Hi Everyone,
We’ll have a longer update next week on our regular May newsletter; introducing our new community relations coordinator, upcoming rides and events, etc. But I wanted to reach out with a quick easy ask for help.
Theres are two big ticket items on the council work session agenda for tomorrow night (Tuesday, the 25th). Its a work session, so there is no opportunity for comment, and no final decisions are being made. But the issues are important enough that we’d love to ask your help.
First: do you know what council district you’re in?
If not, here’s a map. Got it? You can click on a district on that map and it’ll tell you who your council member is.
Now that you know your council member, here’s their email addresses.
you can send to cityleaders@, buts its more likely to get read if its send directly to your rep. It helps to include your address or neighborhood as well.
Here’s the asks.
We’re asking the city to support “Option 5”, which is the most robust commitment to public transit on the table for the work session. Any commitment to encouraging active transportation and bike safety has to include multimode support. Every commuter we get out of a single occupancy vehicle saves the city money, improves public safety (especially bike safety), reduces carbon emissions, and strengthens our arguments for increased spending on bike friendly infrastructure. Fully built out transit networks are a bad weather options for many bicyclists. So we strongly support robust prioritization of Transfort and encourage folks to let council know where you stand. Traffic crashes cost the city of Fort Collins $129 MILLION per year! Routine road work and expansion are huge economic costs, parking in old town has become a major bottleneck to growth of downtown. Ask council to prioritize affordable active transportation.
When a developer build a new project, the city charges fees for the impact of that development. so that things like roads and storm-water and other city services are paid for by the developer, not subsidized by tax payers. The problem is that these fees are very general, and “impact” is defined very generally and doesn’t for impact of things like sprawl, social/economic segregation, and green versus conventional building. There are other incentives for some of these, but we believe that the current system, where a green, transit adjacent, mixed income development pays the same impact fees as a conventionally built, lower density, automobile-centric development where the unit sizes are the same. In the end, this means that sustainable development is subsidizing sprawl, social segregation and non-environmentally sound development. We are asking the city to consider a study of the impacts of non-sustainable development and create impact fees that account for triple bottom line sustainability. We’re asking the city to measure REAL impacts, not just square footage, and make sprawl pay its way.
[embeddoc url=”https://bikefortcollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/DevelopmentImpactFeesandTripleBottomLine.pdf” download=”all”]
Thanks for your support of more bikes • safe streets • one voice
Chris J
Bike Fort Collins