Louisville, CO (May 9)—Formal papers were filed with the City of Louisville on Wednesday to put on the November ballot a measure to transfer the city’s urban renewal powers to the Louisville City Council.

“The ballot initiative is necessary to return accountability and fiscal responsibility on urban renewal issues to their proper place: officials elected by the People of Louisville,” said John Leary, a former Louisville Council member and one of the proponents of the ballot initiative.

An urban renewal authority is a body created under state law to prevent and remedy blight, including dilapidated buildings and dangerous conditions in a city. The authority may be an unelected body or the city council.

In Louisville, the unelected Louisville Revitalization Commission, or LRC, controls the urban renewal powers. The ballot initiative proposes an ordinance that, if approved by the People in November, would transfer those powers to the elected Louisville City Council.

The LRC cannot be funded unless blight exists in the city. In urban renewal law, “blight” is a poorly defined term that depends on good-faith application of the term. In urban renewal projects, blighted property is placed in an urban renewal district. But a city may also include non-blighted property in an urban renewal district.

In 2003, a Louisville study proposed an urban renewal area consisting of a 110-acre area between the Burlington Northern railroad and Hwy 42. It proposed an approximately 110-acre urban renewal district encompassing this area. In 2005, the LRC took the first step to creating an urban renewal district by finding blight in the area.

In a widely criticized action, however, the LRC in 2006 doubled the size of the area it was studying for blight. The new area included the King Soopers, Christopher Plaza and Safeway shopping centers, vacant land (the so-called “Pow Wow grounds”) being developed east of King Soopers, and virtually all of commercial downtown Louisville. The LRC then proposed a 228-acre urban renewal district that included these properties.

Shortly afterward, the LRC estimated that the newly expanded urban renewal district could generate $77 million in tax revenues over 25 years that could be used for “urban renewal” in the district. This would include $42 million in property-tax revenues, and $35 million in sales-tax revenues if such sales-tax revenues are approved by the City Council. The consultant for the LRC said the LRC’s intent is to divert all of the $77 million in property and sales tax revenues for use in urban renewal activities. (http://www.preservelouisville.org/allincrements.pdf#page=8).

Louisville citizen Don Atwood, the other proponent of the ballot initiative, questioned whether the urban renewal district was expanded in good faith. “Few people can understand why the King Soopers shopping center was included in the district. I don’t know anyone who can explain how the Pow Wow grounds can be blighted. One of the consequences of true blight is no developer wants to invest private dollars. But when the Council determined that the Pow Wow grounds were blighted, the Planning Commission had months earlier approved a developer’s plan for commercial and residential development there,” Atwood said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why the shopping centers and the vacant land were included—to generate more new tax revenues for the LRC.”

Taxpayer money diverted to the LRC is deposited directly into bank accounts controlled by the LRC. For Atwood, that is another fault of the current urban renewal setting. “I doubt many citizens would be comfortable with unelected officials in charge of expending millions of taxpayer dollars over a lengthy period of time,” he said.

The initiated ordinance would require the Council to act cautiously in allowing any diversion to the urban renewal district of municipal sales-tax revenues. It would also require the Council to conduct fiscal-impact analyses before permitting any such diversion of sales-tax revenues. “These fiscal analyses are critical,” Leary said. “Because the analyses haven’t been done to date, the City Council doesn’t know whether the investment of sales-tax revenues into the urban renewal district—and its diversion from the rest of the community—would result in a net economic benefit for the City, or a loss.”

After the City Clerk approves the form of the ballot initiative, the signature-gathering process will begin. To get the proposed ordinance on the November ballot, those supporting the initiative must turn in signatures of at least 5 percent of the Louisville registered voters, or about 600 signatures.

Leary said it will not be difficult to collect the signatures. “This ballot initiative is common sense. It lets voters decide whether they want appointed persons or elected officials to directly control taxpayer money and planning decisions about our historic downtown,” he said. “Few voters would say they feel more comfortable with unelected persons in control of taxpayer money and our downtown.”