Nearly 20 years of land and fees from Colorado Springs’ park land dedication ordinance have gone into preparing Grey Hawk Park to open by the end of 2025.

Colorado Springs has used the ordinance since the 1970s to add new park property. The ordinance requires developers to either set aside an amount of land for outdoor uses as part of their addition or pay the city fees that the Parks, Recreation & Cultural Services Department can use for future projects.

City Parks development manager Lonna Thelan said that which route a project takes usually depends on the size of the development, with large annexations generally preferring to set up the land outright.

“We can plan with them for the best master plan location for a neighborhood park or community park, but when you’re looking at 5 acres and 10 single-family homes, that is a much different application of the PLDO. That is where fees often come into play,” Thelan said.

The ordinance requires that the land dedications provide 5.5 acres of neighborhood or community parks per 1,000 residents. The rate was reduced by the City Council from 7.5 acres in 2021, in a move that angered many outdoors advocates who said it undercut the city’s ability to preserve and add more parks.

Caroline Miller, administrator for the park land dedication program, said Colorado Springs had added 17 acres of land through the ordinance in 2024 and another 15 acres this year. On the fees side, the city collects an average of around $2.6 million per year from developments.

Another aspect of the City Council’s 2021 vote revising the parks ordinance changed how the funds are distributed within the parks department. In addition to a main pool for community parks, the city established eight smaller funds that each represent a different area of the city. The neighborhood park funds receive money based on the fees paid by developments in their section of the city.

As of May, the largest balance for a neighborhood fund was $1.35 million and the smallest had less than $75,000.

“Those buckets fill somewhat quicky but when you make a payment, that depletes that bucket,” Miller said.

Grey Hawk Park was dedicated through the ordinance in 2006 as part of the development of the north end of Colorado Springs. The land stood as an open field for nearly two decades as the city worked through the backlog of other park projects that needed funding.

Last year, the developers of the nearby Spectrum Loop Apartments agreed to pay $166,000 in dedication fees specifically for Grey Hawk Park and provided a $90,000 donation to push the project up to the $2.47 million needed to complete it. The park has been under construction since May to install the playground and other amenities and Thelan said should open by the end of the year.

Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates Director Cory Sutela was one of the outdoors supporters who opposed the ordinance changes back in 2021. While his nonprofit’s focus is more on Colorado Springs’ open spaces, Sutela said he remained concerned that the ordinance did not bring in enough money to support the city’s park system.

“The PLDO has the ability to save and preserve land for parks, but not enough of a mechanism to construct and operate those parks. So we get land that has been dedicated for years with no way to develop them,” Sutela said.

Sutela also said it seemed impossible to increase the acreage per 1,000 residents back up now that the city lowered the number.

The third option allowed by the ordinance is alternative compliance in cases when the developer can support a different type of project. Miller said the most common alternative was for metro districts that built and maintained their own park instead of having it join the city system. Green space that is not fully public but comes online faster than the city parks funding would normally allow.

“The ordinance requires that they provide the land. They can go above and beyond to build the parks and either give it to the city or maintain it long term with a metro district,” Thelan said.

The other major addition through the ordinance this year was an expansion of Cumbre Vista Park in the northeast section of the city. In June, the City Council approved spending $794,000 from the park land fund to purchase the area south of the current park from Academy School District 20.

The purchase roughly doubles the size of Cumbre Vista but Thelan said it was at the bottom of the list for neighborhood parks they’d like to build.