The Denver City Council voted unanimously Monday to shoot down a rezoning request for a nine-story office building off Colorado Boulevard.

The building’s owner says he is not sure how its plans “got lost in translation,” leading to a no vote.

“There’s a lot of animosity and misinformation on what we’re trying to do,” Vohn Regensburger told BusinessDen.

Regensburger co-owns and manages the 154,000-square-foot Belcaro Place building at 3801 E. Florida Ave. in the Cory-Merrill neighborhood. The 3-acre property is covered by Denver’s old zoning code, last updated in 2010.

Last year, Regensburger started the process of rezoning it into the new code under S-MX-5, a suburban designation generally allowing five-story buildings with a variety of commercial and residential usages.

That plan failed to win the support of a single City Council member on Monday.

“The proposal in its current form cannot be said to be protective of public health, safety and welfare,” said Paul Kashmann, who represents the district where the building is located.

A 50-foot-wide stretch of trees and green space on the western edge of the property was at the center of neighborhood opposition to the rezoning. While the 1980s office building fronts a busy commercial thoroughfare, the green space sits along Jackson Street, a quieter residential road.

Neighbors believed a rezoning would allow the removal of the trees and green space, which they see as an important buffer. They believed it would also lead to increased traffic.

“Apparently, the original plan was to put a four- or five-story addition on the building complex over there,” Chris Olson, president of the Cory-Merrill neighborhood organization, told BusinessDen on Tuesday.

“The neighbors that were most concerned about it lived right across the street.”

Regensburger said he has no plan to develop the green space.

“This is such a cursory thing … We are not developers and we can’t do it ourselves,” he told BusinessDen.

“We just want to see what our property could potentially do with the new zoning designation. It’s a very cursory exploration at this point.”

The vote to approve or deny the request was postponed twice before, in September and October. Councilman Kashmann had two questions for the building’s ownership at the September meeting.

“Remind me what your intentions are, should you be successful in rezoning this property,” he asked.

“Right now, there are no intentions. The intention of the ownership was to understand what their criteria would be going forward, recognizing that they had a parcel that was pretty old [under] Denver zoning code and wanted to make sure it was compliant under the current code,” said David Budrow, an architect representing the building’s owners.

“What are your thoughts regarding the green space?” Kashmann asked next.

“I know the ownership has a view that the green space, the trees, it’s an amenity for the property. So any development that they would want to do relative to utilization of green space, they’d want to preserve as much of it as possible,” Burdow said.

Kashmann was not sold by Burdow’s response. He told the council he was a “hard no” and moved to postpone the matter. He added that he was concerned over the “55” trees on the property, an issue he raised again on Tuesday.

“We don’t have 55 trees, we have 24,” Regensburger said. “I have a site plan so he misspoke on that.”

It is also technically already possible to build on the green space with its current zoning, according to Regensburger. Documents prepared by city staff in connection with the proposed rezoning said that at least 15 feet of green space must be preserved for right-of-way purposes and that the forestry department would likely not permit the mass removal of the trees there.

“We don’t have much more to offer than what we’ve talked about. They think we’re up to something more egregious,” Regensburger said.

Regensberger has been busy maintaining his building in the meantime, he said. The same day as the vote, he penned a lease with a new tenant that makes the building 100% occupied. He’s spent millions over his eight-year ownership improving the property.

“Were doing very well with the office building, it’s what we know and what we do.”