Valmont Bike Park Awarded GOCO Grant!

Valmont Bike Park Awarded Great Outdoors Colorado Grant!
Additional funding of $200,000 from GOCO

We are thrilled to announce that Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) has awarded $200,000 to Boulder Parks & Recreation for construction at the Valmont Bike Park (VBP). Forty-five applications were submitted requesting more than $7 million - so VBP was among some pretty tough competition!

Boulder Mountainbike Alliance (BMA) played an integral role in the grant application, and our partnership with City of Boulder Parks & Recreation Department helped strengthen the proposal immensely. The community support for a bike park at Valmont, as well as more than $150,000 in individual donations from over 500 people and businesses also made our application competitive in GOCO's process.

This generous grant from GOCO will bring us much closer to the vision of a world-class bike park at Valmont City Park.  This grant will be used to supplement the City's construction budget to help build a cutting-edge bike park, and also help us seek additional funding from local foundations that hold GOCO's decisions in high regard.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Valmont Bike Park - your volunteer time and generous donations have truly paid off!

The PRO-ness of Valmont Bike Park

I just wanted to share with you a little sampling of what’s coming. What people need to understand is that this project is literally at the tip of the spear in many aspects…from the way we organized to push the concept in 2007 with the City of Boulder to the aggregation of the most professional resources possible to ensure this park is world class.

One such example is Tarras Landscape Innovation. This is the team which was selected by the Valmont Park Committee after they submitted their designs  held during an open competition and clearly blew the team away. Their contributions will be to look conceptually at the space we have allotted to us (45 acres) and look specifically at the ‘details’ of the Park itself to balance aesthetics with usability/sustainability all the while keeping the theme of cycling and cyclists at the core of their usable designs.

It’s worth a look at this brief snapshot they’ve provided.

Get excited!

Valmont Bike Park is a GO!!!!!!!!!!

Board OKs first phase of Valmont park construction

45-acre parcel to include bike park and disc-golf course

By Zak Brown (Contact)
Thursday, June 4, 2009

Photo by Marty Caivano

Jasmine Wong plays with her dog, Bella, on the south side of Valmont City Park on Thursday.

Photo by Marty Caivano

Trucks dump dirt at Valmont City Park on Thursday. The dirt will be used to shape the bike park planned for the spot just south of the Boulder County Jail.

 

BOULDER, Colo. — After more than a decade, a plot of land Boulder voters envisioned as a park with community-wide appeal took a major step toward reality Thursday night.

The site review for the first, $4.5 million phase of the Valmont City Park was approved unanimously by the Boulder Planning Board, clearing the way for a 45-acre section of the park that will include a bike park, trails, a dog park, a “tot lot” and a disc-golf course.

“When the idea for this park first started, it was meant to be an active park that could be a place for several different activities,” said Alice Guthrie, a superintendent with Boulder Parks and Recreation. “And we really think we’ve accomplished that with this plan.”

Voters approved a tax to pay for the park in 1998.

Construction is expected to start this summer or fall on the first of three phases of Valmont City Park, which in all covers a 132-acre parcel in northeast Boulder. The first phase is expected to be finished in about a year.

The bike park — which includes several different levels and types of terrain, such as dirt tracks and a cyclocross course — is already being designed with help from the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance, which has donated $70,000 to the project.

The bike park is “the first built anywhere, that we know of,” Guthrie said.

The development of Valmont City Park has been a long and sometimes-complicated process.

Between 1999 and 2003, the parks department tried to find private or nonprofit partners to help develop the park. But after those attempts fell through, staffers went back to the drawing board.

The Valmont City Park Advisory Group was formed in 2007, and it restarted the process of trying to formulate the park.

After the group submitted a concept plan, the Planning Board made some suggestions, such as trying to reduce auto congestion and increase vegetation, and the City Council approved the concept last summer.

The parks department found much of the money to pay for the first phase of construction from the sale of two parks properties, which netted a little more than $3 million.