The Master Plan
If we could improve this place, what would we actually do?
Not what can we afford. Not what will the county allow. Just the design question, asked honestly and in public: what could Niwot be?
We did not write this plan, and we are not adopting it. We are showing it to you because it is what this community said when somebody asked.
Fletemeyer & Lee Associates
The architecture and planning firm on Second Avenue — not a consultancy flown in from somewhere else. Principals Dave Lee and Chad Fletemeyer led the work.
The Niwot Local Improvement District Advisory Committee commissioned it: a nine-member volunteer board that advises the Boulder County Commissioners on spending in the Niwot business district.
It was built out of meetings
The work ran through 2024 and into 2025, drawing on community input and a review of Niwot’s earlier planning efforts. The draft was presented at The Wheel House on December 2, 2024.
The Left Hand Valley Courier counted roughly sixty people in the room, including County Commissioner Claire Levy.
Delivered April 2025. Adopted by the LID Advisory Committee that May. Thirty-one drawings, looking twenty to thirty years out.
Only one of them has teeth
Nobody argues with “more gathering space.”
When Fletemeyer & Lee drew a sundial, a bocce court, and a particular arrangement of benches onto the Cottonwood corner, they were not predicting that Niwot will build a sundial.
Plenty of people have an opinion about a bocce court.
The specificity is a tool. It turns an unarguable abstraction into something concrete enough to react to — which is how you get a community to say what it actually wants.
Read it as a question
Not this is what goes there.
Something like this could go there — does that appeal to you?
Nobody expects a plan like this to be executed as a package, in order, or in full. It succeeds if, a decade on, a few of its ideas got built by whoever had the money and the opening at the time — and the rest still reads as a direction worth going.
Nothing in this plan is funded or scheduled by any Niwot body
Not one drawing has a budget, a construction year, or an entity responsible for delivering it.
The one element with real momentum — the underpass at the Diagonal — is a Boulder County project. Niwot has advocated for it for years. Niwot cannot decide it, fund it, or schedule it.
That is not a complaint about the county. It is a description of the structure.
They do opposite things
Niwot Community Service Area
- Adopted 1988, carried forward since
- Governs what may be built here
- Written by the county
- Niwot cannot amend a word of it
- Adopted 2025 by an advisory board
- Governs nothing at all
- Written by Niwot, for Niwot
- A year of meetings behind it
Every plan like this is addressed to a town
A master plan assumes there is somebody on the other end to pick it up — to fund part of it, phase it, argue about it, put it out to bid, or set it aside.
Niwot commissioned a plan without having the thing it is addressed to.
The LID Advisory Committee can recommend. The County Commissioners decide. That is not a failure of the LID — it is the design of the LID.
Incorporation would not build the village green
Nobody should tell you it would, and we won’t. No one can promise you a sundial or a splash park.
What it changes is who decides.
An elected board, accountable to the people who live here, free to take this plan up as a starting point — fund part of it, revise it, or set it aside. Today there is nobody to make that call.
What becomes of the LID is a question for the county and the lawyers — likely absorbed, but not a promise we’re making.
Sixty people gave up an evening in December to say what they wanted this place to be. Thirty-one drawings came out of it. The only thing missing is somebody with the standing to answer them.
Whatever Niwot decides to build, it will decide together — or it will keep waiting for somebody else to decide for us.