It was good news last April when the voters of Colorado Springs renewed the TOPS (Trails, Open Space and Parks) sales tax. For only 1 cent out of every $10 spent, $11,000,000 per year is raised to buy additional lands for open space and parks in our city.

It was not always that way. Almost 50 years ago, in April 1975, Colorado Springs voters overwhelmingly turned down the city’s first proposal for an open space purchasing program. Acquiring attractive open lands, often graced with attractive rock formations, was a new and radical idea at that time.

Although the 1975 sales tax increase to buy open space failed at the ballot box, some members of the City Council liked the open space idea. They succeeded in appointing an Open Space Committee composed of average citizens.

Nancy Avila was elected chair. One of us, Bob Loevy, served as a member of the committee.

Bill Ruskin was the Parks Department employee who provided staff services, and leadership, for the committee. The committee’s job was to identify logical and desirable open space additions to the city and recommend their purchase and development to the Park Board.

If the Park Board approved, the open space proposal would go to the City Council for final adoption.

The work began with the Garden of the Gods. A real estate developer had purchased the land between 30th Street and the entryway rocks to the Garden of the Gods. The ranch houses of the Pleasant Valley neighborhood were going to be built right up 31st Street and become the close-up eastern border of the Garden of the Gods.

The Open Space Committee made this a top priority, and the land was purchased undeveloped and added to the Gardens of the Gods Park. The committee identified other lands and recommended their purchase to further “buffer” the Garden of the Gods. Critics charged the committee was “buffering buffers,” but the City Council approved adding more lands at the edges of the park.

Nancy Avila had a large family and owned a Volkswagen “bus.” Ruskin and the members of the Open Space Committee would pile into her van, and she would drive them around to look at and walk and hike around prospective open space sites.

One of our most interesting assignments was plotting the route of the Monument Creek biker-hiker trail. When the project began, the trail only ran from Penrose Hospital down the eastern edge of the Creek in Monument Valley Park to the Bijou Street bridge.

In the best safari tradition, the Open Space Committee members put on long pants, hiking boots and hats and walked the overgrown edges of the Creek south from Bijou Street to Dorchester Park on South Nevada Avenue. Then a similar hike was taken north from Penrose Hospital along the Creek to Garden of the Gods Road.

The Open Space Committee recommended purchasing the land and right-of- way necessary to extend the trail that full distance.

This effort was greatly advanced north of W. Fillmore Street, when celebrated former New York Yankees baseball star and local hero Goose Gossage gave the money for Goose Gossage Park, which consists of a baseball diamond, tennis courts, a soccer field, a children’s playground, and an important section of the Monument Creek biker-hiker trail.

About this time a computer industry pioneer, Digital Equipment Company, bought a large piece of land southeast of what is now Centennial Boulevard and Vindicator Drive.

Most of the land became the site of the Digital Equipment factory building, but the Open Space Committee drove and hiked around and evaluated an adjoining parcel that became the beautiful rock-topped bluffs of what is now Ute Valley Park.

Then an elderly man appeared at the Parks Department and offered to give a large piece of land on the west side of Colorado Springs to the city for future development as a park.

The man met the Open Space Committee at the edge of the proposed park site and answered their questions as they hiked around and looked over the property.

It was clear the elderly man loved the land, which included rolling foothills covered with prairie grass and pine underbrush. The city turned it into a 97-acre natural park tucked into a shallow valley on the west side of town at 740 W. Caramillo Street.

It was named Sondermann Park for Fred Sondermann, a Colorado Springs City Councilman who recently had passed away.

Ruskin began organizing the William J. Palmer Parks Foundation, an organization dedicated to acquiring and preserving open space in its natural state throughout southern Colorado.

Ruskin used the city’s Open Space Committee as an ad hoc board of directors to get the William J. Palmer Parks Foundation rolling. Today, with its board of directors, the William J. Palmer Parks Foundation has been renamed the Palmer Land Conservancy. It has acquired considerable amounts of open space throughout southeastern Colorado, preserving it for the benefit of future generations.

The original Open Space Committee quietly faded away. The evaluation and acquisition of open space in Colorado Springs is better financed now since the adoption of the TOPS sales tax in 1997.

A Trails and Open Space Working Committee appointed by the Park Board now does this important work for our city.

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy write about Colorado and national politics.