After two years and more than 20 public meetings, commissioners may finally approve a program this afternoon to limit house sizes in unincorporated Boulder County.

The first draft of the proposal was presented to the public in May 2007, and it limited house sizes, including basements and garages, to 2,600 square feet in the mountains and to 4,000 square feet in the plains. It also limited house sizes in many of the communities in unincorporated Boulder County -- such as Eldora and Allenspark -- to 1,000 square feet.

Since then, basements have been excluded -- and then included. The idea of separating out individual communities was examined closely, picked apart at public meetings and then discarded. Houses in the mountains and the plains, originally treated differently, have been lumped together again. Land already divided into subdivisions was exempted -- and then it wasn't.

"If you look at where we started in the first draft, it's vastly different," said Michelle Krezek, the county land-use planner who has shepherded the regulations through their various growing pains since the idea was born. "A lot of the changes were based on what we've heard from the public."

And Krezek has heard plenty. She's listened to hours and hours of public testimony, waded through hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails, and answered a flood of voicemails. Recently, she said, the phone calls have changed. It's not that everyone is happy -- it's more like different people are frustrated about different things.

"My phone calls have changed in tone quite a bit," she said. "It used to be,'You're not letting people build anything.' Now, it's more like, 'You've gone way overboard.'"

The draft on the table today would give everyone, in the plains or in the mountains, the right to build a 6,000-square-foot house. Anyone wishing to build larger would have to buy extra development rights from vacant land or from smaller houses.

All in all, Krezek believes the land-use staff have struck a good balance between being too constraining and still preserving the rural character of Boulder County -- the regulation's original objective.

And though the commissioners are expected to approve the draft, which has been tweaked from their own detailed feedback, it is possible that they could reject it, table it, ask for more information from land-use staff or even send it back to the Planning Commission to start over.

THE EVOLUTION OF HOUSE SIZES

Today, county commissioners are expected to vote on the final draft of regulations to limit house sizes in unincorporated Boulder County. The concept, which has been evolving for more than two years as it worked its way from the county commissioners to the community to the Planning Commission and back, is to preserve the rural character of Boulder County by offsetting the impact of large houses through preserving smaller houses and undeveloped land.

The proposal has been predictably controversial, pitting property-rights activists against environmentalists and stirring up questions about how to place values or restrictions on what many people envision as the American dream: the right to work hard, buy land and build the house you've always wanted.

After months of work on a final draft, county land-use planners are presenting the proposed regulations to the commissioners today. The document has changed significantly over time. Here are some of the highlights in the latest version:

In unincorporated Boulder County, all houses would be limited to 6,000 square feet, including garages, storage space and basements but not covered porches. In previous versions, the house-size threshold was smaller in the mountains than in the plains, which is no longer true.

To build a house larger than 6,000 square feet, the developer would need to buy credits from undeveloped land or from houses that are below the threshold size. The larger the house gets, the more development credits that would be needed to add the same amount of space. For example, a developer would only need to buy two development credits to build a 7,000-square-foot house, but to build a 8,000-square-foot house, six credits would need to be purchased.

There would not be "special character areas," which were originally used to differentiate how houses could be built in Eldora, Eldorado Springs, Gold Hill, Allenspark, Hygiene, Raymond and Riverside from the rest of Boulder County. The character of these communities will be addressed in the site-plan-review process, which every developer must navigate before a new house is approved by the county.

Development credits would be generated from restricting development on vacant land or by deed-restricting smaller houses so that a larger house cannot be built on that parcel of land in the future. Not all land is considered equal, however.

If a landowner puts a conservation easement on his or her property, it is worth five development credits if the land is in the mountains and 10 credits if the land is on the plains. If the land is sold to Boulder County, it is worth seven development credits in the mountains and 12 in the plains.

If a homeowner agrees not to enlarge a 2,000-square-foot house, he or she can sell off two development credits. For a 1,500-square-foot house, he or she can sell three credits, and for a 1,000-square-foot house, four credits may be sold. All credits can be bought and sold on the open market.