Pikeview Quarry had been a growing scar on the mountains overlooking Colorado Springs for more than a century. Now the land is growing trees and will help to expand the city’s portfolio of parks and open spaces.

The City Council voted 8-0 Tuesday morning to accept a donation of 100 acres of quarry land into the city limits. The donation wraps up a six-year process of moving the former limestone and gravel mine under city control and starts the long-term process of determining what types of activity the public wants to see at the site.

Earlier this year, the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety gave its final approval of the reclamation work that the Castle Concrete Co., which owns the quarry, had completed. Parks staff said that a third-party report the city commissioned from Granite Engineering Group also found the quarry was ready for reuse.

Councilmember Nancy Henjum said that around 50 years ago, her fifth-grade class wrote letters to the state legislature raising concerns about the environmental damage of mining the mountain. Henjum hoped the new chapter of the land’s life would take an approach that didn’t rely on commodifying the land.

“I want to believe that our parks department approaches their work on our land with that sense of reciprocity. Take what you need, ask permission, don’t take the last thing, be in relationship with the land,” Henjum said.

Pikeview Quarry is on the northwest side of Colorado Springs adjacent to Blodgett Open Space. Only 10 of the donated 100 acres are currently within the city limits.

David Deitemeyer, senior administrator for the Trails, Open Space and Parks program, said the city would pursue a formal annexation and rezone next to convert the property to parkland. Until then, the land will be managed by the Parks Department with no public access.

Ronald Gidwitz is the chairman of Riverbend Institutes, the parent company of Castle Concrete, which has owned the quarry since the 1970s. Gidwitz said that mining work ended after the site experienced multiple landslides between 2008 and 2018, which made the quarry too risky and expensive for continued use.

“What do you do when a property has outlived its purpose? We decided that the land provided a unique opportunity for public service by providing the parcel to Colorado Springs,” Gidwitz said.

In 2020, Colorado Springs and Castle Concrete reached an agreement of how that transfer would look. The city paid the company $9 million to acquire two other large properties, 148 acres of frontage property between Pikeview and Blodgett Open Space, and 165 acres of Black Canyon Quarry. The city also took on the reclamation work for Black Canyon Quarry.

In return, the company would take the lead on the harder reclamation process at Pikeview Quarry and donate the land to the city once it was deemed suitably safe.

Castle Concrete said it has moved more than 3 million cubic acres of material to flatten the quarry and help stabilize the land. A large portion of the dirt came from the adjacent land and was relocated through a fill-dirt agreement. The company also planted more than 30,000 trees and several acres of grass seeds along the slope.

Deitemeyer said the cost to maintain the property would be limited for the next few years, with a focus on monitoring the ground to make sure it remained stable. Eventually, the city would gather public input to develop a master plan for the future of the site.

“The spectrum of what that is could be a wide range, everywhere from a wildlife area for bighorn sheep to a recreational hub … related to a bike park. Where it falls on that spectrum, we need to have a public process to determine it,” Deitemeyer said.

The vote came on a quick timeline, as the City Council saw its first formal presentation about the donation Monday morning and approved the resolution Tuesday.

City staff said the official transfer of the land will be finalized by May 15. In the longer term, the city has no timeline for when the master plan process or any other resolutions about the land would come up. Councilmembers including Brandy Williams noted that the city was dealing with a large backlog of deferred park projects and limited funding.

“The community should be aware that it may be a while before we bring it completely to fruition, because there are parks where people currently live that are in need of maintenance,” Williams said.

City staff said that a section of the Pikeview frontage property that was purchased years earlier will open new trails to the public in the coming weeks.