Proposal to change Colorado urban-renewal process clears first hurdle
“House Minority Leader Brian DelGrosso, R-Loveland, said he has no intentions of ending or even slowing the increasingly common projects in which cities offer tax-increment financing to get retail or mixed-use developments into certain areas. But he believes his House Bill 1375 will send the signal that counties that have complained of being left out of a process that costs them some tax dollars need a seat at the table too.
“There is no project out there that has been done that couldn’t have been done after this bill is passed,” DelGrosso said.
City leaders and developers have lauded urban renewal authorities as their best way to take blighted areas and spur redevelopment of them. A number of retail and business areas — including the Belmar shopping center and residential area that replaced a run-down mall in Lakewood — would not have been developed without the ability to use urban-renewal districts and tax-increment funding, they said at the hearing Wednesday.
“But for the tools that urban renewal and TIF financing gives us, Villa Italia very well could be a boarded-up mall with a chain-link fence around it,” Lakewood Mayor Bob Murphy said of the retail facility that was torn down to build Belmar.
But opponents say the designation has been abused to help fund any type of development in any area. Larimer County Manager Linda Hoffman noted, for example, that 19 percent of commercial property in the county is part of urban renewal areas, and it’s not all blighted.”
Sealover, Ed. Denver Business Journal 24 April 2014.