A developer seeking to acquire the 101-acre Baxter International headquarters site, annex it into Deerfield and build a massive industrial business park, has pulled its petition after fierce opposition from residents of Deerfield, Riverwoods and some surrounding towns.

The village of Deerfield announced Wednesday evening that Bridge Industrial had withdrawn its application from consideration. A real estate and zoning lawyer retained by residents opposed to the project was set to make a presentation against the proposal at a Deerfield Plan Commission meeting Thursday, which was canceled.

The decision to withdraw the application jump-started celebrations among a group of residents, including some who live directly across from the Baxter site in the large Thorngate subdivision, which would have shared a single stoplight with the business park.

“This is the story of a community banding together in a short amount of time, and making a massive difference,” Thorngate resident Caron Blitz said. “It’s an example demonstrating that even if the odds are against you, you can still make a difference and have a good outcome.

“People just stepped up with different areas of expertise, we worked together and made it happen,” she said.

The fate of the Baxter headquarters site remains up in the air. Baxter could find another buyer, or it could continue to wait to see if Bridge Industrial intends to pitch the Lake County Board on the idea, whether it would take place on a different or similar scale.

In May, an estimated 600 people attended a Plan Commission meeting where a team of Bridge Industrial representatives presented to the commissioners and took questions, while audience members displayed signs urging action against the developer’s plans.

An April Plan Commission meeting was postponed because so many people showed up that the space was considered too crowded by officials to conduct a public meeting in accordance with the Open Meetings Act.

Residents circulated a petition against the proposal that garnered more than 5,000 signatures, put up signs all around Deerfield and Riverwoods and inundated local political officials, including Deerfield Mayor Dan Shapiro and Plan Commission members, with emails and calls relating to the proposal.

Thorngate resident Lisa Rosen worked furiously for weeks to raise awareness about what was being proposed, how residents could “speak, up, show up and sign up” to support the opposition effort and let village leaders know what constituents’ opinions are.

Rosen said that Deerfield, “should not be known as the truck capital of the world.”

“The lesson I want my kids to know is you stand up for what you believe in,” Rosen said. “When you make a stand, others believe and you come together and you can create great things. And I do believe this is a great win, because it was not the right project for the Baxter land.”

Rosen added that she hopes people in the area were paying attention to the way Riverwoods and Deerfield residents rose up against the effort to bring a massive industrial development to their doorsteps, after similar developments in Northbrook, Glenview and Waukegan were pushed through successfully and are now in use.

Highland Park-based real estate and zoning attorney David Meek was prepared to make the opposing argument before the Plan Commission Thursday. He worked with a team of consultants and the oppositional group’s findings, Meek explained, drastically contrasted with Bridge’s assessment of traffic congestion, environmental and air quality impacts, among other things.

Meek said that Bridge’s presentation categorized two buildings as general warehouses, rather than high-cube warehousing or distribution centers, which “create a lot of idling trucks,” a concern Bridge officials attempted to downplay before the Plan Commission.

“Our environmental air quality report would have talked about the increased emissions, and the worse quality of the emissions to come from idling diesel trucks and how that hadn’t been in the developer’s environmental assessment,” he said.

Plans for an indoor recreational facility to be leased by the Deerfield Park District were quietly scrapped ahead of the May meeting, in favor of an outdoor, 155,940-square-foot recreational facility. Neither seemed to play well with residents.

Thorngate Homeowners Association President Barbara Raff called the residents’ victory, a “David and Goliath” situation.

“ (This) was a coming together of a community, unlike we’ve seen in a long time, in a very positive way,” she said. “It brought together Deerfield and Riverwoods residents to fight this.”

Raff said residents were “very fortunate” they had the “means to pull all this together,” from hiring an attorney to printing signs, and spending countless hours calling and communicating with neighbors and other residents about what could be at stake.

“There are many communities where these huge, industrial warehouses and truck depots are being put that don’t have the ability to do what we did,” she said. “I firmly believe that there needs to be legislation now at the state level that guides local municipalities on where these are appropriate, and where they are not.”

Earlier this week, Deerfield released more than 2,000 pages of emails between village staff and Bridge representatives after receiving public records requests seeking any communications between the village and Bridge. The corresponding communications show that discussions among village staff and Bridge in November which included feedback about the proposal and the Deerfield Mayor Dan Shapiro’s changing attitudes toward it, as conveyed to Bridge by village staff.

Some residents believe Bridge representatives used tentative feedback from the village about its proposal to boost negotiations with Baxter.

In a Dec. 7 email thread, Assistant Village Manager Andrew Lichterman wrote to Bridge Chicago Region Partner Jonathan Pozerycki that the, “Mayor is coming around to the industrial nature of the site and appreciates all of your responsiveness and cooperation” regarding Bridge’s intentions to acquire the site.

Pozerycki wrote to Lichterman earlier that day that he wanted to “circle back” with the village so that Bridge could provide information to Baxter that would “help us with contract timing.”

Attempts to reach representatives from Bridge Industrial and Deerfield Mayor Dan Shapiro were unsuccessful.

Meek said Thursday’s hearing would have been a strong opportunity to get important factors involving similar industrial business developments on public record and in front of an everyday audience.

“There was a missed opportunity to demonstrate to the Chicago metro area, the municipalities and the development community, that we need to develop a better way of evaluating this kind of business or development,” he said.

“It has very unique attributes, and we were going to point to how in California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, there has been a regional or statewide coordinated effort to figure out how to plan for these, and how to create regulations and performance standards that would help guide better decision making about where these facilities,” Meek continued.

He said that if Bridge takes a proposal to the Lake County Board and its Department of Planning, Building and Development next, “the community would fight” and be “fully engaged with that proposal.”

Blitz fired off a warning shot to Bridge Industrial, and other like-minded developers, that area residents would challenge any similar plans they take to other governmental entities.

“Don’t mess with us!” Blitz wrote in an email to the News-Sun. “We’re smart. We’re organized. We’re united in preserving the beauty of our community.”