Amid a yearlong delay, Denver’s voter-approved sidewalk construction and repair program took a key step forward Tuesday when a City Council committee gave preliminary approval to a plan to charge most property owners a flat rate of $150 a year starting in 2025.
But some owners with large properties — including Denver’s Department of Parks and Recreation and other government entities with big tracts of land — could face significantly higher bills if they have more than 230 linear feet of sidewalk running along their lots.
Impact fees of $3.50 per additional foot over 230 would be applied to those properties under the proposed changes. That means the owners of a property with 300 feet of sidewalk running along it would pay $395 annually beginning next year.
Calculations provided to the council’s Land Use, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee on Tuesday show those extra impact fees would add up to a combined $12.1 million next year, or 30% of the program’s total $40.1 million in projected first-year revenue.
The new plan is expected to go to the full City Council on Sept. 9 with a final vote set a week later on Sept. 16.
Jill Locantore, executive director of the advocacy organization Denver Streets Partnership, led the successful 2022 campaign that shifted responsibility for sidewalk upkeep from individual property owners to the city. She also chaired the stakeholder committee that spent 10 months working on changes to the program that are now being proposed as amendments.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Locantore said the change to a flat starter rate with additional impact fees for larger properties was meant to eliminate unusually high bills made possible under the original billing structure, which would have calculated all property owners’ costs on a by-the-foot basis. Under that structure, some people on corner lots could have been required to pay hundreds of dollars more per year than their next-door neighbors.
But the committee decided that property characteristics should still be factored in for large residential and commercial lots — those with frontages equivalent to three-quarters of a football field or more. When city officials first floated the idea of pivoting to flat rates in February, the change was only going to apply to residential land, with commercial property owners still being charged by the foot.
Only 4.3% of properties in the city are expected to pay those impact fees. That percentage shrinks to just 1.1% of single-family homes, according to a presentation that Locantore and Nick Williams, the deputy manager of internal and external affairs at the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, gave Tuesday.
“Importantly, the committee was very concerned about maintaining revenue neutrality so that the fee does actually generate enough funds to build out the network in a timely manner and also to maintain it in a good state of repair going forward,” Locantore said. “So these proposed amendments do exactly that.”
Billing for the sidewalk program will be linked to the city’s existing wastewater billing system, so property owners can expect to be charged in two installments each year.
The council has twice paused the launch of billing for the program — a combined delay of a full year — to allow for a stakeholder committee to refine the ordinance language. If the full City Council votes in favor of the package of amendments moving forward, the first bills for sidewalk fees would arrive between January and June.
The land use committee also gave the green light to changes to the program’s rebate program for low-income households. Residents who qualify for discounts to the city’s fee for trash collection based on their household income would be entitled to equivalent discounts to the sidewalk fee. People making 30% of the area median income and below would be exempt from fees entirely. Apartment building owners could also qualify for discounts of 20% if they can demonstrate that 25% of their building is made up of affordable housing.
The committee additionally approved relaxing the ordinance’s original promise to complete its city-spanning mission “in nine years or as soon thereafter” as deemed feasible by city transportation officials.
Finally, committee members approved a plan that would tie the fees to inflation in future years. Both rising consumer costs and rising costs in the construction industry will be used to determine fee amounts in the years ahead under the proposed amendments.
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