The City of Lakewood has been busy this year overhauling its zoning code and updating its comprehensive plan. This week, we made front page news over a plan to purchase Emory Elementary School from the Jefferson County School Board in order to sell the school building to Jeffco’s historic poverty-fighting non-profit: The Action Center.

The Action Center has a 57-year legacy in Lakewood and originated from the passion of women of faith across multiple congregations in Lakewood to help their neighbors in need.

From food and clothing assistance to workforce training, if you can think of a way for an organization to help people in poverty they have probably done it throughout their history. They now have a time-limited and unique opportunity to expand their operation into a larger facility at Emory Elementary School’s now closed building.

But this opportunity is being hampered by someone with a litigious track record fighting the city of Lakewood: former councilwoman and lawyer, Anita Springsteen.

Springsteen has filed three separate lawsuits to quixotically litigate the actions of the City of Lakewood in court, including one while serving on the city council. Public record of her tenure with the city reveals dramatic arguments with the mayor to personal attacks on the character of city council colleagues. Much of her time on City Council can be summed up as repeat lone dissenter.

And so we in Lakewood yet again observe Springsteen, serving as both plaintiff and counsel, taking the city to court.

For this plan to work, the city of Lakewood will effectively trade the facility on Emory Elementary’s property with the Action Center’s current property. The fruit of this municipal do-si-do creates a larger facility to address poverty in our city, gives the city an opportunity to develop supportive house as a part of its plan to fight homelessness, and provides the city many acres of valuable open space in the process. This is the definition of a win-win.

But Springsteen, based on the tenor of her public statements and the prose of her legal declarations in court, is offended that a property that reportedly is worth 17 million dollars is not being sold privately.

Her argument in court, however, is not about the merits of this exciting plan. Instead, she is accusing Lakewood of violating the Colorado Open Meetings Act.

Her argument would be more convincing if it were actually made in good faith. But Springsteen seems more interested in railing against the merits of the city of Lakewood’s plans for Emory Elementary rather than the importance of civic transparency by Colorado municipalities. In spite of the basis of her lawsuit, she seems desperate to make whatever point she can against this sale, even stooping to distastefully imply that somehow this has something to do with Evergreen High School not having a School Resource Officer on site during the tragic shooting that occurred there in September. The students and staff at Evergreen High deserve an apology from Ms. Springsteen.

The Colorado Open Meetings Act should be an important way that we hold government accountable to meaningful transparency and not a legal technicality that pugnacious lawyers exploit when something happens in our government that they don’t like.

Emory Elementary is a wonderful location for the work the Action Center does in our city. We are excited to see this come to fruition in Lakewood, but time is running out. The Action Center is holding on to time limited federal funding dispersed during the pandemic meant for innovations like this and will not be able to invest it in this effort should nothing happen before the end of the year.

I hope this lawsuit of Springsteen’s fails. If Lakewood can vote to move forward, we will be able to make a massive dent on the systematic realities of poverty in our city.

Rev. Ben A. David Hensley is an ordained Deacon in the United Methodist Church and serves as the pastor of Lakewood United Methodist Church.