Urban-renewal wars return to Colorado Legislature
“A pair of Colorado state senators filed the first — but not last — attempt of the 2015 legislative session at urban-renewal reform on Wednesday, reviving a year-old debate over whether major changes to the current process would stifle commercial redevelopment in blighted areas of cities.
Senate Bill 135, sponsored by Sens. Beth Martinez Humenik, R-Commerce City, and Cheri Jahn, D-Wheat Ridge is not a major shake-up of current law. It takes two aspects of a bill vetoed last year by Gov. John Hickenlooper — most notably, a requirement that urban-renewal authority boards be expanded to include representation of the county government — and offers a reform measure that Colorado mayors who opposed the 2014 effort can support.
What it does not include is the provision of last year’s bill that led to its veto — a requirement that city governments that designate that all local tax-revenue increases from an urban-renewal area be used to redevelop that area must set aside the same percentage of their sales-tax revenue as the percentage of property-tax revenue that counties give up in the deals.”
Sealover, Ed. Denver Business Journal 28 January 2015.