One door opens and another one slams - in jail

Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, April 14, 2006

BOULDER - Megan Forbes cooled her heels in jail for a few hours Sunday, long enough for her to rue installing the wrong kind of garage door behind her historic home and then failing to answer a summons on the municipal violation.

The head of Boulder's Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board is furious that Forbes was hauled to jail for an infraction so minor, but Forbes herself is taking it in stride.

"It's a done deal," Forbes, a dietitian, said Thursday. "I'd rather just leave it alone."

On Wednesday, she told the Daily Camera, "It was a lesson learned, for sure. The law's the law and you have to make sure you're doing everything right."

But Tim Plass, chief of the landmarks preservation board, said he "was absolutely shocked" by the arrest.

"For someone like Meg to get hauled off on a Sunday morning as she is going to church is unacceptable," he said.

"It's a lack of communication between various parts of the city government. It could have been averted."

City officials, too, regret that such a minor miscue landed Forbes in jail, but none seems to have a surefire solution to ensure it won't happen again.

Forbes lives in a 106-year-old house in the Mapleton Hill Historic District. Two years ago, she decided to replace the old horizontal sliding door on her detached alley-side garage with a newer vinyl one.

Uh-oh. That was a violation of a city ordinance that requires owners of homes in historic districts to get a "landmark alteration" certificate for such work.

Assistant City Attorney Janet Michels noted that Forbes didn't go to jail because she installed the wrong kind of door but because she failed to appear in court to explain why she didn't answer a summons issued by the preservation board.

She easily could have forestalled her arrest by asking the court to suspend the warrant while she worked out a compromise with the design board, Michels said.

Julie Brooks, spokeswoman for the Boulder police, said the officer who arrested Forbes on Sunday had not been instructed to get tough on garage door scofflaws.

"We do keep a list of warrants," Brooks said. "And when officers have time, they do look up warrants in their districts . . . and go out" and ring doorbells.

"If it's a warrant, anybody can land in jail," she said. "The warrant itself says the officer is commanded to take the person into custody."

Ironically, while Forbes apparently ignored the summons, she did meet with the preservation board's design team and had worked out a compromise, agreeing to install a garage door that was more in tune with the design sense of the neighborhood.

"There's never an intent to put someone in jail over something like this," said Chris Meschuk, historic preservation planner for the city.

Nancy Kornblum, a member of the design review committee, said she hopes "there's a way to find another form of penalty - a civil penalty rather than a criminal penalty."

Typically, a summons is issued "only after a homeowner's repeated failure to comply," Kornblum added.

scanlon@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2897