for town. You see the railroad coming through. And Eric, where's the power plant you pointed out? Power plant. Yeah. Okay. Right there. So, yeah. All of the infrastructure elements at that time are kind of captured in this drawing. And as Dale pointed out, look at all the trees back there. They believed in tree city. Tree city. Yeah. And I mean agriculture is such a huge part of it. You know, I don't know if your family was here by the time this photo was taken in the early 1900s. Yes, we were here in the back. Yeah. That's not me. But yeah, we were here in about the 1920s. But I think what we're looking at here is, again, the visionary aspect of the community of not only situating themselves in some of the most fertile land on the front range, but also working together to bring irrigation in order to allow for the growing of a wide variety of crops here in Longmont. And I think we're standing in here as a sugar beet field. And so this was probably taken sometime, obviously, after 1903 when the factory came to Longmont. But very forward-looking, you know, sugar beets have always been known as the primary cash crop for farmers. You could always rely on your beet crop to pay your bills at the end of the day. And so it was always a valuable crop. And Longmont was certainly in the thick of it early on. Yeah. Were there other communities that relied upon sugar beet sugar beets locally? Sure. Yeah, a lot of the communities on the front range, especially in Fort Collins, Greeley, they were all came together as part of the Great Western Sugar Factory. And it wasn't just those cities. It was Fort Morgan, Ovid, you name it. It was a huge enterprise. Was Longmont kind of the center of it? Longmont was probably one of the earlier factories to be built. But in Longmont, you know, had its own approach to doing it. I think it took also some local entrepreneurs to help, as it always does, to entice the factory to come built here in Longmont. And so they were probably one of the earlier ones and probably one of the larger factories in the system. Oh, here we are, paving Main Street. So clearly streets were an important part of Longmont. And one of the interesting aspects of this paving is that at one point in Longmont's history, and it's important to acknowledge that Longmont was not always all positive at one point in Longmont's history. It was controlled by the Ku Klux Klan, who actually were attempting to build a big dam up on the North St. Brain. When the plan was voted out, the city was left with 7,000 sacks of cement. They didn't know what to do with them and they decided, well, let's pave some of Main Street. So they were kind of visionary in turning a bad idea into a good idea. And then by the 1970s, Longmont had undergone a huge growth spur. And its city facilities were still the facilities from the 1920s. And so they decided to basically remake almost every city facility with a project called Project 75. And this is the Longmont Civic Center, but they also built the Centennial Pools, several fire stations, Twin Peaks Golf Course, the service center, and a couple of parks, I believe. And the library. Library, Kensington Park. Yeah. And the floodway down Spring Gulch there. And Longmont at the time in the mid-70s was probably what a city of 30,000 people. So again, it was visionary. And a bit audacious for them to undertake that significant of a renewal, if you will, and a commitment to their municipal buildings. And I think it also shows the pride of the community that their local government is important to them. And they wanted it to last and to grow with the community. Do you think we're on schedule in terms of what they were thinking in the mid-70s when they built this? Well, you know, we just did a huge renovation of the Civic Center. You know, it's reaching its 50-year time frame. So like many of us, it takes a bit of work to keep us in shape. And so we have really recommitted to the Civic Center through a lot of the renovations that occurred there. So I believe the Civic Center will last another 50 years into the future. That being said, you know, the question of whether or not additional space is needed and those kinds of things. Honestly, we're going through such an odd time right now. There's a real question of how much office space the city or companies need these days with, you know, the ability for folks to work remotely or work at home. And so I think that's going to extend the life of the size of the Civic Center as it is. Yeah. Oh, Roosevelt Park. Yeah. So, you know, we're talking about land and here's Roosevelt Park. So this photo from 1936, it looks like. You know, you see Roosevelt Auditorium in the back and again, another really important gathering space, entertainment space. It was a lecture hall. Basketball was played there, concerts. But then in the shade of the grandstand was the winter ice skating facility, which we now have open on the other side of the park today. So, you know, just a real important vital element to have that opportunity for exercise and community. I shared with Paula and folks that some of us graduated from high school, had our graduation ceremony here at the grandstands. Yeah. And. Before the board's rotted. It wasn't in 1936, but 1978, Longmont High School, we graduated here. And I think that was maybe the last graduation that was here before before the fairgrounds were relocated to their current location down at Nelson and over. So this is a picture of Thompson Park and pumpkin pie days. And, you know, so another valuable thing. Okay. Look at all the trees, huge amount of trees down there. The women in Longmont took their buckets of water to get those trees started in the early days, but they started deciding that with their agriculture crop of pumpkins, they wanted to create this basically a tourism opportunity. And so they had free pumpkin pie on the right side of the photograph. You'll see a six foot high coffee cauldron. So free coffee. And sometimes they did big pig pig roasts in the park there too. And thousands, tens of thousands of people came from all surrounding areas and came to enjoy that festival. Finally outgrew Thompson Park and ended up in Roosevelt Park. My vision includes Boulder County Fair. Yeah. That's right. My vision includes bringing this back. And the coffee yard back to the coffee yard. Yeah. And the free pie. Yeah. Free pie. And this is another pumpkin pie day photo. You can just see how, you know, the great costumes of people back in those days, but it was quite the event. People really turned out for it. And this is another thing that happened in the early park. So this was a Longmont Coronet Band. And in the book I talk about how they, their claim to fame was climbing Longs Peak and holding a concert at the top. But there was a bandstand similar to this in both Thompson and Collier Parks in the earlier days. And they rotated between them and had community concerts every week. And people had to reserve space on the lawn because it was such a popular activity. So they had not only the Coronet Band, but the Longmont Municipal Band and there was a Boys Band. Yeah. Longmont Boys Band was popular in the teens and twenties. Yeah. And here's a Longmont driving park. So again, Lake Park turned out to be a little bit of a disappointment. A frog mosquito swatting area. And so they converted it to a racing facility and added more land to the park so that it would have a full half mile race track around it. And so harness racing, which was shown here as well as bicycle races, foot races, any number of things were held in that park. It was known as one of the best racetracks in northern Colorado. So it was very well sought after. Rothrock, who's one of our park names over in Eastern, on East Fifth Avenue, raised horses and did harness racing at Longmont driving park. And I think this shows the use of the parks for, you know, in addition to gathering for sport and competition for the community to come together and compete and enjoy that aspect of community gathering as well. Water. So from Longmont's beginning, water was a key part. The people from Chicago, coming from a land where water fell from the sky, nonetheless realized that in Colorado you couldn't rely on rainfall to grow your crops. And so when the colonists came out, one of the big projects that they undertook was what they called the Excelsior Ditch. And it was actually one of the things that ended up partly bankrupting the colony because it turned out to be a lot more expensive than they thought to dig a ditch that would ultimately become the Highland Ditch. But they did plan it out, and it was their plans that then local farmers later used to actually dig that ditch. And with that reliable irrigation water, it meant that you could then farm a huge area of northern Colorado, and it really secured a lot of the success of this area having those ditches to provide water throughout the summer months. And I think that the picture that we were looking at there, that's the Sunset Lake, and the reservoir that the gentleman is standing there, is sort of the precursors to the existing reservoirs that are up at Sunset Hill there. It was pretty visionary for the city to pipe the water in as early as they did from lions, and to bring it in with high quality. And so Longmont was really thinking ahead years ago when they constructed even the South Water Treatment Plant. It was built in 1934. One of the first treatment plants on the front range of Colorado, and we finally retired it in about 2005. But we build them early, and then we try to get our maximum use out of them before we retire it. Well, and certainly this, the water system was built in response to the fire on Main Street in 1879, which burnt down a good portion of a whole block. And realized that we needed a dependable pressurized water system, so they brought the pipe in from the mountains. Then the overflow from this reservoir created Sunset Lake, which has then became Sunset Pool. So good use of... Full use of the water. And then this relates back to what I was talking about earlier. This is a photograph of Chimney Rock Dam, the Ku Klux Klan funded project to build a irrigation reservoir, community reservoir up on the North St. Brain. Basically it was essentially a public works project for unemployed Klan's members. Where you'd show up and they'd hand you a shovel and you'd start shoveling concrete that day. Ironically enough, and maybe show us a little bit about Longmont, why they ultimately voted the Klan out had as much to do with the waste of money in this dam as it did with the racism and white supremacy that the Klan was espousing at that time. But it is an example of a community turning itself around, recognizing a mistake and correcting it. And it was probably before it's time. And there's still elements of Chimney Rock when you hike up to the North Dam. And I think the idea may have been okay. The execution was fatally flawed however on how to get it done. And Fred Flanders from who one of our parks is named after, of course was voted into office in response to the Klan takeover of City Council. And his party basically ousted the Klan and kind of stopped this project and we pivoted to new something, they called it the economy party. So less waste and more down to earth projects. And this of course is the price water tower. So Price Park is named after William Price who was a water superintendent. And Dale this was the first. This is one of the first elevated welded spherical water tanks built west of the Mississippi in the country. And so to me is sort of another example of Longmont taking a chance and getting it built. This facility stayed in operation until the 1980s. We haven't used it since then but it really is sort of an iconic landmark for the city at this point. And I hope we continue to maintain and preserve it over time. When it gets admitted to the public art collection. I vote for that. So this is a shot of the construction of Ralph Price Reservoir. And so this would have been taken somewhere in the mid 1960s when the dam was first getting underway looking from the downstream side of the dam. You can see the earth moving equipment going on. You know at the time again Longmont at that time was probably a city of maybe 25,000 people building a reservoir that's going to hold 16,000 acre feet of water. Almost unheard of. I do know our cities around us would have loved to have been building a water supply of that nature at that time. And for the folks back then it was a dollar bond issuance. Something along those lines and we certainly got our money's worth out of that as the next picture sort of shows the completed dam and the reservoir behind it. And continues to be the mainstay of the city's water supply. Certainly in the wintertime the reservoir is low. We rely on Ralph Bryce and we must be doing something right here in Longmont because actually I'm not going to say it it'll probably jinx us. What I was going to say is we're one of the last areas to not have sustained a major forest fire. And part of that is do quite frankly though to the Forest Stewardship program that we're away with again for about 20-25 years thinning the forest so as to mitigate those extremely hot fires that sort of crown from one tree to the next. I was just up there last week with my husband hiking and I tell you the forest around there is beautiful. It's really been well maintained so kind of commitment to sustainable forestry up there as well as all the trails that we're able to dub to recreational use the trails up sleepy lion and then around the reservoir itself are wonderful spots to go. Is it true that we're in such good shape water wise here in Longmont that during extreme droughts we sometimes sell water back to other communities? What I will say to that is first of all I would not trade Longmont's water supply with any city in the state. Having said that I do know during the flood for instance Longmont did provide emergency service to some of the districts around us because the facilities had been damaged. Longmont has also historically leased water back to some of the farmers in the valley again to support agriculture around the city. Again I think hearkening back to the early days of the community that the relationship between the farming community and the city was always an important one and so we do that but another key thing in Longmont and it's embedded in the charter from the 1960s is that here in Longmont city council cannot on their own vote sell any water. It takes a vote of you all to make that decision and Longmont has never sold any water. So. We're also pretty proud of our water at the top of the food chain. We don't have any cities above us and collecting their effluent cleaned water. We are coming right out of Rocky Mountain National Park and the big mountains so we have very good water supply and clean quality. And this is something that parks has been involved with for a number of years which is converting some of the buffer areas in parks to native grass and to so water conservation as well as lowering some of our maintenance costs as well as providing some habitat for some of the critters that live in the area. So you know really multi-pronged attempt to become more sustainable and not just wall-to-wall bluegrass. Exactly. This is a project that we did over the last couple of years down at the service center down on South Sherman Street. We replaced all the bluegrass sod and grass at the facility with wheatgrass and part of that is to again demonstrate as a city that we are wanting to sort of walk the talk. If we want residents to try to conserve and to explore different ways of landscaping their property maybe we should do it ourselves. And I'll tell you I was nervous when they first did it. I thought oh wow we're taking our nice green lawn and changing it but I'll tell you it's a great project and we're going to be tracking the water savings to get that result from it and hopefully we can replicate it in other areas. So this is a photograph from just this past year. It's up at the Chimney Hollow Reservoir not to be confused with Chimney Rock but this is a Chimney Hollow. This is a reservoir that's being built immediately to the west of Carter Lake. It's a reservoir that is being built as a regional project. Longmont is a partner in that project along with many other cities and water districts around us. We were an early supporter of the project. The intent and the need of the project is to be able to store the water that Longmont owns through the Windy Gap project in the 1980s and this is really really no different than any other water right where whether it's the farmers back in the 1800s they would dig the ditch first and then they would come back and build a reservoir so that they could store water for the dry years to get them through those dry years and that's exactly what's going on so groundbreaking was earlier this year and it's going to take about four years or so to get the reservoir built. So Longmont another visionary aspect of this community was its adoption of a municipal electric utility. In about 1912 the people of Longmont were very unhappy with the private company that was providing their power. So unhappy that they decided to build a power plant and operate their own electric utility. This ended up being a lengthy court fight back and forth between the city and the private company and it drug on to the point where the citizens of Longmont began to switch back to kerosene lamps from electric light because they were so frustrated with not having their own electric utility and ultimately Longmont won the lawsuit they had this big party on Main Street and then began to generate their own electricity and Longmont has done that ever since. This is actually a diesel plant some of you may recognize that it is now the cheese importers building in Longmont but it began life as the diesel electric plant that was actually supplementing an original hydropower plant built up on the North St. Brain. So Longmont has really been very visionary in creating these services for its community and continues to add those throughout its history. I think this next photograph is of the the Pelton wheels at their hydro plant and again it was built in 19 in the teens whether I think it was around 1914 maybe but it is still in operation and so you know right now Longmont is striving and heading towards a goal of 100% renewable power by 2030 the interesting and visionary aspect of it is that's how we started we started with renewable power and frankly we're still using it and probably will. Another part of what Longmont did over the years was to join together with Fort Collins and Loveland and Estes Park and form the Platte River Power Authority. It has probably been one of the more successful efforts of the city that benefits and the result of that is not only reliable power but also probably some of the lowest rates that people can see on the front range. I was just going to ask is this the one up in Apple Valley? This is. This is the little hydro plant that again it's still in operation and we used to have folks that would live there year round and I always wanted that job. That would be great. Beautiful area. It's your retirement. There you go. So here's an example of continuing to push the issue forward so this is an electric vehicle charging station down at the service center. Longmont is going to be installing many of these around the community and I think we also have one here at the museum up near the civic center area but this is really again looking forward not being content with what we have today but instead pushing the envelope if you will and we have the huge advantage here in Longmont of being able to leverage our electric utility to be able to make these kinds of investments that advance the effort. Here's an example. This is a photograph of up at the Raw Hyde Power Plant. That is owned by Platte River Power. This is north of Fort Collins. So on the right hand side you see the Raw Hyde Power Plant. So it's a coal plant. It was built again in the 1970s. It was hailed as one of the cleanest coal plants in the country at the time. Probably still is. Nevertheless, Platte River Power Authority is moving to close down the Raw Hyde Plant and replace that power with wind power and solar and hydro. Again, moving us towards that goal of 100% renewable electric generation. How about wind? Wind is a huge component and it's Platte River is invested heavily in wind farms in the northern part of Colorado as well as southern Wyoming. I think the component that really is still in its early stages is to bring on the battery storage. That is a critical element of renewable energy in order to make it reliable. As we all know, the sun's not always up and the wind's not always blowing. So you need to be able to store that energy no different than storing water in a reservoir. You need to be able to store it when you can generate it and then use it when you need it. What percentage of our power is coming from wind right now? Renewable in general. I don't know the breakdown on wind versus solar although the bulk of the renewables right now is wind. I believe Platte River is approaching 50% of supply coming from renewable. I think we're ahead. You hear a lot of commercials about how Excel energy is doing and I don't want to disparage Excel. I'm sure they're a fine company but they don't have anything on Platte River or Longmont. Waste. Waste not. So this is a photograph of EcoCycle. Some of you may remember that back in the mid-1980s. That was really a grassroots effort that started here in Longmont. Dan Bedavidas was one of the early pioneers of the effort. They used to have a fleet of school buses. Does anybody remember that other than me? I'm dating myself here. It started out as a grassroots volunteer effort to go around collecting newspapers and those kinds of renewables and then has really grown from that to now being really one of the leading advocates and agencies for the recycling cause. Probably in the country and they're still alive and well. They continue to run the recycling facility in Boulder and they continue to be a good partner for the city of Longmont. So this is just sort of a collage of things going on in the 1980s in that arena of recycling which to be honest we have a long ways to go both as a state and as a community. This effort is not done. We can all do more on recycling everything from the curbside recycling programs which again that's another one of Longmont's sort of visionary efforts. We have our own municipal trash and recycling and composting enterprise. I was going to say composting is our newest add to that and the importance of that is not only to extend the life of the landfill which we've got to have a place to dump our trash a place to capture methane is important part but also the whole carbon sequestration thing getting those organics into a place that then can be put back into the soil and not only sustain agriculture and landscaping more effectively holds water and helps carbon sequestration as well. Important stuff. So in the waste arena a few of us want to think about it's not our focus every day nor should it be necessarily but this is a picture of a digester down at the city's wastewater treatment plant off of Martin Street and this is just another portion of the treatment process where the biosolids are accumulated and as part of that process a significant amount of methane is generated and as we all know methane is one of the most aggressive greenhouse gases and historically up until a few years ago Longmont like every other city was flaring that gas largely. We for decades we were using it to run boilers in the days of the plant but most recently what we've done is installed systems down at the plant that clean the gas and allow us to really reuse it more effectively and so Longmont is now using the gas that dare I say we're all contributing to we're using it to now power the fleet that does the recycling and composting around the community again one of the first communities in the state to do that and we are pretty proud of that one and we're currently underway to expand the effort and utilize even greater amounts of that methane so good stuff that got the biggest applause yet where else do you think you can use that gas well right now we're not power the we we don't change out the fleet all at once that's again not real cost effective so we change it out on a certain program but as we are continuing to change out the fleet the new vehicles coming online are running off of we call it RNG renewable natural gas and we've also had some discussions you know City of Fort Collins was interested in working with us on that I think we've reached out to St. Breen Valley school district there's any number of ways at some point we're going to reach our capacity but I think it'd be awesome if other cities would implement this kind of technology and fuel their fleets instead of running diesel so I just think it's a it's an effective way to reuse a waste that we're generating every day in a far more beneficial way than simply flaring it speaking about fueling the feet the fleet excuse me transportation transportation has been a part of Longmont since its founding in fact Main Street is on an overland trail route that's probably been used for millennia so locating in this spot where this trail crosses the St. Breen River gave Longmont an advantage and then it built on that advantage when the railroad arrived in 1873 and then as a highway from Denver Longmont was really on the main highway until I-25 was built in the 1960s so it was an important part of Longmont's economy all of the car related businesses that were up and down Main Street and people got into cars as well to get to parks I was just going to say that was a fabulous picture of Roosevelt Auditorium back in the day what a gorgeous building that was it's no steward auditorium I'll tell you and then in the 1940s at that time the airport in Longmont was actually located right next to Main Street and basically ended at about 1st Avenue so if you think about some of the noise complaints we have today imagine if the airport had stayed there so they were thinking ahead and they put it where they thought well the town will never get out to you know this road 75th Street oh my gosh that's way the heck out there so they built an airport miles outside of town in 1945 realizing that air travel and use of airplanes was going to really dramatically increase in the years after World War II so that municipal airport is still in operation today and now serves a variety of different services and I think going forward into the future you know the airport what they did they also acquired a significant amount of land around the airport that allowed for some expansion of the runways that were necessary at the time but I think going forward the things that we are wanting to try to put into play are attracting business or industry that is aeronautically based that could be either founded or headquartered here in Longmont and you know there are many advances going on in the aviation world you know one of the more interesting ones is the conversion to all electric airplanes there you go so that will have a significantly good effect on the noise issue and so you know again if we keep our eye on the opportunities that are out there the airport could serve that role it will never be a commercial enterprise where you are going to catch a flight to Hawaii out of Longmont but it certainly can fill other aviation related needs and opportunities that again benefit Longmont and keep us in the forefront so transportation you know this is titled transportation disruptions on the far left hand side is Longmont in 1910 and you will see there Main Street is pretty well crowded if not clogged with horse buggies and carts and a mere 10 years later in the center picture in 1920 it was the age of the automobile so imagine that kind of a disruption or a transformation if you will and how you moved around how you got around it was a phenomenal change it was a rapid change that occurred at the time and then on the far right side you see Longmont in 2020 it is still a automobile but it is a downward transportation system you know the single family or the single occupancy vehicle has really had a ride if you will for the last 100 years and it too is likely on the cusp of significant change and I know Paula you've put a huge amount of time into engineering aspects and other aspects of transportation one of the things that I'm sure it is still going on today but the multimodal plan that began I don't know a decade or so ago and one of the things that I know is being worked on is greenway connections and then connectivity between those greenways especially in north south connections mostly east west direction greenways so you know providing those transportation as well as recreational connections as well as kind of a worldwide effort for complete streets making them more pedestrian friendly more walkable trees, cooling them bicycle friendly those benches for people to sit so really trying to empower people and provide pleasant environments for them to use something other than the automobile to get around. Longmont going forward is well dare I say RTD probably doesn't get the greatest applause here these days but is looking forward again with the sort of the visioning of the first and main transit center that is in the planning stages at this point and hopefully we'll go to construction over the next several years but it will really become the new hub of transportation in the city whether that be rail someday or certainly bus rapid transit connecting in with the hopefully a more robust and effective local transit system and there are any number of opportunities who knows at some point the city may run its own local transit system those are difficult operations to get underway with but at some point not unlike in the past dare I say I think Longmont citizens will become fed up with what they have and expect more especially in the area of transit and the equitable accessibility for all to be able to move around the community. And when we do get fed up we'll ride our horse and buggies around like bring the horses back. That's a protest. And then what about the Kauffman project? I think the next slide talks a little bit about some of the future projects that are coming up. The one that's really getting underway and we are able to get a significant grant to do the project is the Kauffman Street project from about 9th avenue down to where the new transit hub is going to be it's really a complete revisioning of Kauffman Street from a automobile centric corridor to one that is far more focused on many modes of transportation and becoming really sort of the spine of the bus system. Trying to move one of those buses off of the Main Street corridor and to make it far more efficient both for the regional connections into Boulder and Denver as well as the connections north into Fort Collins and Loveland. That's going to be really a transformative project over the next several years moving ahead. We kind of need that. More water. So Longmont's history with floods goes back even before there was Longmont in the town of Burlington a small community located right along the St. Brain experienced the first flood in this area in 1864 and when I was researching my book that was such a remarkable thing as there kept being floods. It was like 1864, 1894, 1921, 1935 it was just like I didn't remember floods but the last one had been 1969 which was just a little bit before I was around but one of the things I find fascinating about this particular photo is it's taken at first in Maine you can see the railroad tracks it is just about exactly where the flood of 2013 came to 120 years later so we see that mother nature does tend to follow those same paths and this one took longer for Longmont to be visionary about. This is in some of the neighborhoods on the west side of the city one thing I'm grateful for is we did not have a loss of life as a result of the flood we acted quickly in the middle of the night ahead of the flood waters getting here nonetheless it was hugely devastating to the city so much so that shortly after the flood the city council and I think the community came together to look to rebuilding and re-envisioning what the St. Brain could be through the Resilience St. Brain project which is still underway and still has several years to go forward but it does really represent years and years of commitment and it's not just a drainage project but equally or more important is a wildlife corridor it is the rebuilding of that St. Brain Greenway that we all love and cherish and it really provided a great opportunity I mean not only the floodway but there was a lot of weedy species that had invaded that whole corridor a lot of erosion so you know lessening the erosion opening it up planting native trees and shrubs and so you know it's going to take a while for it to establish itself but certainly on the way to being a much more attractive and sustainable landscape down there can you talk a little bit about what these improvements do to you know keep the flooding from happening and you know I even though I am an engineer by trade I do appreciate that mother nature usually wins at the end of the day but what we have done here is a huge amount of work with redoing all the hydrology of all of the drainage ways along the front range that work was undertaken by the state of Colorado what it showed us was that what we used to think of a hundred year flood the amount of water in a hundred year flood was woefully inadequate and in fact is more than 50% greater than that and so we are constructing the RSVP project to convey that far increased hundred year flood capacity the premise of the project is to protect people and property and do it in the most environmental sensitive way that we can but a huge amount of work huge amount of effort and it is the rebuilding of the transportation system as well every bridge over the river is being rebuilt in order to pass those floods it really is a transformation of projects that will transform this portion of our community for literally decades into the future the other thing is that the river before was undersized as Dale mentioned but now it's not only widened but it's widened in such a way that the low flow channel which carries the water in a low situation kind of bank to bank but then when it floods a little bit higher at like a 10 year storm event there's room for it to go and it will support more wetland plants that help stabilize the banks help clean the water provides habitat for a lot of creatures that live in that area and then even beyond that expansion opportunity there's a lot of flood floods so it really kind of a tiered floodway zone and the other thing is there were a lot of low head dams several in Longmont and elsewhere one down in the Dickens Farm Park area was about 10, 12 feet high if I remember correctly so that all got blown out with the flood which actually in some ways was a good thing and we're not putting it back that way and there was a lot of the small little fish some of which are species of concern and threatened species could never make that, navigate up that low head dam before so now they're able to travel up and down and colonize the river more much larger habitat, one of our partners on the project has been in Colorado Parks and Wildlife and they've been fun to work with and given us good outcomes I hope so next slide is our be me up Scotty program I hope everyone in the audience is a next like customer and if you're not I can help get you signed up so next slide is really you talk about visionary and looking toward the future the importance of the internet these days and the importance from everything from commerce to education to entertainment it's phenomenal pandemic stay at home orders working on zoom for Longmont to have really sort of taken a chance if you will this is a new endeavor again it was controversial at the time because we were as a municipality we had the audacity to venture into the private sector you know the Comcast and CenturyLink and others of the world so the outcome is one of great success we've probably built out the system most if not all properties in the city now have the ability to get service from next light our customer account is growing daily somewhere over 24,000 households and businesses in the city are on the system I believe our market share is somewhere in the range of 57 to 58% I think Comcast would love to have our market share and we also believe by the way in providing this at a reasonable cost to people you shouldn't have to take out a loan to have excellent internet service at your home or your business and so again those are things that you can do when they're community centered and focus that way you know just as a plug we're either we're in the top three as fast as internet in the country who that's one of the top two so this just so some of the construction of it going on it's all underground actually it's not all underground it's some of it is aerial in some of the older areas of the city but majority of it is underground so sustainability yep looking to the future we could probably have an entire talk on these issues of climate change and how sustainability is ever more important with the uncertainty of what climate changes are going to impact our community we again we do our best to try to anticipate and to plan for everything from severe droughts to severe floods to any number of climate challenges that we know they're coming it's just a question of how extreme is it going to be and how ready are we going to be when it's here sustainability is a key element of that the best way to get through any of these climate changes is to minimize minimize your use of the resources whether it's water or power or way services or any of the infrastructure that we talked about is to be as frugal and as smart and as minimal as you can so that you can have that capacity to to deal with the downfall and another key aspect of it and I think that's what's shown here in this picture is we need to do it with a keen sense of equity in other words sustainability has to be available to all in the community for us all to thrive together and I'm really proud of the work that our colleagues are doing here in the city of reaching out and really working to understand what does it take to have an equitable transition so that no one is left behind and that's key I think they talk a lot about how sustainability is a three three-legged stool with economic, environmental and social and certainly one of those things all of our infrastructure is so important but open space areas, green spaces fulfill all of those and we talked about the tourism aspect for parks in the pandemic I think we've seen how important outdoor spaces are for people's peace of mind and recreation and health, mental health so you know Longman I think has a lot to be proud of for its history through the years but certainly a lot of things to look forward to and this is a really quick little review of some of those things and certainly not everything that the city is doing but there's some very good things happening in this community these are actually images from a panel discussion we did last Earth Day with the Equitable Climate Action Team which is a really phenomenal conversation and it's up on our Facebook page if you're interested in checking it out there's a lot of effort and individuals coming together to learn and improve on how we're doing things just like the founding of Longman 150 years ago it was not a top-down approach it was a group of individuals coming together making a decision and working together to create a new community I'm really kind of blown away by how functional this place is and coming from Boulder especially this place seems very highly functional it's easy to understand coming from Boulder but yes we get things done here it's pretty amazing Longman has always been sort of known as the meat and potatoes kind of community in other words we're not out cheerleading ourselves doing what we can to keep our nose to the grindstone and just do good work with the sense being that the work will speak for itself you know Boulder does awesome things and I'm impressed by many of the things that City of Boulder does and I think going forward we probably have opportunity to learn from each other more than maybe we have in the past and because I think it is you have to look beyond your borders you have to look regionally and globally at these issues well we want to open it up to some Q&A while we still have a little bit of time here so why don't we bring the house lights up a little bit and I will run around and do my little Phil Donahue impersonation if I can find my mask what do I do with my mask Any questions? Your battery is running low We have wind power being more and more important more and more prevalent there are some problems about birds being killed by this nice thing What's going on? Well that's likely a consequence again whatever actions we take there's always going to be some negative aspects to those correct I am not an expert on how serious of a condition that is but I've certainly heard about it they can be deadly for some birds I do not know however how prevalent that is like all things though I think finding solutions as opposed to stopping is probably the best approach we know that wind energy is effective we know that it's efficient we know that it can now come online at costs that are comparable and even lower than fossil fuels so maybe we need to change up the visual appearance or do different things to help with that problem I think there are a couple things they're doing to address that one is the speed of the wind turbines and migration times and things like that where they just stop another thing is during the construction I know they've been trying to do less ground disturbance because that actually keeps some of the rodents out of that area more readily and then there's fewer raptors that are trying to hunt in that area so I know there's a lot of work from multitude of different approaches on that but it's really good concern I've been bugging the City of Longmont for a while about noise I don't like it and I wonder looking forward if there is some kind of emphasis or at least recognition from the City of Longmont about noise so just as an example I talked to Joni Marsh about noise before the pandemic hit we met a couple times and I said to her you know there is a wonderful example of city noise right on your building there's an awful fan that broadcasts which building is that that is the building where Joni works the development services center I think it's on the south side of the building it's awful there are a lot of sources of noise and so being a sensitive person I just wonder what are we doing about that you know one thing I would offer on that is certainly as the transportation fleet converts to electric vehicles certainly the loud exhausts and those kinds of things will be mitigated if not eliminated it's not going to happen overnight it's going to take decades for that to probably fully transform itself but I do believe I agree with you that urban noise can be debilitating to people and certainly not healthy for children through adults right so once again I think some of the changes that are occurring should eliminate or lower some of the noise impacts that we're all feeling and of course we all wish it would happen tomorrow and be done but it's my thought on that hi there thanks for this evening I was on that screen that has gone dead which I'm grateful to not have to see myself up there anymore but I was on the e-cat panel so I appreciate that you guys mentioned that but I was a little bit I guess perturbed that the slideshow started with the word land and you guys talked right away about the Chicago colonists and we missed a huge opportunity there didn't we? Yeah, we really did so I was just shocked that nobody thought of well who was here before the Chicago colonists and let's at least acknowledge that so maybe you could talk about that. That's a great point and I know the city council and the city have embraced a land acknowledgement position and statement that here in this very auditorium when we celebrated our sister city relationship with the northern Rapa Ho tribe we proclaimed and read the land acknowledgement statement and I believe it's our intent to put appropriate signage in different areas around the city acknowledging that very issue so I apologize that we should have acknowledged that. And I don't know if anybody can add anything to that now in terms of who did the Chicago colonists purchase it from and who had to leave this area in order for them to be there if you can speak on that now. Sure so by the time the colony arrived and I agree it's a very important point that we certainly should have let off with our land acknowledgement the colony arrived in 1871 and the Cheyenne and the Rapa Ho had been driven out of this region by 1868 so there was a short gap of time so the colony was purchasing land either from the federal government which admittedly was acquiring it from by treaty treaties that had been broken from Cheyenne and the Rapa Ho or from the Denver Pacific Railroad that had received a large land grant recently so that was primarily where the colony got its land directly from but certainly that land all of it belonged rightfully to Cheyenne and the Rapa Ho and the Ute by by treaties that had been signed in the 1850s and 60s. I mean maybe we should talk about the sister cities relationship with the northern Cheyenne I mean in terms of our own visionary approach to... Yeah that's a good point Jensen so you know Longmont it was the city council and there was a lot of effort also by Mayor Brian Bagley that pushed that issue for a number of years I know when we initially approached the the National Sister Cities Association that was sort of an unheard of kind of sister city approach between two sovereign nations and once again Longmont didn't let that deter us we said you know what we think it's important and we want to pursue a sister cities relationship with the northern Rapa Ho and so you know the culmination of it was we exchanged series of several folks from Longmont went up to the Wind River Reservation and visited there and also hosted the Rapa Ho to come to Longmont I would say it's in its infancy at this point we just started that relationship I think there's it could be an exciting future guys it could be something that really grows and again allows Longmont to show that as a community we can build relationship and also acknowledge you know the ownership and role of the the Native Americans in our in our area and so I think it's just beginning you know this is at the very beginning and I hope it really flourishes and grows I think we have time for maybe two more questions you guys have given some great examples of visionary ideas that have you know a lot of work into them and they have become successful and some remain successful today but not all visionary ideas are successful and just curious if you'd run into any sort of audacious ideas by Longmont residents that were ended up being a flop I don't know if you start this off on that well here's one that we've tried a couple of times in our park lands and that was to create more you know using using some of the parks for growing fruit for public harvesting and that has not turned out so successful now I will give an exception to that which is at Rogers Grove we have a very viable little apple orchard down there but we have tried cherries out at Dry Creek Park we've tried a few other areas and that's been a very difficult one both environmentally as well as just abuse let's put it that way I would think another example that's not just Longmont but our involvement with RTD has not been a rousing success really in any sense of the word and the real question is you know where do we lay the blame for that right I prefer to not do that I prefer to let's look at the situation what's not working why is it not working and what is our role in trying to improve it but I think there's any number of examples of things that probably didn't bloom as wildly as we hoped for nonetheless I come up short on finding things that if we started out not good intent that it didn't typically turn out okay we talked about chimney rock we talked about some of those almost follies of efforts that were not well thought out and did not work and actually likely cost a lot of money and so certainly right there's certainly room for doing better and hopefully learning from those mistakes and not repeating them one more question how much money did they come with the Chicago colony it varied a lot but the cost of a membership to the colony was $155 and to give you a sense of what that means in today's terms that was several months wages for a skilled trades person so in order to afford a membership you had to be relatively well off to be able to put down that kind of funds but a woman named Elizabeth Thompson who was a philanthropist out of New York paid for 20 or 25 memberships of people who could not have afforded it so some people arrived with very little whereas others, so for example Seth Terry was the first president of the colony Terry's treat his name for he was a successful business owner owned or lumberyard in Illinois area so was able to come out here and actually move his lumberyard to Colorado probably one of the wealthiest people to come to Longmont based on some of the early tax records some of the tax records show that the majority of people had less than 50 cents to their name a year or two after the colony started and others had 50 to 100 dollars which at that time would have been significant so it was a very diverse community even in its earliest start all right, thank you all for joining us let's thank our panelists Paula Fitzgerald incomparable Eric Mason and Dale Rademacher Paula and Eric will actually be hanging out in the lobby signing copies of their books and if you haven't picked one up yet or multiple copies yet for the holidays I believe in you you can purchase them at the front desk and we'll all be out in the lobby here momentarily to hang with you all thanks for coming