Lakewood Is Weaponizing Government Processes to Support Controversial Policy Decisions

A Lakewood resident who works at Royce Industries, located across the street from the Navigation Center, recently described how increased crime and dangerous activity drove away customers and disrupted normal business operations. According to the resident, these problems were directly tied to the Navigation Center’s homeless services. When those services were temporarily suspended, the problems disappeared.

 

The business must repeatedly ask for police support. 

 

To protect themselves, Royce Industries decided to spend thousands of dollars installing a perimeter fence—an expense they should never have had to bear for a problem they did not create. Lakewood created the conditions that harmed the business.

 

Then Lakewood made the situation worse.

 

When Royce applied for a fence permit, city staff told them the fence would need to run through their parking lot, effectively eliminating usable parking and making the permit pointless. What Lakewood did not say is just as important: the business could have applied for a variance under existing zoning rules.

 

Instead, city staff told the business that if they waited, the new zoning had removed the setback requirement and allowed the fence. That new zoning was thus presented as a “solution” to a problem. 

 

This was not a regulatory necessity. A solution already existed. Lakewood chose not to disclose it.

 

The same pattern appeared during the Parkland Dedication Initiative.

 

After Lakewood residents successfully petitioned for changes to parkland dedication rules—following the highly controversial Belmar Park development—city staff suddenly began withholding building permits from smaller projects that had never been required to dedicate land for parks.

 

This was not the enforcement of new law. It was a new interpretation of old rules, selectively applied to manufacture a crisis.

That crisis then gave City Council political cover to dismiss the residents’ initiative and restore the very system voters had tried to reform.

 

As Save Open Space – Lakewood explained in previous Lakewood Informer news:

“By wrongfully withholding building permits from projects that had already paid a fee and by wrongfully requiring land dedication for smaller projects, City Hall was successful in fabricating a ‘crisis’ that they ‘heroically’ solved. They used the ‘unintended consequences’ suffered by the smaller projects to put back in place all of the problems that led to the initiative—back-door deal making and a scheme where paying a fee is always more of an incentive than providing open space.”

 

 

Not every negative outcome is intentional.

 

Crime near the Navigation Center was predictable, but not necessarily purposeful.

 

De-prioritizing crime enforcement was predictable and acceptable to those in charge.

 

Using Economic Development funds for homeless policies that harm nearby businesses was planned and approved through the budget process.

 

Those are policy choices with consequences.

 

What makes the fence permit and parkland dedication cases fundamentally different is the intentional manipulation of the process.

 

In both cases, Lakewood staff:

 

 

City staff are supposed to administer rules neutrally. Instead, Lakewood management appears to be using permitting, zoning, and administrative discretion as tools to advance favored policy decisions and suppress opposition.

 

That is not governance.

That is weaponization of government against residents and businesses.