Denver’s next mayor and City Council will have plenty on their plates from the moment they are sworn in. Foremost are the city’s big challenges – priorities like fighting crime, fostering affordable housing, stemming the scourge of addiction and curbing the encampments that have overtaken so many public spaces.

City Hall’s new leadership also will be training its sights on assorted redevelopment efforts dotting the Denver map. Whether it’s resolving the future of the former Park Hill Golf Course – where a proposal to create open space, retail and affordable housing was rejected by voters April 4 – or clearing the way for the epic “River Mile” project reinventing a stretch of the South Platte where Elitch Gardens now operates, City Hall will have its hands full.

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Especially given that ambitious agenda, one part of Denver that does not need the city’s intervention is Cherry Creek. The ever-thriving, perpetually prosperous business and residential district – it generates at least 6% of Denver’s total sales-tax revenue – has managed largely on its own to keep rapid growth, intensive development, quality of life and basic transportation needs all in balance, more or less. And it is a delicate balance.

Destination eateries, fashionable boutiques, luxury hotels, a signature shopping mall, sought-after office space, philanthropic foundations, and a wide assortment of upscale homes and condos all coexist. But it has taken a great deal of forethought, care and caution.

Each new development in the neighborhood has always warranted an extra measure of sensitivity toward neighbors and careful consideration of the project’s impact. Effort must be made to work collaboratively with the community and heed its concerns. Cherry Creek’s developers have always had to pay special heed not to contribute to the area’s traffic congestion and tight squeeze on parking.

City Hall essentially would be taking a wrecking ball to all of that if it were to rezone 13 acres on the west side of the Cherry Creek Mall for an unprecedented, massive, mixed-use development of high-rises called Cherry Creek West. Its seven buildings, ranging from eight to 13 stories, would encompass 750,000 square feet of office space and 90,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, along with 600 residential units.

The impact on the surrounding neighborhood would be cataclysmic.

Traffic would bottleneck for blocks on already-swamped arterials like University Boulevard,1st Avenue and Steele Street. Cherry Creek doesn’t have the mass transit access of many other commercial districts in Denver – there’s no light-rail stop – and it doesn’t have broad enough traffic thoroughfares. It would be gridlocked to an extent unseen anywhere in Denver. And that’s not to mention the added din of all the extra traffic.

The business and residential towers would eclipse the surrounding neighborhood and wall out its views of mountains and city scapes. The throngs of foot traffic would be more reminiscent of Hong Kong than Colorado. Even the project’s extensive underground parking could be susceptible to flooding given its location on a high water table alongside Cherry Creek itself.

Construction is projected to take years until buildout a decade from now. Consider how shipments of building supplies, the movement of heavy equipment and construction workers’ own personal vehicles for so massive a project would compound Cherry Creek’s traffic and parking woes.

Sensitive development means serving not only the wide-ranging marketplace but also the nearby community. The Cherry Creek West project as currently envisioned instead would undermine its community and its very character.

The bulk of the neighborhood will become a part of Denver City Council member Amanda Sawyer’s newly reconfigured District 5 in July. We trust Sawyer, a strong neighborhood advocate, will be sensitive to the Cherry Creek community’s concerns.

Rezoning the proposed Cherry Creek West site to make way for such an outsized project would pave the way for a debacle. Denver City Hall has better things to do than uproot what makes Cherry Creek work so well.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board