CENTENNIAL, Colo. — You’d think an eager political candidate is trying to get your attention. People in Centennial are dealing with robocalls and signature gatherers.
Many are surprised to find out it has nothing to do with someone’s election campaign.
It’s an effort to add a car dealer to the already crowded Arapahoe Road corridor.
“It was a recorded call,” Ricki Feist remembers.
She was one of many neighbors in Centennial who posted on the Nextdoor app that they received the robocall. Feist told Next she remembers it was a man’s voice.
“He said there would be people coming around through the neighborhood possibly knocking on doors, possibly contacting us in parking lots of supermarkets or other business establishments with a petition and the petition was to go against a car dealership,” she said.
Other neighbors told us the call forwarded them to a website, www.centennialfacts.com, which seems to advocate for a business owner who wants to build a Mercedes dealership on a vacant plot of land near Arapahoe Road and Blackhawk Street, just west of Jordan Road. That website also warns people not to sign a petition.
A spokeswoman for the city of Centennial gave us the backstory.
Back in 2005, the Centennial City Council passed a series of ordinances banning the development of new auto dealerships along the Arapahoe Road corridor. There were already quite a few in existence near the I-25 exit.
After years of debate, including a 2016 survey the city conducted that concluded dealerships and businesses like them would be the best option along that corridor, Centennial’s City Council earlier this month voted to allow new auto dealerships to develop on the corridor by a slim 5-4 margin.
The council did it, after a similar attempt two years ago was halted by a petition with more than 4,000 signatures.
Now, a group of citizens say they’re trying to overturn the council’s decision by filing another petition.
The group has a website of its own, www.citizensforabettercentennial.org.
Feist said the robocall warned her about the source of the petition.
“He went on to say that the person who was behind this petition and paying for the solicitors was the owner of a Mercedes dealership in Littleton who didn’t want the competition,” Feist recalled.
9NEWS reached out to the General Manager of Mercedes Benz of Littleton Friday to question that claim and never heard back.
Citizens who supported that petition and spoke with 9NEWS said they were unaware of any other involvement.
So why do dealerships want to locate on Arapahoe Road? And why would they want to cluster in the first place?
“I think the main reason is kind of the old location, location, location,” said Darrin Duber-Smith, a professor of marketing at Metro State University.
“They’re on the beaten path and folks are seeing it every day, so probably the main reason is visibility,” he said.
But Duber-Smith also said the access may make the land more attractive.
“I also think that there’s a lot to dealerships,” he said. “They have to be fairly large. And they have to be in industrial areas and a lot of those are on highways.”
Signature gatherers on the latest effort to stop dealerships on Arapahoe Road have until September 17 to collect 4,089 signatures, or five percent of registered voters in Centennial.
If they are successful, they will force a special election, as the petition is too late to be considered for placement on November’s mid-term election ballot.
