You order a burger at Murphy's Mountain Grill, or a plate at Black Hat Cattle after a Saturday hike, and the check comes back with an extra line you have not seen before. One percent. It is not a service charge and it is not sales tax. Ask the server and you will get a version of the same answer: it is optional, it goes to the town, and you can have it removed if you would rather not pay it. What most people do not get in that thirty-second exchange is why the line exists at all, or what it is actually paying for down the road.
The short version is that Kittredge cannot build a sidewalk the way most towns can. The one percent on your receipt is the workaround.
Why Kittredge Doesn't Get a Sidewalk by Default
Kittredge, like Evergreen next door, is unincorporated. There is no town council levying a mill rate for public works, no municipal budget line for a crosswalk at the corner near Blackbird Cafe. Being classified rural under Jefferson County means sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, and paved shoulders are not things that show up automatically the way they do once a place incorporates. If a stretch of Highway 74 needs a safer crossing near a trailhead or a school bus stop, someone has to build the funding mechanism from nothing.
That is what happened this spring. The Kittredge Improvement Fund, known around town as KIF, was formally organized in April 2026 to close exactly that gap, neighbor by neighbor and dollar by dollar. It is not a tax and no one voted it into existence at a ballot box. It is a voluntary collection plate that participating businesses, restaurants, retail shops, lodges, health and beauty services, and other professional services, pass along at the register.
The Committee Behind the Register
The mechanics are plain once you see them laid out. A business opts in. At checkout, one percent of the purchase gets added as a line item. If a customer would rather not participate, that line comes off the bill with no explanation required. The money that does get collected does not sit in a shoebox behind the counter. It is held and professionally managed by the Evergreen Legacy Foundation, a Colorado 501(c)(3), with spending decisions made entirely by the local KIF committee rather than the foundation itself.
That separation matters more than it sounds. The foundation handles custody and compliance. The people who actually live along Bear Creek Canyon decide where the money goes.
The Math Behind the Match
Here is the part that turns a modest pile of one-percent add-ons into something that can actually pour concrete. Evergreen Legacy Foundation reserves the first $90,000 of donations each year as a cash match for KIF projects. In practical terms, that means a meaningful share of every dollar a customer contributes at the register gets matched and then reinvested again as projects get approved, rather than spent once and gone. A single dollar left on a bar tab at Lariat Lodge Brewing Company does more work over the course of a year than the sticker amount suggests, because the match structure is built to recycle it rather than retire it.
This is the detail that separates KIF from a typical tip jar for a good cause. Most small-town fundraising efforts spend a dollar once. This one is engineered to spend it more than once.
Where the Race Turns the Line Item Into a Landmark
If the one percent program is the quiet, ongoing half of the story, the Great CO74 Trail Run is the loud, visible half. KIF and the race launched together this spring, with the run serving as the fund's public coming-out party on Saturday, May 9.
The course itself is not a token loop around a parking lot. Runners and hikers covered 7.4 miles starting and finishing at Kittredge Park, staggered across three wave starts at 8:00, 8:05, and 8:10 in the morning, through a route that ran along Columbine, across private Kittredge lands opened for the day, and into the canyon trails of O'Fallon Park before looping back.
What made the race more than a scenic run was the fine print on the ticket itself. Both adult and kid registrations built in a direct donation toward flashing crosswalk signs, a specific, named infrastructure item rather than a vague gesture toward community betterment. Kids ran a lap count matched to their age around Kittredge Park at roughly 0.15 miles per lap while the adults finished, and the whole event closed out with food, drinks, music, and a post-run soak in Bear Creek for anyone who wanted one. Three Sunday practice sessions in the lead-up, March 29, April 12, and April 26, gave neighbors a reason to show up at Kittredge Park months before race day, which is its own kind of quiet infrastructure: a recurring meeting point that did not exist before this year.
Put those two threads together and the picture is clearer. The one percent at the register funds the fund. The race funds a specific, named thing you can point to on a corner. Together they are how a town with no public works budget builds one anyway.
Which Register You'll Actually See It At
The businesses carrying this are ones most Kittredge residents already visit without thinking twice. Blackbird Cafe for lunch by the creek. Switchback Smokehouse and Black Hat Cattle for dinner. Murphy's Mountain Grill for a burger after a trail day. Amano Coffee and Plants for the morning routine. Lariat Lodge Brewing Company for the evening one. Black Hat has leaned into the community moment directly, running a Saturday brunch built around mimosa flights, a curated menu, and an onsite pop-up from White Rabbit Hat Co, the kind of local collaboration that only makes sense in a town small enough that everyone already knows everyone's inventory.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Colorado Department of Transportation has been repaving State Highway 74 through the canyon this year, the same stretch that runs past Kittredge Park and connects the town to Evergreen and Morrison. That project is state-funded and separate from KIF, but it is worth knowing both are underway at once, because it means the corridor through town is getting attention from two directions simultaneously: a state agency resurfacing the road itself, and a resident-built fund working on the crossings and shoulders the state project does not cover.
What This Actually Changes for Anyone Walking the Canyon
None of this rewires daily life overnight. The trails behind O'Fallon Park, the West Ridge and Bear Creek loops that connect through to Corwina and Pence Park, are still reached the same way they were last year, mostly by car, mostly along a highway with limited shoulder space. What KIF represents is the first organized, funded attempt to change that gradually, using a mechanism residents invented themselves rather than one handed down from a city government that does not exist here.
The next time your check has that extra line, you will know what it actually is. Not a fee, not a tax, and not charity in the abstract sense. It is a small, specific bet that enough one-percent additions, matched dollar for dollar up to $90,000 a year, can eventually put a flashing sign at a corner that needs one.
Dawn Zalfa has spent years working the same stretch of Bear Creek Canyon these projects run through, which is part of why she tends to notice when a town starts building its own infrastructure from the ground up. If you are curious what that kind of neighborhood momentum means for property values in Kittredge, Dawn Zalfa offers a Confidential Home Valuation for anyone who wants a clear-eyed read on where things stand.
