Pine Creek residents are preparing to take their fight against plans to build hundreds of new apartments in Briargate to the Colorado Springs City Council.

Preserve Pine Creek Village, a group of Pine Creek neighbors, on Thursday formally appealed the Planning Commission’s Jan. 10 approval of plans to build the 232-affordable unit Royal Pines Apartments at North Powers and North Union boulevards. 

The council will consider neighbors’ concerns during a hearing expected to be scheduled for the board’s regular meeting on Feb. 13, according to a email sent Thursday from Planning and Neighborhood Services Director Peter Wysocki to Pine Creek and other Colorado Springs residents.

In the documents filed by Joseph O’Keefe, an attorney with Colorado-based Baker Law Group representing Preserve Pine Creek Village, he said the development planned adjacent to their neighborhood will be “detrimental to the public interest, health, safety, convenience or general welfare.”

Residents have vocally opposed the attainable housing project marketed toward working families, proposed by Portland, Ore.-based developer DBG Properties, since the summer.

Many have said they are not opposed to attainable housing but are chiefly concerned hundreds of additional residents living in the complex will make evacuations more dangerous in the event of an emergency such as a wildfire.

Appellants also believe additional residents in the area will create more everyday traffic, noise, light and air pollution; that area schools are already “overcrowded” and cannot accommodate additional students; that planned parking options for the apartments are inadequate; and that surrounding property values will be negatively affected, among others.

“We believe that we have a right to defend our neighborhood from all this overdevelopment and we are going to continue to do that,” Pine Creek resident Steve Parrish said Friday.

Supporters of the project who spoke at this month’s Planning Commission, most all of them who work or are involved in the housing industry, said the project will meet growing workforce and attainable housing needs in this area of Colorado Springs.

Neighbors have said there is already too much traffic on Briargate Parkway, Union Boulevard and Powers Boulevard bordering the neighborhood. With one entrance and two exit points proposed for the complex, and roundabouts located along the exit route, residents have said they are concerned about critical and potentially deadly traffic backups during emergency evacuations.

Colorado Springs Deputy Fire Marshal Kris Cooper told planning commissioners the project site is not located in a wildland urban interface that is at greater risk for catastrophic wildfire. If assumptions are made that the neighborhood would be impacted by a forest fire, Cooper said they were “inaccurate,” because the area doesn’t fall under those qualifications.

Parrish repeated claims neighbors made in the appeal documents that planning commissioners ignored their concerns about emergency evacuations.

“It felt to me like they were patronizing, ignoring us,” Parrish said.

Pine Creek resident Jim Blair said Friday he believes neighbors may not have been so opposed to the project if they were brought into the planning process earlier.

Developers held two informational neighborhood meetings in July and August. 

Residents at the July meeting said the city sent postcards notifying only people who lived within 1,000 feet of the proposed project. The first postcard listed the wrong project address and so the city sent a second. Neither postcard mentioned an apartment complex, Parrish said last summer, but listed the project description as a “concept plan to allow for commercial or residential uses.”

“Community-based planning — we do not have that,” Blair said. “It’s more reactive. … My question through this whole process is, at what point did you in the city come down to residents and say, ‘We’re planning this’? They never did that. That’s why you get the reaction you do, as far as a negative reaction from the community. All we’re asking for is a fair shake on this.”

Residents in Pine Creek are appealing plans to build the 232-unit Royal Pines Apartments at North Powers and North Union boulevards in Briargate.

Courtesy city of Colorado Springs