Denver has made spectacular capital investments in the past couple of decades – from Denver International Airport to the Convention Center hotel. A justice complex is on the drawing boards.
But now it is time to take care of more mundane tasks, such as pothole-pocked streets and unkempt parks.
Mayor John Hickenlooper’s infrastructure task force recommended a maintenance budget of $56.8 million for 2006. Though the city is climbing out of an economic downturn, tax revenues are still tight, prompting the mayor and the City Council to budget only $28 million for infrastructure maintenance in 2006. That’s small potatoes in light of $6.4 billion spent or earmarked since the 1980s for such high-profile projects as the airport, Convention Center expansion and hotel, new central library, city office building, Art Museum addition, renovation of the old Auditorium Theater, plus the planned jail and justice center.
In all, the city’s debt portfolio totals about $5 billion, including revenue bonds paid off by airport fees and other special revenues.
Council President Rosemary Rodriguez says her constituents are clamoring to repair city streets and parks. “I’m sure we have the right guy (Bill Vidal) in the public works department,” she said, “but I’m not sure he’s got the money to address what we’d call the little things. … It seems like it’s starting to add up.”
Denver has capacity to issue bonds for the work without increasing taxes, Rodriguez said. Denver voters have been willing to invest in the city if they know what they’ll get for their money and agree on the need, she noted. According to the city’s treasury department, Denver can issue up to $300 million in bonds under existing authority as earlier bonds are paid off.
Councilwoman Elbra Wedgeworth says some maintenance has been deferred for years and there’s “no way to catch up without a bond issue. … This is something we’re going to have to put on the front burner. It’s not going to go away, and we can’t keep putting it off.”
The administration isn’t rushing anything. The mayor’s chief of staff, Cole Finegan, and Marilyn Miller, head of the budget office, favor setting priorities and long-term planning to achieve the goal.
Finegan says the administration will “start expanding its internal conversations and holding conversations with stakeholders throughout the city to determine what are the most important priorities” before going to voters again.
Denver’s last big general obligation bond election was for $242 million in 1989, but given projects in the interim, city leaders should remember there’s such a thing as going to the well too often. (Although, with about $404.7 million in general obligation debt, the city is well short of its $1.9 billion limit.)
Better to plan carefully and gradually fix things as revenues improve than try to do everything at once with a badly timed bond issue.
