Colorado Springs is a pro-growth city. Real estate developers are the biggest donors to election campaigns for local public office. A proposed 27-story apartment building, taller than any other building downtown, will very likely be built in the near future.

But there are some city volunteer homeowner associations that are planning to fight these plans for tall buildings in Colorado Springs.

These volunteer neighborhood associations, representing close to 100,000 or so city dwellers, are currently debating how best to pursue setting height limits of 250 feet or so on high-rise buildings in Colorado Springs.

That 250-foot limit is about the height of what is currently the highest building in downtown Colorado Springs — the Wells Fargo Bank building.

The homeowners’ associations have tried in vain to get the City Council to pass a law setting a firm building height limit.

The purpose of such a limit would be to preserve the beautiful views of Pikes Peak and other Front Range mountains from the city. Colorado Springs is famous for its Mountain View.

The most recent rebuff to the neighborhood associations came at last Tuesday’s City Council meeting, when representatives of the various associations presented arguments for limiting building heights.

City Council members listened politely but made no comments and then moved on with a crowded agenda without acting on limiting building heights.

The various neighborhood associations are weighing three possible actions to save the view of the mountain panorama to the west of the city.

The first action would be to gather the signatures of registered voters in Colorado Springs to put the issue on the ballot at the time of the April 2025 municipal elections.

If the ballot issue was adopted by the voters, it would place building height limits in the City Charter where they could only be changed by a second vote of the people and not by sole action of the City Council.

Taking this initial path would require raising money to pay for a citywide election campaign. Most of the work of gathering signatures could be done by volunteers who support building height limits.

A second way to limit building heights would be to press for City Council to put in height limits when it updates the “form-based code” that covers the downtown central sector. Such an update of the downtown “form-based code” is scheduled soon.

A third technique would be to include building height limits in a planned update of the Downtown Master Plan.

The Downtown Master Plan holds that the “stakeholders” should participate in downtown planning, so selling the major downtown stakeholders on the merits of limiting building heights would be needed to implement this third plan.

Also discussed was the possibility of linking a vote on building height limits at the time of the municipal election in April with another popular issue.

That issue would be setting donation limits on campaign contributions to City Council candidates. That reform would come along with “auto recusal,” where elected City Council members would eliminate themselves from voting on issues that benefit a council member’s major campaign contributors.

Citizen signatures putting each of these reform issues — height limits and campaign contribution limits — on the April 2025 municipal ballot could be gathered at the same time, thus greatly reducing the workload for putting both issues on the April ballot.

One of the groups considering limits on building heights in Colorado Springs was the Historic Neighborhoods Partnership (HNP), a coalition of volunteer neighborhood associations located mainly in the downtown region.

Meeting the next day after last Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the HNP Board of Directors voted unanimously to pursue setting building height limits.

Other groups pondering action on this issue were Westside Watch, a group lobbying on issues on Colorado Springs’ west side, and Integrity Matters, a similar civic lobbying group.

Opponents of setting building height limits in Colorado Springs argue that most prosperous big cities have a cluster of tall buildings characterizing their downtown area.

It is also argued that downtown buildings are almost always privately owned, and the owners should be allowed to build their buildings as high as engineering and financing will allow.

Pro-growth advocates note that Colorado Springs is in the process of becoming not only a major military and space community, but also a home of many aerospace and quantum computing businesses. The city needs diverse housing, and downtown has become a boom location. Tall buildings downtown make sense for a city on the move.

This debate is likely to heat up over the next several months. And this is a debate that many similar cities have experienced. Stay tuned.