Home Care In Layfayette, CO

Disagreement over a burial ban at the Lafayette Cemetery remains unresolved as some in the community acknowledge steps toward a solution and others ask the city’s leaders for more information.

Lafayette officials have estimated that about 150 individuals still own one or more plots at the cemetery, with roughly 270 unused plots remaining on record. But since November, casket burials have not been allowed, a restriction that could be made permanent by city leaders due to concern that the site is at capacity.

Roughly 100 people arrived at the Lafayette Public Library on Monday to attend a second “listening and dialogue session” with city officials and a city-hired facilitator about the cemetery, after a session earlier in June ended without a clear path forward.

At Monday’s meeting, city officials put forth several options, listed on a scale from “simpler to implement” to “extremely difficult and potentially unlawful.”

Among the “simpler” options, according to the city’s scale, would be maintaining a “case by case determination for casket burials.” Another possibility would be waiving fees for cremains burials, which are still allowed at the cemetery.

Also on that end of the scale: adjusting the amount the city offers to buy back cemetery plots — after the initial offer made to plot owners was a $1,500 refund from the city — or creating a specific section at the Lafayette-owned Coal Creek Memorial Cemetery in Louisville.

One attendee at this week’s session said an adjusted buyback amount “would be really appreciated by a lot of people.”

“I definitely think that should be an option. I think they should have as many options as possible,” added the speaker, who said her grandfather is a plot owner.

The “difficult” paths forward, according to the scale presented by the city, include any sort of cemetery expansion or “reconfigurement.”

Also on that side of the scale would be disinterring — or removing — any remains from unknown burials in the cemetery. Chris Keller of LINc Partners, who a city official said was hired to “assist us with burials,” told the room on Monday evening that disinterment would be illegal, though he did not cite a specific law.

‘I would like to have it dug’

City officials issued the moratorium, or temporary stop, for casket burials after human remains were found in what was thought to be an open grave site last year. That discovery prompted involvement from the Office of the State Archaeologist of Colorado, which directed the city to conduct survey work to identify casketed graves in the cemetery, including possible unmarked graves.

Results from the survey — done with ground-penetrating radar — identified about 3,500 graves “and/or full grave shafts,” while only about 2,200 markers are visible on the surface. State Archaeologist Holly Norton in May recommended closing the Lafayette Cemetery to casket burials “permanently.”

On Monday, Keller said that survey had both “false negatives and false positives.”

A false negative, Keller said, is when the survey says an area is clear underground but it isn’t really. An example of that limitation arose in February, when a casket burial was approved for what the survey had indicated was an open plot. (The city manager can make exceptions to the moratorium.) During that burial, staff discovered a casket already in the space, and had to find another location.

There are also false positives, Keller said, “when the GPR says there’s something there, and it’s not a casket, it’s a tree or it’s something else entirely.”

Some speakers in the crowd on Monday took the microphone and said they need more information about why they can’t be buried next to loved ones.

“If you find something in my plot, but we don’t know what it is, I would like to have it dug. … And if it’s a rock, take the dang rock out, and then I can be buried,” one speaker said.

Others questioned whether there is any “legal loophole” that would allow for the disinterment of remains from plots owned by living individuals.

“I know this is a creepy thing … But the reality is that, the liability of the town, and unfortunately it’s on your shoulders, to now make sure that we do the right thing for the people that actually have the deed to the plot,” one speaker said.

Lafayette Mayor Saul Tapia Vega said removing human remains from the cemetery would be “losing touch” with the city’s history.

Those buried in the plots are “the people that literally and figuratively built the roads that we walk today,” Tapia Vega said.

“We celebrate our ancestors, and every time we dig on what the GPR data tells us is likely a body, what we’re doing is desecrating the burial in the final resting place of people who came before us,” he added.

‘Imperfectly get to a better outcome’

The Lafayette City Council could have signed a resolution to end the moratorium and enact a prohibition on casket burials at its May 5 meeting, still allowing for cremation burials, but, after backlash from the Lafayette community, postponed the decision indefinitely.

A subcommittee dedicated to the cemetery issue was formed on June 2, when the council voted unanimously to appoint Tapia Vega and Councilmember Kyle Beaulieu to the effort in collaboration with city staff.

Beaulieu on Monday asked that plot owners contact the city to voice their preferred path forward, as officials have incomplete contact information about who still owns plots, he said. The city is encouraging plot holders to contact the “City’s Cemetery help line” at 303-604-3511 to schedule individual discussions regarding their plots and preferred options.

“We want to honor your wishes, but also we have to recognize that there are limits of physics. There just is not enough room. No one here is fighting you because they want to disrespect your family,” Beaulieu said.

“What we’re trying to do is imperfectly get to a better outcome,” Beaulieu added.

At the meeting’s conclusion, Tapia Vega said the subcommittee will review feedback from the community session before determining next steps.

AdventHealth cleared another hurdle for its plan to replace Avista hospital in Louisville with a new five-story, 371,600-square-foot hospital building on a piece of land in the city known as Redtail Ridge.

The Louisville City Council on Tuesday approved the project’s final development plan, which also includes a 62,000-square-foot medical office building and a helicopter pad. Now the project will be allowed to move forward, into the process for construction and permitting.

Under the plan presented to the council, the first phase of development would include the hospital and medical office building. Years down the line, a second phase would aim to expand the new hospital and add a second medical office building.

Council members across the board expressed excitement about the project’s next steps, which will advance a long-standing vision to develop the Redtail Ridge site, a roughly 400-acre piece of land seated on the north side of U.S. 36, near Monarch High School.

Redtail Ridge has been envisioned as a campus that includes a mix of hospital, medical office, light industrial, commercial and office uses. Two other proposals for the site — an industrial building and a “life science building,” according to the city — are in earlier stages of Louisville‘s development process.

“I’m very much looking forward to breaking ground on this project,” Mayor Pro Tem Barbara Hamlington said of the hospital plan.

The hospital building could initially include about 150 inpatient rooms, along with operating rooms and an emergency department, a project narrative says. It’s expected to run around the clock, with around 500 staff members across all shifts. The medical office building is expected to have an additional 50 to 60 staff members. The hospital project would preserve about 63% of the site as “open space, landscaping, and pedestrian amenity areas,” the city says, including roughly 400 trees and nearly 4,000 “low-water plantings.”

The approval from Louisville leaders comes weeks after AdventHealth announced it would assume operations of three Denver-area hospitals owned by Intermountain Health. Under the joint venture, AdventHealth will oversee daily operations at Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge, Platte Valley Hospital in Brighton and Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette.

AdventHealth says its existing Avista location in Louisville, at 100 Health Park Drive, isn’t big enough.

“To better serve Louisville and the surrounding communities, AdventHealth needs both a different location and a different building,” reads the 2025 project narrative submitted to the City Council.

“They need better access for their patients, and room to expand and grow to meet the evolving health care needs of the communities they are caring for,” the narrative adds.

The AdventHealth hospital system purchased land in Redtail Ridge around the start of 2025 for $34 million.