FAQ

• We do not accept donations.

• We do not have a GoFundMe page.

• We are not affiliated with any person or group that raises money at GofundMe.com.

• Here is an unaffiliated GoFundMe page that accepts donations.

When signing our Change.Org petition:

You may be asked to ‘chip in’ at change.org when signing the petition.  We receive no money from what you chip in.

If you do ‘chip in’, 100% of the amount you ‘chip in’ goes to change.org to advertise the petition which is very useful to gain more supporters and is greatly appreciated.  However, we have no control over what change.org does with your money.

Thank You!

There is one small HOA across the street with only 45 townhomes.  However, our change.org petition has over 7,000 signatures from metro area citizens and beyond.

So NO, this is not a NIMBY-based opposition.  Far from it.

You decide.

Kairoi held a secret meeting with unannounced time or place and not open to the public.  They allowed just three representatives from just one HOA to attend.

The Letter:

In a letter dated October 18, 2023, Kairoi Residential stated their intention to have “a discussion about this project with the “Lakewood community” because they “want to be a good neighbor”.

They even exclaimed: “We should have worked to have a community discussion.”

Kairoi further stated: “We have contacted City staff to schedule these discussions and to reach out to concerned residents about participating.”

However, Lakewood later announced: “The discussion for the proposed development at 777 S. Yarrow St. will encourage dialogue between Kairoi and the immediate neighbors” with no mention of the Lakewood community or reaching out or concerned residents.

So they had a secret meeting with three immediate neighbors!  THAT was their ‘discussion’ with the ‘Lakewood community’.

The traffic study only includes traffic attributed to one of the two buildings Kairoi proposes to construct at the Belmar Park site. 

The traffic study does not include the additional traffic generated by the 777 S Wadsworth building. 

Kairoi is under contract to purchase 777 S Wadsworth yet has only presented the impacts of the 777 S Yarrow St project and has withheld the impacts of their other proposed building across the street which may include up to 1,200 additional residential units. 

As a result, actual traffic generated by the two buildings could easily be 2-4 times the amount reflected in the initial traffic study.

The original traffic study also did not appear to include any estimate for delivery vehicles from Amazon, UPS, USPS, etc. 

From a science perspective, protecting Belmar Park is largely about protecting biodiversity.

According to the United Nations, biodiversity is our strongest natural defense against climate change.

Because as we lose or degrade habitats such as Belmar Park, biodiversity declines including eventually losing entire species that become extinct.

It is critically important to protect habitats because the web of life depends on habitats to support biodiversity.

That is why the US Fish and Wildlife Service now “embraces Strategic Habitat Conservation (SHC), which focuses less on recovering individual species, and more on recovering habitats essential to a broad range of species.”

Without biodiversity, our well-being including even economic well-being falls apart.

Over half of global economic activity (sometimes called GDP) depends on nature.

If we prioritize building expensive housing over protecting habitats and biodiversity, what will you tell the kids when they grow up and there is not enough food to bring home?  Or not enough water?  Or not enough medication?  We depend on the web of life for all of that.

The assumption for many years has been that high-density housing characterized by many people living together in a building would save energy compared to low-rise housing.

However, now that the energy use of high-density housing has actually been studied, it turns out that high-density housing uses significantly more energy per capita per year.  Plus, the embodied energy of high-density housing is much higher.

“We estimate that downtown high-rise living in Chicago, IL accounts for approximately 25% more life-cycle energy per person per year than suburban low-rise living, on average, contrary to some common beliefs (best estimates were ~141 and ~113 GJ/person/year, respectively).”

The finding of higher GHG emissions also has been duplicated by Australian researchers:

http://demographia.com/RDC_ACF_Greenhouse-Report.pdf

High-density housing is more expensive to construct per square foot and is therefore not conducive to providing affordable housing. Developers do not build high-density housing that is affordable to low-income residents unless it is subsidized because the construction cost is prohibitive.

If ‘affordable’ uses the definition of annual rent not exceeding 30% of area median income (AMI), developers sometimes include a few units in that rental range.  So if the AMI is $100,000 per year, annual rent of $30,000 would be considered ‘affordable’.

Lakewood has run financial modeling to evaluate whether Urban Infill Apartment housing is financially feasible to produce if a percentage of units are required to be ‘affordable’. Lakewood concluded:

Each of the prototypical housing developments are infeasible when hypothetical inclusionary zoning requirements are applied.

The estimated feasibility gaps range from approximately $14,000 to $49,000 per total housing unit when the hypothetical inclusionary zoning requirements are applied to each housing prototype.

Accordingly, a “mandatory” inclusionary zoning policy is not recommended for Lakewood.

Lakewood Strategic Housing Plan – May 2023 p.41

Please note:

The website is maintained on a volunteer basis with limited time availability.   We apologize that questions or comments may not receive a response.

Thank You!

Contact Us

This was the first, and remains the only actively updated volunteer-supported web presence advocating for Belmar Park wildlife habitat protection.

In Summer, 2023, I came across the public information webpage for 777 S Yarrow St at the Lakewood Planning Department website.  Over the next many weeks, my concern grew regarding the proposal for 777 S Yarrow St.

Contacted Roger Low who was then a candidate for city council in Ward 3, the same ward in which Belmar Park is located.  We scheduled a phone conference and discussed concerns regarding the 777 S Yarrow Street proposal.  Roger seemed somewhat open to considering mitigations if he were elected. It was encouraging that a potential member of city council might be supportive of protecting Belmar Park.

Subsequently, incumbent Anita Springsteen withdrew from the race which left Roger Low running unopposed for the open seat on city council to which he was elected.

Preserving Trees

Urged Polly Reetz, the Conservation Committee Chairperson of the Denver Audubon Society, to endorse the basal area method of tree replacements calculation.  After reviewing the paper from Professor Coder, Ms. Reetz agreed and sent an email to City Council with that recommendation.

Unfortunately, City Council has taken no action and Lakewood still relies on the grossly inadequate caliper inch method of calculating tree replacements.

Later created an additional webpage explaining why the basal area tree replacement formula should be used to replace the many large condemned trees at 777 S Yarrow St.

Realized that a website would better publicize the issues with the huge apartment complex proposal and launched Save Belmar Park website.

The Meeting at the Church

Soon after the website went live, City Council Member Anita Springsteen, who had just withdrawn from her reelection bid, announced she would co-host a public meeting at the Phillips United Methodist Church.  I agreed to author a public announcement and invitation to this meeting that was published in the Lakewood Informer.  Several dozen residents attended this meeting.

I previously informed the other co-host that I would join via ZOOM since she said that option was available.  However, the meeting co-host did not provide any support for usable ZOOM audio and allowed another person to also login and rudely talk over most of the meeting on a private phone call despite repeated requests to mute their microphone so their phone call would not block the meeting audio.

The ZOOM host has the ability to mute microphones in order to control background noise.   This ZOOM host never muted anyone’s microphone.

Participants and hosts on ZOOM conference calls are typically respectful and attentive to the call since they usually have a common shared purpose.  It was peculiar, to say the least, that the ZOOM host did not monitor this whatsoever and that this other person refused to mute their microphone.

In-person attendance at this meeting included Lakewood City Council members Anita Springsteen and Rich Olver. Also in attendance was former Planning Commission member Cathy Kentner.

The announced purpose was to discuss submitting a Resolution at an upcoming city council meeting to stop or mitigate the proposed apartment development at 777 S Yarrow St.

You might think that since they called a community meeting to discuss a city council resolution, that someone would actually have a resolution or at least an outline of one in hand to discuss.  You would be wrong.

Neither the hosts nor anybody in attendance at this meeting authored a resolution or even an outline despite calling a meeting for that purpose.  This was a meeting for supporters of Belmar Park attended by various city council members, a former planning commission member, various attorneys and dozens of other community members.  None of them authored a resolution or outline.  Weird.

It turns out, I authored the only resolution for consideration at the meeting.  Yes, at the same meeting I was excluded from due to the bizarre ZOOM issues that were permitted, I also provided the only resolution for consideration.  If you think that is also strange, I would agree.

City Council Meeting

Councilor Springsteen presented my Resolution to City Council but changed it to mitigate rather than deny the major site plan as I had proposed in the original resolution. That was the final city council meeting for Councilor Springsteen who concluded her term of office that night.

City Council refused to take any action.

The Gofundme Fiasco

Several people from the meeting at the church described above later met at a home and discussed a Gofundme page to raise money.

One of them emailed me and stated that Gofundme requires an external website in order to accept donations.  They were all aware the Save Belmar Park site you are reading from now was already online and it was stated that if I did not want to use this website for their Gofundme campaign, they would create an additional website for that purpose.

However, GoFundMe does not require an external website to accept donations.  A key purpose of GoFundMe.com is to accept donations on behalf of groups and causes so that they don’t need to build websites just to accept donations. Yet this person made the curious false claim that a website was required in order to accept donations.  In fact, that was their justification to suggest developing a duplicate website even though doing so would obviously require unnecessary time and expense.

The Amazing Refusal of Help to Fix a Misleading Website

Later that same day, it was disclosed they had already registered a .ORG domain name the day before.  Cathy Kenter was thanked for assisting them in getting a domain name registered.

The domain name they registered remained non-functional for over a year until it finally expired in 2025 and during that entire time never displayed a website.  So whenever anyone went to that domain name, they received the message no website existed.  If they were trying to use that website as an information hub for their environmental cause, why would they leave it defunct over a year and let people think the Save Belmar Park effort was defunct?

Early on, I offered to fix the defunct website problem at no cost by directing their non-functional domain name to this working website.  They made a decision to refuse the offer and leave it broken.

Think of it.  They intentionally preferred a non-functional, decoy ‘website’ it you can even call it that.  When any unsuspecting members of the public found their non-functional decoy webpage, they would receive an error.  They could then logically conclude there is no Save Belmar Park website.  It was their intentional choice to send that misleading message to these potentially interested members of the public that since there was no website, there was no public support for Save Belmar Park.   Why did they do that and persist in doing that?  If they support protecting Belmar Park, why did they prefer to send that negative misleading message to the public for a year or more?

Plus – At the same time, they were also potentially harming the website ranking for savebelmarpark.  All of this was intentional.

We have to ask what was the motivation to intentionally maintain a non-functional, misleading domain name for a year or more that mislead and confused both the public and Internet search engines rather than immediately fix the problem at no cost?

Although knowing they refused my offer to fix it, I still volunteered this website in good faith and thousands of dollars were raised for their campaign from this website while their donation button was displayed here and again at no charge and without receiving any of the donations to support this website.

I also repeatedly asked why it was a good idea to pursue building a second website but nobody had an explanation.

I persisted and exposed that their false claim that a website was necessary for GofundMe to accept donations.

There is no requirement for a separate website to accept donations via GoFundMe.com.

Once they realized that we all knew the fake gofundme additional website justification was not a valid reason for a website, were they glad there was no need to go to the bother and expense and effort to build another website just to accept donations?  That would be a reasonable response.  After all, they had supposedly been facing the prospect of having to build a website for the sole purpose of accepting donations.  That significant task was no longer on the table.  They were now free to focus their efforts on protecting Belmar Park in more productive ways.  They should have been very happy about that.

But they were not happy that building a web site was no longer necessary.  Instead, they then raised complaints with this website.

They cited certain website features they wanted. It turns out that they were not aware the features they complained were not available were already implemented including links to a list of upcoming City Council meetings and contact info for city council members.  The fact they now wanted features that were already available revealed their total motivation was fault finding to justify their alternative website agenda.  The fact that gofundme was not a valid reason and that only then did they suddenly want other features that were already available suggests they were not looking for those features.  Because if they were looking, they would be aware the features were already there.  Instead, they were looking for some excuse to say they just had to build a website.  And they never came up with a plausible excuse.  They never found anything they needed that was not already available on this website.

Despite the fact GoFundMe does not need anyone to build a website and despite the fact they never expressed any clear reason to have an additional website, they held a meeting and arrived at an agreement within to proceed with another website anyway.

The features they asked for were also not implemented in the website they finally launched many months later (as of 8-2024).  In my opinion, the whole fiasco raises the question what these individuals are actually seeking.  What is their true agenda?

One of their members indicated she would build their new website but that never happened.  She later admitted she had never built a website. Suppose you wanted a new website for your charity, business, family reunion or whatever.  Would your go-to resource to get that website built be someone who had never built one before?  That doesn’t make much sense, does it?  Yet that is what they did.

Once I exposed that their website person had never built a website, another member of their group agreed to build their website.

That new website person contacted me and asked if they could simply copy the content from this website over to their website!

So this website you are now on that they were inventing unfounded fault finding complaints about, it turns out they were actually perfectly happy with this website so much so that they wanted to create an exact copy and then claim it is their website!  Yes, in spite of their complaints, they would have been happy with an exact duplicate website!  You can’t make this stuff up!

But why would they need a whole new website if they would have been happy with a direct copy?  What purpose would be accomplished by having two identical websites?  Whatever their reasons, it obviously was not about any so-called new features or about gofundme.com.

I declined their bizarre and disingenuous request to copy this website.  Their behavior did not seem as if we were playing for the same team.

Change.Org Petition Has Over 7,600 Supporters!

The Protect Belmar Park petition on Change.Org now has over 7,600 signatures.  The petition requests the Fort Collins buffer zone ordinance be adopted in Lakewood and that if necessary, a buffer zone be established via Eminent Domain between Belmar Park and the proposed apartment complex.  The Denver Post Editorial Board subsequently has published TWO editorials that also strongly recommended such a buffer zone be established.

Some of these individuals have formed sub-groups.

One group gathered signatures for an Initiative petition that removes the fee in-lieu verbiage in Lakewood’s Municipal Code.  Developers prefer the fee-in-lieu option to avoid the larger expense and effort of providing open space with their projects.

Instead of canvassing 1,400 homes near Belmar Park and expanding community engagement of these key nearby Belmar Park neighbors to the proposed Kairoi Belmar project, they went off on this diversion for months on end.

City council actually adopted their Initiative into law which bypassed the citywide vote and allowed the council the option to simply repeal it shortly after.  Council then simply repealed it.

Unfortunately, ANY Initiative petition approved by Lakewood voters can simply be repealed by city council after 6 months which was the fate of the Strategic Growth Initiative that many voters in Lakewood mistakenly thought would have permanent impact on managing growth.  City council eventually repealed it.  City Council can even adopt an Initiative to avoid a citywide vote and then move to repeal it shortly afterwards.

We are not aware of any Initiative petition approved by Lakewood voters that was not repealed by city council.

Cathy Kentner has organized multiple Initiative petitions.   She noted via email that a partial Initiative campaign may influence City Council just as effectively as a full campaign and citywide vote by citing the example of Lakewood removing the sales tax on grocery items in 2008.  Former Mayor Bob Murphy claimed that the change had been “percolating in the community for a long time”.  Although the petition was never turned in to the city clerk, City Council did adopt an ordinance eliminating the grocery tax on key items.

Another faction is raising money to ‘protect the integrity of Belmar Park’ and they have also retained a qualified land-use attorney and have filed a ‘CRCP Rule 106’ legal challenge now that the environmentally-damaging housing project has received the big rubber stamp OK from Lakewood.  Let’s hope the legal challenge succeeds even though most Rule 106 actions do not.

They raised over $35,000 through May 2025 and have received IRS charity status and donations are tax deductible.

We have recommended supporters of Belmar Park stay focused.  The path of having distracting or decoy websites including a domain name that landed on a totally non-functional webpage and using a confusing copycat name on another site required unnecessary added cost and time and has distracted from the goal of protecting wildlife.  Nobody has been able to substantiate why these tactics made sense.  Nor is it a strong strategy to divide up into sub-groups that may have hazy objectives.  Now that the 777 S Yarrow project has been approved by Lakewood’s Planning Commission with no mitigations to protect wildlife, it is clear these unconventional and bizarre tactics utilized supposedly in support of protecting Belmar Park’s habitat have not been as effective as some might have hoped.  Sadly, community engagement has not been sufficient to expand the number of supporters and gain momentum to the level necessary to sway city hall prior to their key decision point at the Planning Commission.

This website started the first email list of Save Belmar Park supporters in 2023.  Unfortunately, various community members decided utilizing multiple disconnected email lists was their preferred strategy.  We have invited Belmar Park wildlife supporters to join our mailing list and sign the Change.org petition (if you have not already done so) which may allow advocates to focus our collective power so we can have a stronger and more unified message to decision makers and to the public.

Our home page also has listed numerous volunteer activities available that have proven to be effective in the past.