June 29th, 2008

Landowners in Limbo

From the Longmont Times-Call

LONGMONT — Butch Vernon isn’t going anywhere. Not anytime soon. Not that he knows of.

He opened his new Budget Home Center store at 780 Boston Ave. in May 1999. Five years later, voters approved the Regional Transportation District’s massive commuter rail project, FasTracks.

RTD’s conceptual map for the Longmont station now shows Vernon’s 10 acres as a parking lot. But Vernon hasn’t heard anything from RTD, he said Wednesday.

“We don’t know,” he said of RTD’s plans. “It’s kind of up in the air.”

Vernon knows that, whatever RTD’s plans, he doesn’t plan to close the business. He and his wife, Bev, opened Budget Home Center in Longmont in 1984. They bought their land on Boston Avenue in 1998 and opened the new store the next year.

If RTD needs his land, Vernon wants to make sure it doesn’t destroy his livelihood.

“If they have to have this property, they have to either find us another place to go or compensate us so we can,” he said. “That’s a lot of business interruption and time and effort, and things cost a lot more now than when we built this.”

Read the full story here.