The one-and-a-half-hour discussion, during the Town’s Zoom meeting of the ‘Urban Renewal Authority’ Commission, spent a great deal of time on what seemed like a big can of worms… courtesy of a series of questions posed to Town Attorney Clay Buchner by URA Commissioner Greg Schulte.
In the end, the (possibly confused?) commissioners did not take any action based on Commissioner Schulte’s passionate appeal.
The Town voters, meanwhile, had presented the Town officials on July 14 with a overwhelmingly clear and consistent statement — by way of the 3-to-1 vote approving an amendment to the Town Home Rule Charter, requiring voter approval for any future ‘urban renewal projects’ expected to utilize more than $1 million in Tax Increment Financing subsidies to any private developer.
Ballot Measure A added the following requirement into the Town Home Rule Charter
Any proposal by the Town Council or by the Pagosa Springs Urban Renewal Authority to use Tax Increment Financing (TIF) must first be approved by the Town electors whenever the total TIF revenues are expected to exceed $1 million ($1,000,000) over the life of the project.
I try to always put ‘urban renewal projects’ in quotes because we know that the Pagosa Springs URA was originally formed to address supposed “dangerous urban blight” on 27 vacant and never-developed acres owned by local developer Jack Searle.
And we all know there was no ‘dangerous urban blight’ on that property.
But former Town Manager Greg Schulte has been — to use his own word — “passionate” about the idea of using a proposed lawsuit to try and overturn Ballot Measure A, which he has consistently described as unconstitutional. Commissioner Schulte also argues that a developer will be required to spend significant amounts of money creating a project plan to obtain the corporate subsidies — without any guarantee that the voters will approve the project.
It appears that Commissioner Schulte has spent a considerable amount of time and effort, over the past couple of months, getting Attorney Buchner to fully explain how the URA Commission — or perhaps the Town Council — might use the court mechanism of ‘Declaratory Judgment’ to overturn Ballot Measure A. (Mr. Buchner’s time is not cheap, as we know.)
The URA commissioners — most of whom are also Town Council members — exhibited considerable confusion about where, exactly, in the complex ‘Urban Renewal’ approval process the Town would put a proposed multi-million-dollar TIF-funded project in front of the voters, and how, exactly, the placement and timing of such a vote might affect corporate welfare proposals coming from developers.
Near the conclusion of the rather lengthy meeting, we finally heard from URA commissioner JR Ford. Mr. Ford was appointed to the commission to represent the six special districts in Archuleta County who could be forced, by the URA, to donate future taxes to ‘urban renewal’ projects over which the special districts would have no right of approval.
Commissioner Ford:
“I don’t disagree with [Commissioner Schulte] on a lot of points. But I would be coming from a whole different direction. We’ve talked about a lot of things, so I’m a little confused about where I want to go with this, but I… I’d be spending my money on my attorney, having him figure out how to align myself with my taxpayers, way more than I’d be spending my money on my attorney, trying to figure out how I can get around my taxpayers.
“I know we’ve been handcuffed with this $1 million [limit]… but on the lower end, you can negotiate, and you can have a cap on [the maximum level of tax subsidy] so that it stops at $1 million.
“And then, on the other side of it, where you’re talking about major dollars being spent [on plans], the developers have to spend those dollars anyway. They have to put all that information together, to be able to sell the project to their investors, to offset their financing.
“So, does [the Charter amendment] make it a lot harder for them? Yes. But are they spending a lot of money they weren’t going to spend anyway? No, because they wouldn’t make the decision to go for a $10 million, or $20 million, or $50 million TIF project if they didn’t need that to make their project go forward. They need all that information to be able to sell it to their investors.
“I think we’re making more out of this than is necessary. If I were a Town Council member… you know, I don’t think the URA commission has a right to vote on this at all… but if I were a Town Council member, I’d be more worried about how to align myself legally, and fix the URA to align with the wishes of our taxpayers.
“I think these are the cards we’ve been dealt, and we ought to learn how to deal them, and go and make the best projects we can with the terms that we have. You can put all kinds of caps and percentages on a project. You can cap the number of years they get money. There is so much flexibility in this, but I think some people are trying to make this into, ‘Woe is us. We’ll never get another developer to come to town.’ And I just don’t believe that.”