Beyond the bedrooms: after years of relying on home construction, Erie aims to woo commercial development.

• Author: Lewis, David

LOOK at the growth of the town of Erie and the dilemma in which it might find itself, and you could say the town already has taken baby steps down the slippery slope to municipal ruin.

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Look at growth in Erie another way, and the town is on the glide path to success, a path smoothed by the town's construction of a new library and a recreation center.

Some say that, in view of Erie's losing hand in local annexation wars, efforts to woo commercial developers are too little too late. Erie will become a kind of downscale Aspen, with service and construction workers forced to commute into Erie while upscale residents commute to work in Boulder or Denver.

"It's certainly not sustainable to be so heavily reliant on construction to pay the bills. That obviously can't continue forever," says Brendan Ruiz, president of Sustainable Erie Inc., a nonprofit interest group.

Officials insist residential development fees will bridge the gap until the happy day arrives when Erie has enough sales tax revenue to offset declining residential construction.

Not yet visible, that happy day remains real, officials say.

"Erie is transitioning from a bedroom community to a full-service community with commercial amenities that our citizens want to have closer to home so they don't have to leave Erie," says Fred Diehl, assistant to the town administrator.

Some of the same numbers underlie both arguments. Erie grew 96 percent between 2000 and 2005, the Census Bureau says. The fastest-growing town in Boulder County, Erie's population growth outpaced all of Colorado but for Frederick (next door); Firestone, just north of Frederick; and Severance, north of Windsor.

Town officials estimate Erie's population now is about 16,000, up from 6,291 in 2000. Only two years before, the town finally got around to paving its original residential dirt side streets for the first time.

Erie's budget estimates 2007 tap/impact fees will have plunged by half in just two years, to $13.1 million in 2007, from $17.2 million in 2006 and $26 million in 2005. That $26 million represented almost 55 percent of all of Erie's revenues, while this year's projected $13.1 million in tap/impact fees would add up to just 26 percent of this year's $50.4 million in revenue.

Turn those numbers into a graph and the trend-line begins to make former Erie Mayor Vic Smith look prophetic. "Erie's been living on impact fees and building fees," Smith told High Country News in 2003. "We're going...