Insurance Fire Mitigation Evacuations
Is your home insured or under-insured? Is there an evacuation plan for your household and neighborhood?? Where lessons learned from the Waldo Canyon fires? Did you know that money will be spent on fire mitigation? Where is development? How safe is the development? Are there landslide issues? Now, development fees (aka impact fees) are on the table.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Maintainence costs were carefully built into the original TOPS ordinance. It is critical to point out publicly and repeatedly that the cost of maintaining open space is a fraction of that required to maintain hyper-developed parks. The problem began when the Colorado Springs Parks Department fell desperately behind on parks maintenance after the drastic post-2008 cuts to its budget. Raiding TOPS became a default practice and was done quietly by being “flexible” with the wording in the ordinance. Understandable to be sure, but not acceptable. The expenditures required by OPEN SPACE are to be, by law, covered by open space tax revenue. And, what expenses PARKS require are to be extracted from that allowable portion under the TOPS ordinance and no more than that, again by codified law. If the underlying and very real *difference* between a park and an open space is not acknowledged and protected then there is no point in the TOPS ordinance. If that distinction is erased or downplayed then TOPS becomes little more than a slush fund for a underfunded and thus struggling parks department. Our open spaces did not suffer during the years following the downturn for the simple reason that their whole existence as a separate and named entity rests upon their being left in a protected natural state and unimproved. The issue fundamentally is that parks and open spaces are two entirely different entities (both being experienced and valued by the people) and the fight to keep them separate will be ongoing until parks gets its budget issues under control. Hint: General Fund.