Urban-renewal projects that have ground to a halt since the Colorado Legislature passed a hastily written and confusingly worded urban-renewal reform bill in 2015 may get started again under a measure that would reform the reform plan.
The 2015 bill was the result of years of fighting between cities and other local governments over the creation of urban-renewal districts in which cities pledge revenues from the future growth of property-tax collections in a typically downtrodden area to developers agreeing to remake the area.
Counties, special districts and school districts complained they had no say in a process that robbed them of future property-tax revenues in order to benefit municipalities, and the new law required them to get seats on urban-renewal boards and allowed them to stop renewal plans from moving forward or being modified substantially if they objected.