On Tuesday night, the Boulder County Commissioners voted to terminate the conservation easement on the Kanemoto Estates property.
The Kanemoto Estates property is located just south of Pike Road along South Airport Road. The property used to belong to the Kanemoto family but was sold in 2020. Since the family has had nothing to do with the property.
The property is currently in unincorporated Boulder County. The vote to end the conservation easement now allows developer Jack Bestall of Bestall Collaborative to submit a concept plan to the city of Longmont.
Longmont would then work on annexing the property into its city limits.
Bestall proposed developing the 40 acres to provide attainable and affordable housing. His proposal would meet Longmont’s requirement of 12% of affordable for-sale housing units that would be available to people with 30-79.99% of AMI and would be deed restricted. The remaining 88% would meet middle-tier income earners’ needs who fall within 80-120% AMI.
Commissioners Clair Levy and Marta Loachamin voted for the termination while Ashley Stolzmann was opposed.
Stolzmann opposed it because she felt the termination was not consistent with the county’s comprehensive plan. However, she agreed that the county needs more affordable/attainable housing.
“Anytime it's housing versus open space, we lose as a community,” Stolzmann said.
Levy’s focus was to make sure Longmont and the developer actually created homes that remained affordable for starter families and proposed deed restrictions for the middle-tier units.
“My first priority is that what comes out of the ground is what was presented to us,” Levy said.
Ultimately, the commissioners agreed on the conditions of the release of the easement that the city of Longmont rezone the lot as a mixed-use development, the affordable housing units be deed restricted, that all the units are developed on the site — instead of at another site — and the developer waives his right to utilize the city of Longmont’s pay-in-lieu.
