Durango Mayor Dick White expressed optimism Monday that the new Oxbow Park and Preserve could be annexed by the city before January.
Lack of law enforcement in the 44-acre preserve – north of town, outside city limits and beyond the jurisdiction of Durango police – was a repeated concern during a public hearing on developing a park management plan.
It is also home to a quiet and flat section of river popular with kayakers, paddle boarders and solitude seekers who want to observe wildlife.
Neighbors and river users said they did not want to lose the area to rowdy inner tubers and commercial rafters.
While a new launch or put-in area for nonmotorized boats has been proposed for Oxbow to relieve congestion at the 33rd Street and 29th Street put-ins, homeowner Tim Wolfe said he was worried the river would be flooded with more traffic.
“Whatever happens in Oxbow does not stay in Oxbow,” Wolfe said. “It’s not Las Vegas.”
He called Oxbow a “special area” where people go to get away from the “hordes” of river traffic.
Jean Bignall, a neighbor, was worried about losing her front yard to illegally parked cars. Neighbors questioned whether Animas View Drive, the access road for Oxbow, could handle the traffic of boat trailers.
To mitigate concerns, Cathy Metz, director of parks and recreation, has proposed requiring a permit for commercial outfitters who use the put-in, declaring the river from Oxbow to 33rd Street to be a quiet paddle-board area, and temporarily closing a 38-acre preserve section for a wildlife survey.
There is ongoing debate about whether to exclude dogs from the park, other than along a future extension of the Animas River Trail, because of how dogs scare wildlife.
The draft plan will be reviewed again at another meeting by the city’s boards for Parks and Recreation and Natural Lands.
Kayaker Bill Karls explained why commercial river guides and rafters should have access to Oxbow.
“We need commercial companies to (put in there) because not everybody owns a raft, not everybody has a canoe or the skill to do it,” Karls said. “To show them that section of river is to give them an appreciation of the river that could be important down the road.
“You’re not just floating down the river, you’re educating people about the river, conservation,” Karls said.
He thinks there is inconsistency in people who arguing for wildlife preservation while owning a house in the country.
“To me, it sounds a little weird,” Karls said. “When people build a big house up there on the river, right in the middle of the section that they want to observe wildlife, and then they don’t want to share that with other people. If it’s that important not to disturb the wildlife up there, then (they) should have never built up there. The whole thing should have been a wildlife corridor.”
jhaug@durangoherald.com
