In August 2023, the Illinois Developer Kensington withdrew their application to annex the 35 acres at the Southwest corner of Highway 287 and Arapahoe Road to build a huge residential and commercial project. Thanks to all of you who signed this Petition, we thought we had scored a victory against this massive and ill considered development.  We were wrong. They are back!

Last week on the eve of the holidays, with only a few days notice, Kensington held their required “community meeting“ in anticipation of an initial  Lafayette City Council meeting on January 7.  In my opinion, the “community meeting” was a charade.

For example, Kensington tried to pretend to be a Colorado developer. They told us that they hadn’t really decided what to build  and how many units, if any, would be affordable housing.  Not believable!  Instead of showing us their plans they showed us a retail blob and a residential blob.  I can only guess that they thought it was a mistake in 2023 to show us their plans before they had secured approval to annex the land.  

Further they showed their distain for Lafayette and Erie residents by disclosing that they had thrown away all the  “Comment Cards” and names and email addresses of citizens who had signed up to be on the mailing list for this project.  And as if we were completely stupid, they invited us to fill out new “Comment Cards” and sign up for a new mailing list pretending that they gave two cents about our comments and contact information.

At the meeting residents raised all the same concerns that we raised over a year ago - Dumping up to 1000 new cars onto Arapahoe, which is already a parking lot sounds like a sick joke- We are in the middle of a water crisis and the last thing we need is hundreds of thirsty new housing units - Local schools already are overcrowded and resorting to temporary buildings - The proposed massive and dense housing project would be completely and jarringly out of character with the surrounding area of Lafayette.

So what can we do?:

1. Show up at the Lafayette City Council at 5:30 PM on January 7 at the corner of S. Public Rd. and S. Boulder Road!

2.  Recruit Multiple friends and neighbors to join you in signing the petition. Remember there is absolutely no obligation to contribute to change.org in order to sign the petition!

We can’t believe that we have to do this all over again. But we do. Also we will be reaching out to residents of Erie who have to drive up and down Arapahoe Road  to ask them to lobby Erie town leaders to join with Lafayette in a mutual agreement to not annex this parcel. That way, neither city will feel compelled to try to get the jump on the other.

Thank you so much for your past support and please recruit more supporters to our Petition.

Preston Padden