Unveiled at a campaign event on former Denver mayor Wellington Webb’s front yard, signs bearing the phrase “Green v. Concrete” boiled down the debate over the future of the former Park Hill Golf Club property to three words.
That messaging proved effective in the city’s 2021 election. Initiated Ordinance 301 was poised to pass with 63.2% support as of the city’s latest unofficial count Thursday night.
What 301 does is set a new, higher bar for the long-simmering effort to redevelop the Park Hill property. Under the terms of the measure, primary owner Westside Investment Partners will not just have to earn city approval to amend the taxpayer-funded conservation easement that since 1997 has dictated the property is home to a regulation-length, 18-hole golf course. The firm will have to win over voters in a citywide election if it wants permission to build housing or any commercial development on the 155 acres of land on the east side of Colorado Boulevard north of East 35th Avenue.
Efforts to get something election-ready are at the top of the developer’s to-do list.
“We understand that residents want to hear more details about what this can be,” Kenneth Ho, a principal with Westside who is leading the firm’s efforts at the golf course, said this week. “I think what the initiative does is it now says we need to come up with a plan for the voters to vote on. I think the next step is to develop that and put some specifics around the plan.”
Ho emphasized that 301 appearing to pass does not turn the former golf course into a public park. It’s still private property.
The city paid Westside $6 million in 2019 to compensate it for land there that was impacted by a city drainage project. That agreement also granted Westwide at least three years to work on a redevelopment plan for the land without having to operate the golf course under the terms of the conservation easement. That window remains open, Ho pointed out.
Not only was 301 passing in preliminary results, but Initiated Ordinance 302, a countermeasure backed by Westside that would have exempted the golf course from the citywide election requirement was failing by a ratio of 2-1 as of Thursday.
The pair of likely victories has supporters of 301 and Save Open Space Denver, the group that has been fighting against any commercial redevelopment of the golf course, looking forward to some rest more than looking at next steps.
“People in Denver and people in Colorado love and will fight for open space,” Webb said of his interpretation of the results this week. “For me, what’s next is to get reengaged with my Nuggets tickets. Then we go back and look at what are the areas for reconciliation to some degree.”
Penfield Tate, the former state legislator and Denver mayoral candidate who has been at the forefront of Save Open Space’s efforts, also called for a cooling-off period after what he dubbed an unnecessarily unpleasant and bruising campaign.
He felt that the pro 302 campaign tried to draw a line between Northeast Park Hill, an economically depressed neighborhood where most residents are people of color, and the rest of Denver, a majority white city, to imply efforts to preserve open space there were inequitable.
On Election Night, the Empower Northeast Denver campaign backing 302 sent out a press release quoting Northeast Park Hill resident Samie Burnett as saying “It is disheartening that voters supported taking away the voice of our community and letting the whole city, which has very different priorities, make decisions related to this property.”
Tate hopes that when the two sides talk again the focus will be on ways to update the property into a recreational amenity that invites in people with a wide variety of interests, not just golfers.
“We never told anyone what the open space and recreation was supposed to be and the community should have a say in how it’s activated as open space and recreational space,” Tate said.
The dueling measures came against a backdrop of an active planning effort organized by the city. The Park Hill Golf Course Area Visioning Process, which started in January, is expected to hit an important milestone next week when the firm the city contracted to lead it releases a summary of recommendations from a 27-member steering committee convened to discuss options for the future of the property.
By Thanksgiving, the city expects to combine those recommendations with the results of a community survey sent out to 6,000 households within a mile of the property and input gathered through one-on-one and small group conversations to summarize the process thus far, Community Planning and Development Department spokeswoman Laura Swartz said.
“We’ll report back out ‘here is what we are hearing is most important and here is what the city will do to fulfill that,” Swartz said. “The city has two priorities here. The first is engagement. The second is marking sure that we are making quality open space in this neighborhood.”
Westside has committed to preserving at least 60 acres of the property as open space.
That city planning process, too, has been controversial. Webb, Tate and others are co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the city, Mayor Michael Hancock and the head of the city’s planning department in June that sought to stop that effort on the grounds it was using taxpayer money to circumvent a taxpayer-supported conservation easement.
The city filed a motion to dismiss the suit in July. The case is on hold while the two sides wait for Denver District Court Judge Ross Buchanan to rule on that motion.
Northeast Park Hill resident Shanta Harrison is part of the 27-member steering committee. She is also firmly in the camp that wants to see the golf course preserved as open space and recreational land. The city’s visioning process was biased in favor of development from the start, she said. She said it was a challenge to even bring up the conservation easement in the committee’s monthly virtual meetings this year.
Harrison doesn’t feel the process should be scrapped entirely in the wake of Election Night but she does think it needs to be paused until the lawsuit can be resolved.
“I think a judge ultimately needs to interpret what can be done on this land and then, once that process is resolved, I think we move forward in accordance with whatever that decision was,” she said.
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