The year-long quarrel regarding Lakewood’s new zoning code is stretching into the new year, with petition signatures potentially taking the issue to the ballot this spring.

A nearly 400-page zoning code update was sent to the City Council in February and was officially approved on Oct. 13. It took effect at the beginning of the year.

But the debate over the zoning code continues because the city has found four petitions to repeal the ordinances sufficient.

Lakewood City Clerk Jay Robb gave a presentation to the council on Monday to confirm the sufficiency of the four referendum petitions against Ordinances 2025-27, 28, 29 and 30 — parts of the zoning code update voted upon at the tail end of last year.

The Lakewood Home Rule Charter requires “at least 3% of the total number of registered electors of the City of Lakewood on the date of the last regular municipal election” to deem a referendum petition sufficient.

All four of the petitions had at least 3,600 signatures, with three stretching past 4,000, and 3% of the around 117,000 Lakewood residents is just about 3,500.

The zoning changes were highly debated by some local groups, including Lakewood Citizens Alliance and Lakewood Stronger Together, who helped collect the petition signatures outside of various businesses and buildings throughout the city, along with social media campaigns.

Meanwhile, Livable Lakewood, a group that formed to help inform people during the zoning voting, has created the legal entity “Make Lakewood Livable” to campaign against misinformation as the ordinances likely hit the ballot.

Ultimately, some residents claimed that changes to single-family zoning would cause parking issues, overcrowding and changes to the characteristics of existing neighborhoods.

Article 3, the most debated part of the code, erased the term “single-family zoning,” which does not appear in the document. Instead, the city will use the term “residential dwellings.” A residential dwelling could be a single-family home, duplex, tri-plex or townhome in an effort to create more affordable housing.

The new residential districts are broken up into low-form residential and mid-form residential classifications.

Lakewood has never had single-family-only zoning, with all areas allowing some type of different usage like group homes or duplexes.

That ordinance is targeted in one of the four petitions.

Sophia Mayott-Guerrero, Make Lakewood Livable campaign manager and a former councilmember, told The Denver Gazette that people had been asking for affordable housing options and walkability for years.

She said the petitioners collected signatures based on misinformation and fear-mongering.

Still, Livable Lakewood agrees with sending the ordinances to the ballot.

“A small portion of Lakewood residents signed the petition, around 3%, with many of them responding to misrepresentation of what is actually in the updates,” she said. “We, too, encourage the City Council to send zoning to the ballot because we expect it to bring wider awareness of the value of these zoning updates, and ultimately strong support of the updated codes from voters.”

The Denver Gazette reached out to the petitioning groups, but did not hear back by the time this story published.

Resident Bonnie Nguyen told the council last year that rushing the vote and not putting it on the ballot was “fundamentally undemocratic.”

“Lakewood is a community-first city, not a developer-first city,” she said.

More than 4,000 people seemingly agreed.

Now the council has two options, per the city’s charter: It can repeal the petitioned ordinances or put them on a special election ballot, allowing the voters to decide on the changes.

The council will decide on next steps on Jan. 26. If the ordinances are sent to the ballot, the election would likely occur on March 31.

In a side issue, residents and Councilmember Roger Low raised the question of how those petition signatures were verified by the city.

The clerk’s office only checks signatures on ballots returned during elections and special elections through the Secretary of State’s database, Robb told Low, adding that he was denied access to that database regarding the petition signatures.

“How do we determine that people aren’t making up signatures?” Low asked.

“I don’t know, but there’s nothing in state law that requires us to be handwriting experts,” Robb responded.

“The idea that signatures can’t be verified flies in the face of the plain language of Lakewood code,” resident Ben David Hensley said. “How can we know that the required number of signatures are present when no checking of the actual signatures that exist (was made)?”