In 2019, the big minds at the Butterfly Pavilion knew habitat destruction, chemical pollution, parasites and pathogens were crushing populations of bees, butterflies, moths and beetles, and that without these critical species one out of every three bites of food we eat could be at severe risk.
However, pollinators aren’t just critical to keeping three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants alive and around 35% of food crops producing, according to the USDA.
“They keep wetlands going. They keep our grasslands going. They make sure forests are diverse. And if they can keep those plant communities healthy and reproducing by assisting plants in their reproduction, that means our water is filtered, and we can hold on to our soil and not just have a big old dust bowl,” said Amy Yarger, director of horticulture at the Butterfly Pavilion, the science-based invertebrate conservation organization in Westminster.
So the big thinkers there created “pollinator districts,” or communities designed, constructed and maintained in such a way that pollinator habitat demonstrates a net gain over time.
And now, seven years later, the city of Manitou Springs is a certified municipal pollinator district, the city of Lafayette is working toward becoming one and a suburban development in Broomfield that was the first in the world to embrace the designation is showing how a new model of living built around saving bees and butterflies could change the definition of sprawl on the Front Range.
Save butterflies! Save the world! Buy a condo!
Baseline is a mixed-use community on 1,100 acres at the southwest corner of Interstate 25 and Baseline Road in Broomfield.
It sounds like a sales pitch — Save butterflies! Save the world! Buy at Baseline! — but Yarger and developer Kyle Harris, senior vice president of community development and Baseline general manager at Realberry real estate firm, say it isn’t.
First off, the land Baseline sits on was fallow agricultural land where wheat was the only crop grown, Yarger said. Wheat is wind pollinated, so no bugs were needed, and “with a few noxious weeds thrown in, it was very low in plant diversity,” she added.
If you drive up and down U.S. 36 or Sheridan Boulevard, or out toward Denver International Airport, you’ll see miles of new housing development, she said. But it isn’t the main contributor to habitat loss — that was the farms. Even on land designated as open space, which seems natural, you’re looking at agriculture’s footprint, Yarger said.
Amy Yarger, director of horticulture at the Butterfly Pavilion, teaches residents of Baseline community how sunflowers attract pollinators during Honey Bee Day. (Courtesy Baseline Community)Construction in the Broomfield area isn’t stopping anytime soon — the population in the consolidated city and county grew by 35% between 2010 and 2022, and is on track to keep booming. That translates to housing needs, and the area faces the same housing crisis as all of Colorado.
Baseline is a high-density neighborhood, with bike paths, walking paths and trails that thread 1,200 finished multifamily units. Every unit meets Home Energy Rating System requirements and other green building standards. There’s a “pocket park” no more than 1,600 feet away from any resident and plans for a linear park through the center of the development. And most important: The “plant palette” used in the majority of landscaping consists of mostly native plants that attract pollinators and are drought tolerant.
“I won’t say we’ve negated turf everywhere,” Harris said, “but we use rock, mulch, native grasses and drip-irrigated xeric species.” Those include black-eyed Susans, blue mist penstemons, prairie zinnia, rubber rabbitbrush and various junipers, all of which support local birds and bees while thriving in the Colorado climate.
Harris said “environmental stewardship really means something” to Baseline tenants. Move-in-ready homes are for sale starting in the low $500,000’s.
Sustainability is everyone’s responsibility
Sean McKenzie, a Baseline resident, says when he sees the community rally around its annual Bees and Blossoms Festival, he’s reminded that they are “pollinating a new idea, planted in the roots of our very own habitat, watered with the courage and care with which we all show up for each other.”
Yarger concurs, saying when she’s at Baseline, in the summer, doing a pollinator survey, “homeowners will come outside and want to tell me what they’ve been seeing. They just feel like I’m somebody that has things they want to talk about. They know I’m there for the pollinator district and they have ownership in that.”
Those surveys are a requirement for a place to be pollinator district certified — “it’s not just, ‘Well, you say you’re one so we’ll certify you,’” Yarger added. It’s counting and counting again, like she and her team have done at Baseline since 2019.
That year, on that dead, post-agricultural land, they found just 11 pollinator families.
Baseline community in Broomfield is the first designated pollinator district in the U.S. (Courtesy Baseline Community)But as Baseline grew, that number grew too: last year, they counted 27.
In 2023 they found 587 individual pollinators on the property; in 2025 that number jumped to 3,805.
And in 2025, there were 3,031 sightings of Western honeybees compared with 815 a year earlier — a 272% increase, directly contrasting national decline trends.
The question now is who wants to be Colorado’s next pollinator district, because a study by the state Department of Natural Resources shows pollinators are still in decline.
Yet even though there’s plenty to make Yarger worry, she says, “when I see what people are doing to respond to the situation, that makes me feel like, well, we have a way forward.”
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