EDITORIAL: Icebergs of Ignorance, Part Two
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The Pagosa Springs Town Council will be hosting a public hearing tonight, Tuesday November 5, at the Ross Aragon Community Center at 5pm. The subject of the public hearing is a resolution, Resolution 2019-18, which — if approved by the Council — would initiate the creation of an Urban Renewal Authority (URA), a new layer of government encompassing the entire Town limits. You can download the 28-page Council packet here.
The 28-page packet doesn’t come close to addressing the complexity of this issue.
Urban Renewal Authorities and similar governmental agencies are common all across the US, but they are, in a sense, ‘dinosaurs that somehow never went extinct’. The laws written to allow for these authorities date back to the 1950s when the federal government was doling out money to eliminate the slums that had appeared in America’s larger cities during the first half of the 20th century. The law governing urban renewal in Colorado was passed in 1958, and was initially used almost exclusively within the City of Denver.
By 1975, however, the federal money had dried up, so Colorado’s Urban Renewal Law was updated to allow cities and towns to use Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to fund ‘urban renewal’ schemes. TIF funding was invented in California as a form of corporate welfare that can make even a marginal development project profitable for the developer. Using a TIF, a municipality extracts property tax revenues from surrounding government entities to reimburse certain developer’s costs within the town limits. California has since outlawed its TIF-funded ‘redevelopment agencies.’
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read the entire article
Hudson, Bill. Daily Pagosa Post 5 November 2019.
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