Colorado's urban renewal law was passed decades ago to incentivize the redevelopment of blighted urban lands, such as abandoned and polluted old factory sites or dilapidated downtown areas.  The law was meant to provide some taxpayer funding to help allay some of the costs of cleaning up the pollution or rehabilitating sites that were in disrepair. The idea was that it made sense to use taxpayer money for this because redeveloping these sites served the public good. The redevelopment would be good for the neighborhoods surrounding these sites and the community as a whole since urban slums are eyesores and menaces to public health, and redeveloping these sites in already existing urban areas would be good infill development.

However, due to a loophole in the urban renewal law, what has happened over the years is that cities and developers have used this loophole to misdirect taxpayer funding to turn unblighted agricultural lands into shopping centers and housing developments.  This is an abuse of the urban renewal law since developing productive farmlands on the outskirts of town is neither urban nor renewal.  Rather than the taxpayer money being used to clean up contamination, it is too often provided as a subsidy to the developer by a city that is competing with other communities to get that developer to choose it over other cities for a development project.  

In addition to the fact that money taxpayers pay to their county governments and fire, school, and library districts is given to developers to turn cornfields into shopping centers, there is another way that taxpayers are made to pay for these abuses.  The Colorado Constitution requires that the money that is taken from school districts is "backfilled" by the state. This means that taxpayers end up paying twice, because they also have to pay for this backfill.  This is a huge issue that currently diverts $50 million from state coffers.

Most citizens driving by productive wheatfields or rows of corn do not see blighted or slum areas in need of their tax monies for redevelopment. The General Assembly needs to close the loophole in the law that allows this abuse to occur.

This year, Representative Randy Fischer, from Fort Collins, and Senator Morgan Carroll, from Aurora, have introduced a bill to close this loophole and stop the abuse of taxpayer funding and conversion of farmlands to shopping centers.  CEC is working hard with Representative Fischer and Senator Carroll to pass House Bill 1107.

For more information on the misuse of urban renewal funding, please see this article.