Since last fall, Boulder County has gone months without holding meetings of its primary forum for public input on parks and open space decisions, raising concerns among some former advisory board members about transparency.
The Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee (POSAC), a community board that advises county commissioners and serves as a key venue for public comment, held no meetings from November until its annual retreat on April 17, which does not include an opportunity for public comment. The next meeting open to public comment is scheduled for May 28.
The gap came during a period of heightened public interest, as the county paused, resumed and paused again a controversial herbicide spraying plan at Red Hill, and began hiring a new Parks and Open Space director.
Read: Boulder County pauses Red Hill drone herbicide spraying again amid backlash
For decades, POSAC has helped shape how Boulder County manages its open space, giving residents a formal way to influence decisions about public land.
But for several months, that forum was not convened. Some former members said the absence of meetings limited opportunities for public input. POSAC is supposed to meet monthly, though meetings can be canceled if there are no agenda items.
The gap coincided with county commissioners’ review of the first year of a new weed management plan, a process that would typically be reviewed by the advisory board and include public input.
That plan called for spraying Red Hill with herbicide during the 2025 season. Commissioners delayed a decision, saying they needed more information, and the spraying window passed. The latest report again recommends spraying, this time during the 2026 season, which begins in December.
When commissioners reviewed the new report in February, they said they plan to revisit the issue before any spraying occurs.
The report did not go before POSAC this year, according to Tony Lewis, who served on the committee from 2020 to March 2026.
“It should’ve come to POSAC first,” Lewis said. “That’s why POSAC exists in part — not only to review these important plans and strategies, but to solicit public input on them.”
Lewis said the lack of meetings made it harder for residents to raise concerns.
“How can you affect any policy or get any concern addressed? Other than sending an email to Parks and Open Space, which is probably not going to get you very far.”
Former POSAC member Derek Turner, a water resources attorney with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, said the cancellations were unusual.
“It’s a little bit of a shock to see that they just simply canceled all of these meetings,” he said. “There was essentially a quarter of the year where all of these meetings were just canceled.”
County staff said meetings were canceled because there were no agenda items and staff capacity was limited. The county’s Parks and Open Space director, Therese Glowacki, retired last fall, as did its POSAC liaison and 12 other people across the department, according to staff emails. Agenda items are set by county staff.
Emails obtained by Boulder Reporting Lab indicate that interim director of Parks and Open Space Heidi Wagner discussed canceling “POSAC meetings for a while” in October, in light of Glowacki’s retirement. A county hiring freeze added to the staffing strain, according to staff emails.
“I would support that 100%!” Natalie Springett, a deputy to the county commissioners, wrote in a Feb. 12 email about canceling POSAC meetings until April. “Unless there is a burning advisory item that needs to come to the BOCC, but I don’t see that we are waiting on anything from POSAC.”
Lewis did not dispute limited staff capacity but questioned the idea that there were no agenda items. “There’s always important issues to talk about,” he said.
A long-standing advisory role
POSAC was established in 1967 and helped shape Boulder County’s first open space plan, laying the groundwork for one of the nation’s most prominent open space programs.
Summer Alameel, a spokesperson for Parks & Open Space, said POSAC’s role is to provide nonbinding strategic advice and recommendations to the county commissioners. She said staff bring items to the board only when a recommendation is needed. In this case, she said, there were “no agenda items requiring a recommendation to the Board of County Commissioners.”
Turner said that, in practice, POSAC was at times asked to weigh in without the information needed to do so fully.
During a November 2025 POSAC meeting, member Joan Lutz asked whether the board could review the terms of a conservation easement before making a recommendation. Staff said no.
“We are giving you an outline of what’s in those documents, but they are long, legal agreements. It is not your job to read through them and parse them,” said Janis Whisman, a county real estate division manager. “We don’t even have the Board of County Commissioners review these documents, because that’s our job.”
Whisman said the approach has been in place for decades because the terms are part of confidential negotiations.
“It’s so hard to know what we’re going on,” Lutz responded at the meeting.
Turner also said members were unable to obtain year-to-date financial reports before weighing in on real estate decisions.
County officials did not respond to a question about whether members are entitled to review year-to-date financial reports. County spokesperson Gloria Handyside said she had nothing to add to Whisman’s comments on the issue of easement terms.
Both Turner and Lewis said they had limited direct communication with county commissioners during their time on the board. The only direct outreach they recall was a letter seen by Boulder Reporting Lab instructing them not to draft a proposal on workforce housing on agricultural land leased by the county, instead requesting they act as a stakeholder in Boulder County Housing Authority’s efforts to address the housing shortage.
“As members of POSAC, the focus on your committee should remain on Boulder County Parks & Open Space plans, programs, and actions specifically,” commissioners wrote in the May 2024 letter.
“There were many times on POSAC where I wondered what our role was,” Turner said.
“[Were we] accepting public comments, carefully considering the spending of public dollars, setting the priorities,” he added, “or were we hearing informational presentations about the status of rare wildflowers found this summer and how are the tadpoles and the salamanders doing?”
