Voters in Colorado Springs will soon receive ballots by mail for the June 17 special election. It presents a single question: do you approve or disapprove of the Karman Line annexation?
Your answer should be “No/Against.”
Karman Line is a proposed 1,900-acre development, a “flagpole annexation” miles beyond the current boundary of Colorado Springs’ largely undeveloped eastern fringe. There, developer ONE La Plata wants to build a suburban-style enclave of 6,500 homes and commercial properties over 20 years. It will essentially be a self-contained city out in the county that Colorado Springs residents will ultimately pay a lot of money and resources for.
So I had an idea: what if we took the 3.35 miles from the city’s border to Karman Line along the county’s Bradley Road – which will be annexed as the “flagpole” to connect it with the city legally – and walked that length? The result was a march along Platte Avenue from Downtown Colorado Springs’ Acacia Park to the Citadel Mall: 3.35 miles.
After World War II, Colorado Springs, like many other American cities, embraced car-dependent suburban sprawl. This was initially an appeal to the freedom that the newly popular automobile gave us.
As we marched down Platte on a beautiful sunny day, we saw the various eras of our city’s development unfold before us. Older, walkable neighborhoods with quaint homes and tree cover gave way to a post-war treeless void of concrete, vacant lots, decaying buildings, incomplete sidewalks, loud traffic and yet another future car wash.
As Colorado Springs’ leadership clings tightly to continuing this tradition of sprawl, dazzled by the possibilities of paving to Kansas or installing more precious stones along its north side, so many existing neighborhoods are hurt by a lack of municipal investment.
Nearly every issue you may have with the city – potholes and traffic, long 911 queues and slow police response times, undeveloped parks or parks with locked bathrooms, and food deserts where there are no grocery stores or health services nearby – exists because of unrestrained suburban sprawl. Karman Line will make these things worse for all of us by stretching our city’s resources even thinner.
A flagpole annexation is the most inefficient way to grow a city.
We need to plan for the future of our growing city, yes, but we need to be a lot smarter about it.
If ONE La Plata believed that their development could be built with county resources alone, that would be one thing.
My dad once commuted daily to and from Schriever Space Force Base (then Falcon Air Force Base) from Village Seven. If the military truly felt that the servicemen and women who worked there and at Peterson Space Force Base needed Karman Line to live in and shop at and were willing to support it with their vast pool of federal resources, that would be another thing.
But neither of these things are happening. ONE La Plata is asking Colorado Springs to foot the bill for their profits. Most importantly, they need our water, which is becoming an increasingly precious and overly-taxed resource.
A flagpole annexation is the most inefficient way to grow a city when infill, urban renewal and cohesive neighborhood/multimodal transit planning would do a much better job, save us money, and limit water usage. With this ballot, Colorado Springs voters will have a final chance to say, “We will not pay for this irresponsible, illogical, inefficient and expensive growth.”
There are even bigger questions at hand, like how such an annexation was able to make it through the City’s planning commission (which passed it by a narrow 4-3 vote), why the City and Colorado Springs Utilities spent two years planning for it and why both city council and Mayor Yemi so fervently defend it. The bipartisan opposition to Karman Line, from conservatives and liberals alike, has been called a “special interest” by the mayor as if it’s a conspiracy, rather than sensible planning.
But the answer is simple: this is how we’ve always done it. It’s how our current system was designed to work and it’s functioning properly. After most of a century of car dependent suburban development, it’s baked into our psyches. Quieter, intimate and walkable communities like Manitou Springs, Old Colorado City or Downtown Colorado Springs are “old” and “outmoded” when compared to endless tract housing, loud, fast-moving roadways, and big box retail stores.
Karman Line isn’t designed to make the lives of Colorado Springs residents, neighbors and families better. It’s not “for the troops.” It’s designed to make developers happier and richer, continuing the cycle of wasteful urban planning that future generations will still be paying for with both their wallets and their livelihoods in the same way we pay for most of a century’s bad planning today.
A “No” vote is how we can stop kicking the can down the road.
