Niwot Road Crew: Ensuring Niwot's traditions endure despite barriers

The Niwot Road Crew has been managing the road closures for Niwot’s many annual parades and events since 2012, spending untold hours guaranteeing the safety of both pedestrians and drivers.

Many people don’t realize how much behind-the-scenes labor goes into the orchestration of a parade such as the one that passes through Niwot’s Second Avenue every year on the Fourth of July.

Not only are volunteers needed to plan the event, create floats, set out announcements and monitor the event, but a lengthy procedure must be properly adhered to as stipulated by Boulder County Event Planning regulations. In 2012, the county published a nearly 150-page event manual detailing the required regulations for road-closure traffic plans, which all events must now comply with.

After paying $3,800 for a highway technology company to create a traffic plan and handle road closure signs for the final Niwot Nostalgia Days, the Niwot Community Association (NCA) decided that this type of spending was in no way sustainable. NCA President Dick Piland proposed the idea that Niwot buy its own signs and get several traffic plans approved, thereby following Boulder County’s regulations without having to rent signs and without having to redesign the parade route for each event.

In 2012, after getting a traffic plan approved, Piland approached the NCA, Niwot Business Association, Niwot High School student body, Local Improvement District, Niwot Rotary, Niwot Grange and Niwot Cultural Arts Association with his plan. With the help of these and other various organizations, the NCA was able to purchase all the required signage for $6,000.

Today, rather than pay an exorbitant amount per event, all organizations holding events in Niwot are able to borrow the town’s own set of road closure signs, providing the organization either uses one of the NCA’s four approved traffic plans or gets approval for their own plan.

“There are a number of obstacles that you must negotiate in order to comply with Boulder County’s regulations,” Piland said of the event planning process. Organizations must still fill out an application and apply for insurance 60 days before their event, but using the NCA’s traffic signs and barricades expedites the process considerably.

The one drawback to Niwot managing its own traffic plans is that all events involving a road closure require a set of loyal volunteers to manage the traffic signs.

The Niwot Road Crew, made up of a small but committed group of community members as well as the occasional enthusiastic child, fulfills this need. The crew arrives (rain or shine) several hours before the start of any event and remains long after it ends. Piland, Dave Limbach, Johnny Barrett, Jim Jones, Tom Sesnic, Aidan Sesnic, Bob Zimmerman and Bob Breyer are the group’s core members.

Using this year’s Fourth of July Parade as an example, crew leader Limbach detailed the group’s elaborate parade strategy which involved showing up two and a half hours before the start of the parade, unpacking all the necessary signs from the Left Hand Grange #9 garage, loading up a trailer, assigning roles, meeting with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, barricading the road, setting out the signs and finally taking everything back down and packing it away once the people milling about in the street begin to disperse following the event.

An unrelated accident at Niwot Road and the Diagonal Highway just as the parade ended kept the crew in place longer than expected so that traffic could be re-routed as emergency crews had to extricate a driver from one of the vehicles.

“It has been getting more fluid and more crazy at the same time,” Limbach said. “We still make our fair share of mistakes, but we’re getting it down to a science.”

The assurance that his time and effort are making a difference in the Niwot community is more than enough incentive for Limbach to continue devoting countless hours of his time to the cause.

“It’s a labor of necessity,” Limbach said simply. “If nobody does [the road crew], these events aren’t going to happen. For us, its been very rewarding to know that the Niwot High School Homecoming Parade, the Holiday Parade and all Niwot’s many time-honored traditions carry on despite Boulder County’s best efforts to make it difficult. To allow these things to go on is a reward in and of itself.”

As president of the NCA, Piland is appreciative of the many volunteers in Niwot who both make up the NCA and who make the NCA’s sponsored events possible.

“Volunteerism is still alive in Niwot,” Piland stated. “This is just another example of how the city operates from volunteerism. [Since] we’re not incorporated, if we want to do something we have to do it with volunteers and fortunately we’ve got a lot of great volunteers.”

As a team whose excellence depends on its ability to remain behind the scenes, the Niwot Road Crew tends to be underappreciated. Limbach, however, is grateful for all the positive feedback that he has received from the community.

“What’s really nice is when parade-goers come up to the people wearing the orange vests and ask questions or say ‘thank you,’” Limbach said. “I think that they get it, that there are people who are working for them to make these things happen and keep Niwot the fun place that it is.”