The CMU football team was fed plenty of pizza before the March 4 City Council meeting, after which they all duly testified in favor of the lease to give exclusive use of the publicly-owned Lincoln Park Barn to the CMU football team for the next 25 years. (Photo: JG, Facebook)At the Grand Junction City Council meeting last Wednesday, March 4, (video) Council members voted 5-1 in favor of the City signing a lease handing Colorado Mesa University (CMU) exclusive use of the Lincoln Park Barn. The lone vote cast against signing the lease was At-Large City Council member Scott Bielfuss. Council member Robert Ballard (District E) was absent.
The Barn, built in 1923, has always been a public building. Over the last 100 years it been used for community events like dances, conventions, concerts, parties, yoga and dance classes, wrestling matches, weddings, anniversary celebrations and other events.
But no more.
The 25-year lease hands exclusive use of the Barn to CMU’s football team, and bans the public from the building.
Public comments against the City entering into the lease came from Lincoln Park neighborhood residents and others who regularly attend Yoga classes at the barn and value the barn for its proximity to their homes and the center of the City. Members of the Historical Society and many City residents who cherish the barn and its history and want to preserve public access to it also gave public comments against the lease. One City resident, Robert Traylor, whose career was in public finance, warned City Council of the many drawbacks the lease contains for City residents.
City residents who opposed the lease spoke with passion, from the heart and were armed with facts, while most of the opposition came from the CMU football team, whose members were fed pizza before the meeting. Football players stepped to the microphone and read rote, bland, repetitive-sounding statements from their phones, giving the feeling that in addition to pizza, they had been fed talking points before the meeting.
This is the second incident of the City shutting taxpayers out of publicly-owned properties in the last 2 1/2 years.
On September 12, 2023, the City barricaded the public out of Whitman Park downtown, including all the public sidewalks surrounding the park. The barricades remain in place even now, 2 1/2 years later. The park sits completely unused, even though City residents still pay taxes to maintain it and have a general inherent right to access it. At the time they fenced it off, the City promised to “reimagine” use of the park and build improvements, but so far no plan has materialized, there is no construction budget for the park in 2026 and City Council has given no end point to the closure. The City also said the park is available for events with reservations, but no events have been held there, and the rate to reserve it isn’t posted. There is no law preventing municipalities in the state from shutting city residents out of their own publicly-owned spaces on an unending basis.
Now that Council has done this twice successfully, will City residents be forced to give up access to even more of their publicly-owned spaces in the future?
We will all be watching to see if it happens again, especially as CMU continues its ongoing expansion into surrounding neighborhoods and its ever-growing influence over the Grand Junction City Council.
I was so sad to hear of this vote. The Lincoln Park Barn is a very historic building, and giving it over to a (male only) sports team smacks of payola somewhere. It’s too bad the LP Barn didn’t have official protection, but I’m unsure if that would even stop this juggernaut of “give it to us” thinking.
I was informed last week that the first meeting of livestock producers (both cattle and sheep) with Congressman Taylor was held there in the 1940s. I’m checking on the details.
I have never been impressed by the relationship of CMU to the community. The salary structure for highly educated staff is pretty pathetic. Why would you go to school and take out loans just to end up with a position that pays the same as a manager of Pizza Hut?
This undercuts the whole higher ed message. One has to wonder about the quality of education with salaries more like a trade school. The top administrator may consider a lower salary in line with his staff.
Robert Traylor made some very worthwhile points in his article but perhaps it was just too late to digest. Minds were made up.
I assumed that this discussion with the public would allow for more time and public deliberation. It just seems that select members on the Council have far too cozy a relationship with the CMU Administrator. The demonstration of football players showing up for CMU reminds me of recent Trump administration tactics showing off athletes to clean his spoiled image and distract. I don’t know of any political affiliations but this all feels quite Trumpian by any standards!
Here’s some info on politics for you diane. https://www.denverpost.com/2006/11/08/perfect-storm-of-goofs-damaged-beauprezs-run/
I’m an alum and love my university but the administration has been a kingdom for a only few.
Does TABOR work the other way?
Before you take a public asset and give it away, do the taxpayers need to vote on it?
I don’t know about other assets, but the public has to consent by vote before the city can sell a park.
What a sad way to administer a city! How does this align with being a “good Neighbor”?. CMU is using a similar manner of treating the community as it treats its staff and faculty. In the latter there is no means of questioning a supervisor’s decision. Faculty have no voice in the running of the university. The faculty senate is not able to “legislate” against what ever the administration decides. It functions at the pleasure of the president. The evaluations of faculty are done based on whether the students “like you” rather than how demanding you are as an instructor. Much less weight is placed on research than there is on “teaching”. So “the customer is always right”, the customer being the students. Imagine if any other academic organization were run that way?
And community members are not an element in the equation of the Grand Junction city council. What backroom deal making occurred for this to go down the way it did?
Now is not the time to wonder about whether government is for the people and by the people. There’s no wondering here; it was foreordained…rubber stamped. CMU being a good neighbor is as like the Federal government honoring the Constitution. Money, like pizzas, changes hands in situations like this. Depose the City Council under oath.
Good ole boys continuing what they do damn the rest of us.