Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has dropped one part of a proposal that had raised the ire of neighborhood leaders and threatened to derail efforts to create new districts that could levy taxes for improvements.
The controversy dealing with the plans for community improvement districts surfaced at the last moment.
The Denver City Council is scheduled to discuss the proposal in committee Tuesday.
Council members last week started getting complaints from neighborhood leaders who had worked with city officials on how to create the districts.
Those leaders thought a neighborhood should be allowed to ask the City Council to seek such a district when the owners of more than half of the assessed property value in the area signed a petition to do so.
City officials thought the threshold should be 30 percent of assessed property valuation for the petition.
But the neighborhood leaders prompted the Hickenlooper administration to reconsider when they started complaining to council members that the 30 percent threshold was too low.
They complained that community improvement districts could be designated even if the majority of residents in the area didn’t want to pay taxes for the upgrades.
They also pointed out that Business Improvement Districts, such as the one that encompasses the 16th Street Mall, are controlled by state law and require a 50 percent petition threshold, weighted by area and property value.
The idea behind the new districts is to coordinate the city’s current approach, which city and neighborhood leaders agree doesn’t do a good job for areas that have a mixture of businesses and residences.
The community improvement districts will have the power to levy special taxes in the area that can pay for new curbs, sidewalks and street lighting. The City Council already can create such districts, but there are different approaches to ones designated to pay for maintenance of existing projects and ones formed to pay for new construction.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
