Opinion: CU South – “The Road Not Taken”
Robert Frost’s famous poem The Road Not Taken ends with: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. For me, this captures the essence of the struggle around flood control for area around South Boulder Creek and what should happen on the CU South property. The “road” that the majority of the city council has committed to is almost certain to be looked back on as one taken with inadequate foresight. Climate change will likely cause significantly larger and more frequent floods. But using detention ponds (new to Boulder on this scale) means that a flood significantly bigger than designed for will overtop the dams and inundate the downstream areas anyway. And committing to allow CU to develop land that otherwise might be used to expand detention capacity means that improving protection levels above that currently planned will be limited, dif