How the referendum got there

Four separate referendum petitions were filed. A protest was filed November 25, 2025; a validity hearing was held December 19, 2025; and a hearing officer validated the petitions under Lakewood Municipal Code § 2.52.150 and C.R.S. § 31-11-110(3). Council voted on January 27, 2026 to call a special election.

Lakewood's Home Rule Charter requires signatures from at least 3% of registered electors as of the last regular municipal election — roughly 3,500. Each petition carried at least 3,600, three of them over 4,000, with organisers reporting more than 10,000 signatures collected overall.

The Article 3 design-standards vote in council had been 9–2 on September 23, 2025, with Councilmembers David Rein and Paula Nystrom opposed.

What the vote did not solve

The state mandates were not repealed by a city election. Councilmember Roger Low put the problem on the record: “One of the many reasons we passed (the ordinances) was to comply with state law, so that we would not be competing for important state resources.”

Lakewood remains on the HB24-1313 transit-oriented communities list, with a December 31, 2026 Housing Opportunity Goal report due to the Department of Local Affairs. And Governor Jared Polis signed an executive order on May 16, 2025 conditioning certain state transportation and energy grant funding on compliance. The compliance problem the repeal creates is Lakewood's, not any association's.

The two points a Lakewood board needs to make to its members

First: the declaration did not change, in either direction. A board that assumed the 2025 overhaul had loosened its own design standards, or that the April 2026 repeal has now tightened them, is wrong both times. Public zoning says what the city will permit. It does not say what a recorded declaration permits.

Second: the one state law that does reach declarations was never on the Lakewood ballot. HB24-1152 (2024) added subsection (4) to C.R.S. 38-33.3-106.5, voiding association provisions that restrict the creation of an accessory dwelling unit in a designated jurisdiction in a way prohibited by C.R.S. 29-35-103. Three limits on that preemption are load-bearing: it operates only in a “subject jurisdiction” or a certified accessory-dwelling-unit-supportive jurisdiction; it applies to an accessory use to a single-unit detached dwelling, so condominium and shared-wall townhome communities are largely outside it; and “reasonable restrictions” survive — defined as a condition that does not unreasonably increase cost, effectively prohibit construction, or extinguish the ability to build.

Whether a particular association restriction is a permitted “reasonable restriction” is a fact question we do not answer for individual disputes.

Why this matters beyond Lakewood

The Lakewood result is now the reference point in Colorado for what organised residential opposition to density can do, and the tool it used is a municipal one. An HOA has no referendum power over a city's zoning code — it has covenants, which bind its members and nobody else, and whatever standing its members have as voters.

The parallel fight is in court. Six home-rule cities — Arvada, Aurora, Glendale, Greenwood Village, Lafayette and Westminster — sued the State of Colorado and Governor Polis in Denver District Court on May 19, 2025, challenging HB24-1313 and HB24-1304 on the ground that land use and zoning are matters of exclusive local concern under Article XX, section 6 of the Colorado Constitution, and asking the court to declare that the two laws “have neither force nor effect in the Cities.” No final ruling has been located. Notably, that complaint does not challenge HB24-1152 — the one statute in the group that reaches into declarations.

One sourcing note: this article does not assert that the four Lakewood ordinances were silent on covenants. Their texts were not obtained, and neither the legal analyses nor the press coverage reviewed mentions HOAs, covenants or metro districts. Anyone wanting to state that silence definitively should pull O-2025-27 through O-2025-30 from Lakewood's own records.