Castle Pines Metropolitan District Road System
Castle Pines Metro District has certain responsibilities for the community’s road systems. Namely, repair and maintenance, street cleaning and snow removal. Basically, there are two types of roadways in Castle Pines–collector roads and local roads. Collector roads are, at a minimum, 24′ and 28′ wide asphalt roadways, and the local roads are the 20′ wide asphalt roadways. While the builders and developers in Castle Pines Village construct the roads throughout the Village, the District monitors the design and construction of these improvements.
The roads are dedicated to the Homes Association via subdivision plat. Once the roads have been completed and accepted by the District, it takes over the responsibility of repairing and maintaining these roadways.
The District maintains the street light system on the collector roads only, which does not include bollard lighting. The District will not perform any maintenance services on roads that are not built to the District’s standards. Happy Canyon Road is a county roadway maintained by the Douglas County Highway Department.
Historically, the District’s Board has adopted and revised roadway standards as the community characteristics have changed. The primary concern has always been safety within the community. The original roadway standards were adopted in 1981 anticipating 813 dwelling units in Castle Pines Village, with their related traffic volumes. At that time, the Homes Association had the responsibility of roads maintenance.
In 1985, Castle Pines Village (and the District’s) boundaries were expanded via property inclusion. This inclusion added approximately 2,000 dwelling units to the master plan. The District was delegated the roadway maintenance responsibility. The projected traffic volumes associated with 2,800 dwelling units would increased fourfold.
By 1993 it became obvious that, with the growing traffic volumes and the addition of school bus and mail delivery traffic throughout the Village (school bus and mail delivery traffic was formerly restricted to Happy Canyon Road), roadway safety was of great concern. Therefore, the District revised the roadway standards to increase the safety.
After the 1993 revisions, developers complained about environmental impacts and increased costs associated with compliance to the standards. In answer to these complaints, the District agreed to allow some “private-private” roads where District standards were not met, and the obligation of maintenance of the “private-private” roads fell to a sub-association of homeowners living on these roads. It wasn’t long before the District began hearing concerns from the homeowners on the “private-private” roads. Additionally, the County was concerned by the “private-private” roads. In the event no entity maintained these roadways, their design was also in violation of the County’s regulations, and the County would not step forward to accept responsibility.
In 1995, the District began a six-month cooperative work effort with the then-current developers to re-examine the roadway standards. After numerous meetings and workshops with Fidelity Castle Pines, Falcon Homes, Castlewood Fire Department and Douglas County, the standards were once again revised to include some compromises between the 1985 and 1993 standards. Prior to their adoption, the 1995 standards were submitted to all Village developers, the Homes Association, the County, Castle Pines Emergency Services and Castlewood Fire Department for review. Very few comments were received. The standards were adopted by the District Board and the Douglas County Commissioners. The District’s engineers believe that “the present standards represent the minimum necessary for safety for the Village.”