Every piece of open space has a history to it and almost every piece of open space could have gone one way or another.
There was this argument that it was an extravagance it's what people love about this place that sometimes they don't understand what it took to make it happen and what it will take to continue to preserve it.
We had to preserve this magnificently wonderful place in the world preserving the uniqueness of Boulder County really means.
Preserving land that's both in the mountains and on the plains our farmland as well as our forests.
There is not a single place between the Mexican border and the Canadian border where the Continental Divide comes so close to the Great Plains as it does right here in Boulder County.
I think Boulder County is unique because of parks and open space. Without the public's support I don't think parks and open space as we know it today would exist and that's something that myself and the staff that I worked with kept in mind all the time.
Open space to many people in the county was a pretty foreign concept. There were only two governments in Colorado that had open space programs and a lot of people in Boulder County just didn't think it was necessary to have open space and when you look at it now I think there something in excess of 50 open space programs just in the state of Colorado.
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When we moved here 1969 a tremendous amount of open space magnificent views of the mountains from almost anywhere what I found out is that that isn't automatically preserved. One of the local issues that was talked about a lot in Boulder County because of the surge in development over the 60s and 70s was preservation of open space.
I came here in 1970 and I was very involved in the hearings about whether what we should have in a Boulder County Comprehensive Plan in fact I found this by little tattered copy of it that comprehensive plan called for the preservation of agriculture.
There was it was obvious than that we were losing a lot of agricultural land to development.
That basic idea contained in the comprehensive plan that urban development should occur in and around cities and not in the rural parts of the county is critical really to the way Boulder County is developed. The citizens wanted it prior to the department even starting there were many surveys that were done countywide and it was literally in the thousands of surveys they got back they had a very good idea what people wanted and they also had them list which properties are areas of the county they thought should be preserved.
The county and other parts of Colorado were losing agricultural landed in an alarming rate and we really knew something needed to be done.
As farming and agriculture we're talking about long time historic families that have been here for fourth fifth generation.
Urban sprawl had always been kind of outlying it was always something that you saw somewhere else in the metro area now in rather than being outlying it was infilling and it was becoming part of Boulder County's personality.
Well for sure the eastern part of the county would have grown together. You couldn't tell the difference between Louisville, Lafayette, Erie, or Superior. They would have all grown together.
People coming to the realization that if we don't do it now it's going to be gone and finally the tax proposal was on the ballot in 78 and I worked on that. There was a lot of support for it but still a lot of people who didn't understand and who didn't trust what the government would do to preserve open space if they paid a tax for it.
The decade between the first election and 78 and the second election had seen a lot of growth in Boulder County.
Subdivisions were popping up all over the place ag land was being lost there was a growing concern about the loss of important lands.
Oh man what a disappointment and when we lost that election I was just sick because development was happening so much then and I thought if we don't get the money to get ahead of this this thing will be a sea of rooftops.
Even though the issue lost in 1988 that didn't mean that all the growth stopped and that there weren't that wasn't a challenge to our future quality of life. The effort continued to try to find a way to find an appropriate funding source and it was Rock Creek on 36 growing and growing and growing finally made people realize if we don't save it now we're it's going to be gone.
It provided kind of a wake-up call to the county that either something needed to be done or there was going to be significant additional development in lots of other places throughout the county.
So I think it played a pivotal role in changing public sentiment about whether this proposal for a county tax was necessary or not.
We always looked with some regret on that property they offered it to the county but we didn't have any money so we had to pass.
I had to pass on it when it was all still rolling grasslands.
It makes them to the 93 election work one of the things that we knew we had to do was to to get people on board support wise and we had more a three pronged approach. You know with wildlife, there was agricultural land, and it was separating our cities so we could stay individual cities.
By the time this went to election the supporters included eight mayor's from Boulder County towns, over 20 City Council members from those towns. The Boulder Area Board of Realtors which is a big deal and then people from a lot of community organizations.
The consideration was well what should we do now in order to move forward with a different kind of proposal and the thought was it would be good to get everyone in the same room who cared about open space whether they were for it or against it to provide input about what an open space program might look like. 
So the open space task force was created in 1992. Business people and farmers and citizens who were interested in preservation. Environmentalists to the task force.
It's at a wonderful stage for this door to open. People in the eastern part of the county were also starting to see enormous growth.
Longmont, Lafayette, Louisville, Superior, Erie, all of those places growth was starting to happen. It was easier in that election to get people to understand why open space might be important because they were seeing land disappearing to development throughout their communities.
The doing that was really really essential to Carolyn Holberg's perspective. She was very very sensitive to the affordability of this tax. We had to make sure that the people in the eastern County knew that this open space tax was more about them than it was about proximity to the Boulder city environs.
She was a spitfire and she had the unique ability to talk to anybody. People respected her and she was able to build those relationships in a way that promoted our program. 
And so I had an idea for an ad that had three images and the words that went with it going going gone. This is something that really hit home with people. This is the one where it was a wake-up call for people who who maybe didn't realize how how much this was happening.
So we're starting to campaign and we knew native the yard sign but we didn't want just a square rectangular yard sign. And we thought of the bear that the science and cultural facilities district uses to pass their vote, so we thought we should do an animal.
And I was for an owl because owls are wise it's actually shaped about right.
Hootie was the creation of a wonderful friend and a terrific artist Joanne Dufty. She was a remarkable fine artist.
She was a real advocate for open space, not only for the preservation of land, but also for the idea of having trails that connected communities and that were available for the public to use.
Simple, open space yes, and it sold. People knew it. And finally you got a name, named Hootie.
When you have this little character, like Hootie, every time you see it, it reinforces the image that, and it was a positive image, open space yes, was Hootie's message.
On election night, I was I was pretty confident.
I felt a whole lot better the third time than I did the other two times and it was a very exciting night because it's it was like an issue that we've been working on for you know a decade and a half for 15 years.
It's just a slogging effort and you just have to stick with it. And we did and it was the most glorious moment when that finally passed in 93.
It's amazing what Boulder County has been able to accomplish. In our early years, the first 18 years of our existence, we didn't have a funding source, a dedicated funding source, and we had limited means and we had to be very creative about the deals we did.
We had big plans and we we had a lot of things we wanted to do, but it took hard work before we were able to accomplish those. 
When I started in 1979 I think we had roughly a department size of about a dozen people.
I think the overwhelming part was was we were not staffed for it. It was exciting because now you could really move ahead in all of those things that have been put on the plan since 1960. You could now have a potential of making that happen.
When I first got here we were really the poor stepchild of every department in the county. I mean we would beg every everything we could just to operate. We would buy our vehicles from Colorado surplus and they were all army vehicles from the World War 2 era.
That's what we had in 1993 our first sales tax passed and all of a sudden we had the means to go out. We were able to sell a bond and get a lot of money and we had our eye on some pretty important pieces of property. 
The Heil Valley Ranch, the Hall Ranch, and our acquisition program exploded in that next 10 years.
It happened fast because we have been anticipating.
And be able to buy those properties that we'd been longing to buy was really was really the highlight of my time in office.
Heil Valley Ranch played so significantly into the 93 election. It was so critical. When that option to buy that place came up it was eight square miles for eight million dollars. And it was a gift horse just looking Boulder County in the eye.
And then a lot of the farm properties belong along 287. And having bonding capability was vital because we bought large tracts of agricultural lands.
And it took us a while to catch up with the planning on all those to get the the facilities in place and the properties open for the public's enjoyment.
There's still an opportunity to purchase land and to preserve land and we should definitely do that.
So you've got to buy those remaining parcels it's like a jigsaw puzzle and those last ones are almost always the hardest to get so you need to keep focused on that because once it's gone is gone.
The open space program now is preserved about a hundred and five thousand acres of land and its land that's as diverse as the farmland around Longmont to the Caribou Ranch up by the Continental Divide near Nederland. 
I think that the challenge now is how to manage that land, what to do with that land, how to be sure that we're applying the best principles of management to the land and and also being sure that we're involving the public in the stewardship of the land.
Sometimes people don't understand the gifts they have and they take them for granted. So education is really important to help people understand how do we acquire some of those properties what was historical significance, and then what do we all need to do for stewards to preserve that.
We're very aware that building stewardship ethic is so important for the legacy of Boulder County Open Space and for future generations to enjoy and steward these properties.
If this open space is going to continue and be preserved and be used in the future we need the next generation coming behind. Not only the users, but also the professionals that are going to take care of it. 
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We have provided the foundation for a quality of life that will carry on forever.