The fate of Telluride’s beloved Valley Floor first appeared as a Telluride Watch top ten local news story of the year at the end of 1998, when it was the number one story.

“Local Governments, Valley Floor Owner in a Strained Courtship Over Presumed Pending Development,” the headline in our edition dated January 1, 1999, read.

In the intervening years, the Valley Floor appeared as a top news story of the year almost every year – 1999, a quiet year on the Valley Floor front, was the exception – and was the top story again in 2004, 2006 and last year.

This year, the Valley Floor makes what is very likely its last appearance as the number one local news story of the year. At an admittedly high price, the Town of Telluride finally succeeded in 2008 in its epic battle with a wealthy landowner to acquire the 572 acres of the property south of the Hwy. 145 Spur by means of condemnation. The town concluded its legal action to condemn and was able to deliver the $50 million that a Delta jury determined the property was worth. The property owner, the San Miguel Valley Corp., appealed the town’s right to condemn to the Colorado Supreme Court and this year, in June, the court ruled that the town did in fact have the ability to condemn the property, sealing the victory.

The long War for the Floor dates back to 1998 and 1999, when the SMVC decided not to seek development approvals for its property from the Town of Telluride. Instead, in 2000, SMVC representatives met with the Mountain Village Town Council to discuss the possibility of annexing its property to that town. The Telluride Town Council responded in April 2001 by passing a resolution that launched the town’s effort to acquire the bulk of the 860-acre property by exercising its powers of eminent domain.

In January 2004, following a rejection by SMVC of the town’s “good faith offer” to acquire the property for $19.5 million, the town council made the fateful step of voting to file a condemnation suit in district court. SMVC responded by successfully lobbying the Colorado General Assembly to enact an amendment to a bill governing eminent domain, specifically to prohibit Telluride from condemning the Valley Floor.

It was that law, which became known as the Telluride Amendment, that the Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional this year.

But before that ruling, with the possibility that the Telluride Amendment would stand, the Telluride Town Council and SMVC in December 2005 announced that they had negotiated a possible settlement whereby 47 acres of the Valley Floor on the south side of the highway would be developed (up to 22 single-family homes) in exchange for the preservation of the remaining 513 acres on the south side through conservation easements. Telluride voters decisively rejected the compromise, however, in 2006, and for good measure, in a second election, voted by approximately the same 60-40 percent margin to approve additional debt to go toward the acquisition, raising the town’s readily available cash for the purchase to approximately $25 million.

Thus, in effect, voters assumed two risks, one that the Telluride Amendment would in the end trump the condemnation effort and the second that the cost as determined through the condemnation process would exceed the town’s ability to pay. In either case, the town could have ended up with nothing.

But, as is obvious in hindsight, it didn’t play out that way.

The town suffered a defeat in February 2007, when the Delta jury ruled that the property was worth $50 million, or twice what the town’s appraiser had argued in court. The town did not appeal. Instead, a private organization called the Valley Floor Preservation Partners got to work and successfully raised $24.5 million in private donations, enabling the town to deliver a $50 million check to the district court by the deadline in May 2007. Thus, one of the two ways that the town could have lost the Valley Floor was averted.

The second risk was impossible to handicap because the legal arguments before the Colorado Supreme Court as to whether the Telluride Amendment should be upheld or overturned as unconstitutional were so complex. The court’s June 2008 ruling, by a 6-1 vote, that a home rule municipality has a very broad constitutional right of eminent domain that cannot be abridged by a legislative act, set off a long-awaited local celebration.

Over the last decade of effort by the Town of Telluride to preserve its entrance, there have been almost too many political and financial impacts to tally. There have been hard-fought elections; candidates for mayor and council have been elected and defeated over how they said they would deal with the Valley Floor; other issues have been deferred; and the town has incurred debt into the future that may seem more challenging to support today than it did before the economy soured.

And yet, whatever the cost, the region’s reward is that the Valley Floor now constitutes a trust that forever gives definition to what Telluride is and what Telluride values.

The Valley Floor will continue to make news as the town devises a restoration and management plan for it. Groundwork for that planning in the form of an environmental assessment took place this year. There will likely be some vintage Telluride battles over what’s appropriate out there. The SMVC still owns acreage north of the Hwy. 145 Spur and at Society Turn, whose future is not yet decided, and that may prove controversial, too.

But the Valley Floor per se has almost certainly ended its long reign as the source of the region’s biggest ongoing controversy and a perennial major news story. Forever free of the threat of development, may the land itself, as its champions long envisioned, now repose free of headlines, too, in peace and quiet.