Centennial, Arapahoe County, Colorado, USA

Notes: Centennial, Colorado
  Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial,_Colorado). 30 January 2014. Accessed on 2014-03-14.

     The City of Centennial is a Home Rule City located in Arapahoe County, Colorado, United States, and part of the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area. The city had a total population of 100,377 in 2010 census.[3] Centennial is the tenth-most populous municipality in the state of Colorado and its 2001 incorporation was the largest in U.S. history. Centennial is ranked as the 15th safest[5] city in the country.

     The City of Centennial was formed February 7, 2001, from portions of unincorporated Arapahoe County, including the former Castlewood and Southglenn census-designated places (CDPs). The citizens of the area had voted to incorporate on September 12, 2000, choosing Centennial as the official name during the vote. The name reflects Colorado’s admission to the Union as the 38th state in 1876, the centennial year of the United States Declaration of Independence.[6] The state of Colorado is nicknamed the "Centennial State".[6]
     Incorporation was approved by 77% of the voters, and the population of the area at over 100,000 made it the largest incorporation in U.S. history as of its creation. The city was incorporated in large part to prevent further annexations of unincorporated areas by the city of Greenwood Village in an attempt to improve its tax base. The taxes generated from businesses in unincorporated portions of Arapahoe County funded the majority of the county's services, including road work. A number of court cases eventually established the right of incorporation to take precedence over the right of annexation.
     The city was incorporated on a promise to keep city taxes at 1%. (One of the campaigns against incorporation had appealed to voters to maintain the 3.8% sales tax of the unincorporated county.) According to the City of Centennial website, the current sales tax rate is two and one-half times the promised rate, at 2.5%.
     Since the city is relatively new, many people in the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area do not recognize the area by the name “Centennial”, especially since neighboring Aurora, Englewood and Littleton are assigned by the United States Postal Service as the “default” place names for the ZIP codes serving Centennial. Thus, mailing addresses in which “Aurora”, “Englewood” or “Littleton” appear may actually be in Centennial. This causes considerable confusion, as Centennial and Englewood do not even share a common boundary, while some portions of Centennial are surrounded by Aurora and vice versa.

     Centennial covers 27.9 square miles (72 km2). Centennial is roughly divided in half by Interstate 25, with most of its business and entertainment centers lying west of the highway. The city's boundaries are highly irregular and evocative of a gerrymander, particularly the overwhelmingly residential eastern portions of the city, which appear with Foxfield, portions of Aurora, and unincorporated areas as a distorted checkerboard on a map.

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GEOGRAPHICAL COORDINATES

GeoHack (WGS84)
• 39° 35' 47" N, 104° 50' 38" W
• 39.596389, -104.843889

RootsMagic GeoCode
39° 34' 45.01" N, 104° 52' 35.00" W

USGS National Map Viewer (manual placement on imagery)
• 39° 35' 15.714" N, 104° 55' 17.923" W
• 39.58770°, -104.92165°
OpenStreetMap

Latitude: , Longitude:

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