My wife Barbara and I respect the Lafayette City Council and Staff. Full stop.
But this evening we are disheartened and disillusioned about the extent to which the City actually represents the interests of citizen/voters.
1,375 citizens - citizens of Lafayette and citizens of surrounding communities, many of whom have to travel through the horribly clogged intersection at highway 287and Arapahoe - took the time and effort to sign a formal and respectful Petition asking the City to not annex the land at the Southwest corner of that intersection to enable a developer to jam in over 600 new apartments. Months have gone by and we have received zero feedback or reaction from City Staff - absolutely nothing! By contrast, Staff has spent countless hours meeting with the out-of-town developer who wants to build all those apartments.
We just learned that City Staff has sent the memo below to Council proposing to plow ahead with the beginning of the annexation process at the Council meeting at 5:30 this Tuesday evening, August 15.
As we read the memo we kept thinking “soon we will come to the paragraph where Staff describes and discusses the Petition by 1,375 citizen/voters”. But, the memo contains not a single word about the respectfully presented views of citizen/voters. It is hard to imagine how the City could show greater disrespect for the citizen/voters they are supposed to serve than to plow forward without even acknowledging that a citizen Petition exists.
This is not the way representative democracy is supposed to work.