"You can't replace this. This is a lot more than just baseball fields."
That's what Thomas Click, vice president of North Boulder Little League, told a Denver TV crew last fall, not long after a hand-painted "Save Iris Fields" sign went up at the corner of Iris Avenue and Broadway. For nearly 70 years, kids ages 5 to 12 have played ball on four diamonds tucked behind a cluster of Boulder County office buildings there. If you live in Kalmia Estates, you've probably driven past that corner more times than you can count, maybe without ever registering that the whole 17.5-acre site, offices, ballfields and all, was quietly up for sale.
It isn't anymore. But the way it got saved is a better story than most people around here have actually heard, and the amenity everyone hoped would come with it hasn't shown up yet.
Five Bids, One Winner, And $22 Million Left On The Table
Boulder County put its North Broadway Complex, five office buildings totaling more than 108,000 square feet plus the Iris ballfields, out for bid last year. Five offers came in. The highest, $48 million from local developer John Kirkland, would have wiped out the diamonds entirely to build new housing, including roughly 200 affordable units, with a one-time $5 million payment to the Little League as a parting gift.
County commissioners said no to that money. On November 18, 2025, they voted 2-1 to sell instead to Academy Boulder, known locally as The Academy, for $26 million, a gap of roughly $22 million walked away from specifically to keep the fields standing. Commissioners Claire Levy and Ashley Stolzmann backed the deal. Commissioner Marta Loachamin was the lone no vote, arguing the county had passed up a real chance to add more affordable housing at a moment when the state is short on both.
That vote is the headline. The organizing behind it is the part worth understanding if you live nearby.
How A Coalition With No Government Money Out-Bid A Developer
Neighbors didn't start by trying to beat a bid. Early in 2025, when word got out that the county planned to sell, residents asked the city of Boulder to simply buy the land and fold it into the parks system. City staff said there was no budget for it, not with Boulder facing a projected shortfall in its 2026 budget. So the residents changed strategy. Starting that spring, a group calling itself the Save Iris Committee began reaching out to developers on its own, looking for one willing to build around a vision the neighborhood had already sketched out: keep the diamonds, add housing that wouldn't overwhelm the block, and do something about the fact that there's nowhere to grab a coffee or a sandwich within walking distance of most of these homes.
They found a match in Academy Boulder, which already runs three senior living communities in town, including Mapleton Hill, under two miles from Iris Fields. On August 18, 2025, the Save Iris Committee, North Boulder Little League, the Broadway and Juniper Condo Association, and the Juniper Townhomes Association jointly submitted a proposal to the county with Academy Boulder attached as the developer.
"It came from parents, players, and neighbors who refused to let Iris Fields sit in limbo."
That's Aquiles La Grave, one of the residents who helped drive the effort, describing where the plan actually originated. Not a developer's pitch deck. Not a city planning document. A neighborhood that decided to write its own terms first and go find someone to build them.
The two competing visions, side by side:
- The Academy's $26 million bid: keeps all four ballfields, transfers them to the city's parks system, and builds roughly 100 senior living units on the county-office footprint, with 10 units set aside for senior-living staff and an estimated $13 million generated for the city's affordable housing program through a cash-in-lieu arrangement.
- John Kirkland's $48 million bid: demolishes the ballfields entirely, replaces the whole site with new housing including about 200 affordable units, and offers the league a $5 million payout instead of a place to play.
The higher number lost. That's the part of this story that doesn't fit the usual pattern of how these fights end.
What's Actually Going Up Next Door, And What Isn't Confirmed Yet
The senior living piece is the most concrete part of the deal. Academy Boulder plans to build on the western half of the parcel, where the county's office buildings currently sit, not on the outfield grass. The company has said it wants the design to encourage interaction between residents and Little League families rather than wall the two groups off from each other.
Some longtime neighbors have also pointed to a century-old building on the site, reportedly dating to 1918 and used historically as part of a county work farm, as a piece of local history they'd like to see preserved and reused rather than torn down. That detail hasn't been confirmed through official county documentation in the reporting so far, but it's part of why some in the coalition pushed for adaptive reuse language in early conversations rather than a clean teardown.
Here's the part worth being clear-eyed about: the original neighborhood proposal submitted in August described space for a restaurant, a café, and a general store on the west side of the site, the kind of walkable amenity Click told reporters the area has been missing for years. Later reporting described those retail ideas as things Academy Boulder has discussed, not commitments locked into the final purchase agreement. If you've been telling people a coffee shop is coming to the corner, it's more accurate right now to say a coffee shop has been talked about. Nothing here promises it will happen.
One more piece of context explains why density mattered so much to the people negotiating this. The city has separate plans to redesign Iris Avenue itself, narrowing it from four lanes to two. Neighbors pushing the Academy deal specifically cited that road diet as a reason to keep the new development modest in scale rather than maximize units on the site.
Where This Stands As Of This Summer
As of a Boulder Reporting Lab piece published in July 2026, the Academy's Iris Fields project is still listed among senior housing developments "expected over the next several years" in Boulder, alongside a planned expansion at Frasier Meadows and a project at Presbyterian Manor. That's useful to know if you've been expecting to see construction fencing go up any day. Ground hasn't broken yet.
In the meantime, Boulder County is leasing the property back from the new owners through 2026 while it finishes moving customer-facing departments, things like public health, human services, and housing assistance, out of the Iris Avenue offices and into a new hub at 2525 28th Street. That transition was expected to wrap by late 2026. So the office buildings on the west side of the site are still functioning county buildings for now, and the ballfields look exactly like they did last season.
If you walk or bike past that corner this fall, the visible changes will likely start on the office side long before anything happens near the outfield fence. The diamonds were the one piece of this whole fight that residents refused to negotiate on, and for now, that's the piece that's staying put no matter what else gets built around it.
Kalmia Estates sits close enough to this corridor that changes here ripple through daily routines, whether that means a new place to grab lunch eventually or just knowing why the traffic pattern on Iris might shift in the coming years. If you want a neighbor's read on what's actually changing around here versus what's still just talk, Maureen McCarthy has been paying attention to this corner of Boulder for a long time. And if all this local movement has you wondering what it means for your own address, get your instant home valuation and see where things stand today.
