LAKEWOOD — The people will finally have their say on a controversial growth control measure that has spawned a lengthy court battle and even pressured city leaders to change the charter of Colorado’s fifth-largest city.
The Lakewood City Council on Monday agreed to send the Strategic Growth Initiative, a proposal to limit annual growth in new residential construction to 1 percent of housing stock in the city, to a special election on July 2. The council had the option of putting the measure into law immediately Monday night.
The mail-only election is expected to cost the city $300,000.
“It’s encouraging that it finally seems to be coming to fruition,” said Cathy Kentner, the Lakewood resident who first brought the measure forward nearly two years ago. “It has taken a lot of patience and perseverance.”
It also took a vote earlier this year of Lakewood’s elected leaders to change the city charter so that a citizen initiative can continue to move forward even if it faces a legal challenge. The Strategic Growth Initiative, which was first proposed in June 2017 for that November’s ballot, was derailed when it was challenged in court by Steve Dorman, a Lakewood Republican, who contended that the signature-gathering effort for the initiative had been improper and that the measure was unconstitutional.
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After a judge in December turned aside Dorman’s challenge to the measure, he filed an appeal with the Colorado Court of Appeals the next month. That forced Lakewood’s council to once again put the issue aside, though several council members expressed concern at a January city council meeting that stopping the process every time a legal challenge is filed is tantamount to denying voters their right to “direct democracy.”
In February, the Lakewood City Council amended its charter so that citizen initiatives could receive consideration from elected leaders even if they are under protest or appeal. Kentner said she looks forward to the people in Lakewood getting a voice at the ballot box this summer.
“I believe this is about the peoples’ right to initiatives, referendums and recalls,” she said.
The impetus for the measure, Kentner said, sprang from concern among some that Lakewood wasn’t exercising enough control over what kind of housing was being built. Luxury apartment buildings were the leading housing product, she said, and that was exacerbating the city’s affordable housing problem.
She also said developers don’t provide adequate infrastructure to help alleviate congested roadways impacted by new growth. The initiative would require that the city council vote to approve or reject projects of 40 or more housing units instead of letting the city’s development department handle them alone.
“Everything we hear about gentrification and lack of green space and the need for affordable housing shows how much we need the strategic growth initiative,” Kentner told The Denver Post Monday.
But Lakewood Mayor Adam Paul said the measure is ill-advised.
“I think we all share concerns about growth in metro Denver but this ordinance is a blanket approach to dealing with some complicated issues,” Paul said. “Artificially capping growth doesn’t help with affordability.”
Housing in metro Denver has been under historic pricing pressure over the last decade as waves of new residents have called the area home. According to RealPage, the median rent in metro Denver was $805 in the first quarter of 2010. By the end of 2018, it had risen to $1,462, an increase of 82 percent, although there have been signs the market has been softening as of late.
Paul said he’s heard from builders who are shy about starting projects in Lakewood due to the uncertainty the Strategic Growth Initiative — if passed — would bring to the city in terms of new regulations.
The mayor pointed to the Lakewood Development Dialogue effort as a better way to deal with Lakewood’s growth. The online tool, launched by the city in 2017, solicits public feedback and encourages participants to come up with ways of dealing with increasing population and growth pressures in the city of 155,000 west of Denver.
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But Kentner pointed to a recent Apartment List report that showed rents in most communities in metro Denver were on the rise in March from the year before, with the exception of Golden, where the annual apartment rent declined 0.3 percent last month from a year earlier. That’s important, she said, because Golden passed its own housing cap ordinance more than 20 years ago.
Dorman said he still feels “as strongly as I did in the beginning” about his stance against the measure despite recent legal setbacks.
“And I am adamantly opposed to government telling a property owner when and if they can develop their property,” he said. “Proponents of this government nannyism are concerned about ‘over growth.’ But… they could have achieved their objective with some common sense zoning changes, rather than the usurpation of property rights.”
