LAFAYETTE — It’s not your ordinary municipal squabble.

In a standoff with Erie over the future of a retail-ready site at the corner of Arapahoe Road and U.S. 287, Lafayette has taken the unprecedented step of attempting to lay claim to its neighbor’s land by filing a condemnation action in court.

It wants to take possession of more than 20 acres of Erie’s property in order to provide “a buffer through open space” that will “protect Lafayette’s unique community character.” In layman’s terms, Lafayette wants to shield the residents of its Beacon Hill neighborhood from whatever ends up getting built at Erie’s Nine Mile Corner.

According to several municipal land-use attorneys contacted by The Denver Post, never before has a Colorado town or city attempted to take by eminent domain a large chunk of property owned by the city next door. Lafayette filed the lawsuit in July.

“We in Lafayette appreciate having our own identity, and we think it is important to preserve that,” said Lafayette Mayor Christine Berg.

Erie Town Trustee Mark Gruber doesn’t buy Berg’s argument for a second. Lafayette, he said, wants to ensure a significant portion of the sales tax generated in east Boulder County continues spilling into the city’s coffers.

“It’s a typical cross-border war over sales tax,” he said. “They have $15 million in sales tax annually and we have $4 million in sales tax — and they like it that way.”

Robert Widner, a Centennial-based municipal attorney, said condemnation for the purpose of building a bridge, road or water treatment facility is one thing. Lafayette’s claim, he said, will hinge on whether the city can convince a judge that condemning land to create a green belt serves the public good, as is required by Colorado’s eminent domain statutes.

“Whether a public purpose can be found in providing a buffer around a community is novel,” Widner said.

While Lafayette’s legal tactic may be new, the dispute itself is just the latest in a time-honored tradition of municipal sparring over borders, annexations and retail opportunities in Colorado, whether it’s Westminster and Thornton competing for a new Walmart or Centennial keeping the state’s first Ikea store from straying to other cities with $18 million in financial incentives.

And it’s not the only fight going on right now that has ended up in court. Timnath in June sued Severance after the small but fast-growing Weld County town annexed 270 acres in Timnath’s “growth management area” for a residential development.

Timnath claims that Severance hopscotched far from its town center to grab a piece of land that was long ago identified as being a part of Timnath’s long-term growth area. April Getchius, Timnath’s town manager, said it wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last fight that her town of 3,000 residents has with neighbors over growth plans.

“It’s symptomatic of how we grow in northern Colorado and the pressures we are under,” she said.

Those pressures include a burgeoning population brought about by a steady influx of new people moving into Colorado, giving once tiny communities – such as Erie – and still tiny but rapidly growing places – such as Timnath and Severance, both of which are southeast of Fort Collins – the impetus to lay claim to available land for development plans that may not be realized for decades.

The inevitable result is clashing between neighbors, according to Widner.

“It’s a little hard not to have the same interests in a piece of property as your neighbor when you’re up against each other,” he said. “It’s not land grabbing as much as it is planning for the future.”

But planning for the future can get very messy very quickly.

In the case of Lafayette and Erie, blood began to boil early this year when rumors surfaced on social media that the King Soopers in Lafayette wanted to relocate to Nine Mile Corner in Erie. That prompted Lafayette to announce that it was launching an investigation into Erie’s earlier acquisition of the corner parcel and its plans there.

In July, Erie offered to provide a setback at the site that is consistent with Lafayette’s own land use code on buffers. Lafayette filed suit a week later.

Erie Town Administrator A.J. Krieger pulled no punches in a message posted on the town’s website, accusing Lafayette of “mudslinging” and undertaking “phony investigations.”

“Maybe at some point we can all at least be honest about what Lafayette’s really trying to do here — eliminate competition for sales tax dollars,” wrote Krieger, who declined to comment for this story.

Gruber, the Erie trustee, said Lafayette’s plans to develop a 30-acre commercial project directly across U.S. 287 from Nine Mile Corner is evidence that competitive advantage, and not open space preservation, is his neighboring city’s paramount goal. If Lafayette can hang up Erie’s Nine Mile Corner plans long enough through litigation, he said, it can establish retail dominance along the U.S. 287 corridor.

“It’s a tactic to affect the marketplace,” he said.

Berg, Lafayette’s mayor, said she could not comment on the buffer issue because of the ongoing lawsuit, but she vehemently denied that her city was trying to do anything other than provide protection to its residents from a future mixed-use development nearby.

“It has nothing to do with sales tax,” she said.

Berg noted that Erie can still develop its corner as long as a buffer is in place. And she noted that her neighbor to the north has far more acreage within its borders than does Lafayette, and has potentially far more commercial clusters to develop in the decades ahead.

By contrast, Timnath and Severance are still trying to determine their borders. With a 7 1/2-mile separation between their respective downtowns, they’ve been able to largely avoid butting up against each other through their annexation efforts until this year.

That’s when Severance made a play for the Buffalo Creek project, a proposed community of up to 750 homes just east of Timnath Reservoir and adjacent to the town’s municipal border. Timnath immediately cried foul.

“Severance jumped into our urban growth area that we identified 10 years ago,” said Getchius, Timnath’s town manager. “We are in a much better position to service this area with a professional police force and a robust capital improvement plan. It just isn’t good planning or responsible governance to have a hodgepodge of developments in this area.”

But Greg Bell, Severance’s town attorney, said because Buffalo Creek would be in Weld County, just over the line from Larimer County, his town would be the better service provider because fire and law enforcement protection and schools would all come out of Weld County. Timnath is in Larimer County.

Bell expects there to be further conflict between the towns until they can hammer out intergovernmental agreements, or IGAs, that serve as the guiding documents between dozens of Colorado communities.

“In the long term, these things usually get worked out through agreements,” Bell said. “In the short term, it’s chaotic.”

Just last month, Arvada and Westminster hammered out a 40-year IGA that both cities are confident will minimize conflict over the future of vacant land west of Standley Lake. The agreement defines, and limits, where each city can annex land in the future.

Westminster’s director of community development, John Carpenter, said his city’s primary motivation for the pact was keeping water that flows into Standley Lake clean and pure, especially in light of the rapid development that has been occurring in northwest Arvada.

“It’s a reality that things change, and we want to have predictability,” Carpenter said.

Bill Ray, Arvada’s deputy city manager, said his city has been forging IGAs with its neighbors for years. It has a similar agreement with Golden: Golden has annexation say on property south of Van Bibber Creek and Arvada retains that influence north of the creek.

“It’s just making our land-use plans harmonious with each other,” he said.

And harmony is good for business, said Andy Montgomery, CEO of the Northern Colorado Economic Alliance. Fights between communities can have a “chilling impact” from an economic development standpoint because they create uncertainty for businesses looking to set up shop.

Montgomery’s hope is that as Weld and Larimer counties continue growing in the coming years, parochial battles will “fade into regionalism” as municipal borders are eclipsed by the overall economic fortunes of the larger area.