City leaders have zeroed in on a strategy they hope can break downtown Denver out of what Mayor Mike Johnston has described as the area’s post-COVID “doom loop.”
The key to that strategy: the expansion of an obscure special taxing authority that played a key part in downtown’s last big boom.
Johnston and other city and business leaders stood in front of the dormant fountains outside Union Station on Thursday morning to announce a plan they say could generate $500 million in public investment in downtown Denver over the coming decade.
The approach relies on a strategic funding tool that helped turn Union Station from an all-but-deserted bus terminal into an anchor of downtown Denver’s economic resurgence in the 2010s. Namely, the Johnston administration and its partners are intent on expanding the boundaries of the Denver Downtown Development Authority to cover all of the city’s core, including the long-floundering Central Business District.
Once expanded, that entity — created to pay off $400 million in public debt incurred building infrastructure around the station — would collect incremental property taxes from participating businesses and property owners to back bonds that can be used to fund a host of economic development work and projects, officials explained.
What kind of work? City residents will have a chance to weigh in on that question, Johnston said
“This campaign will start with a conversation with downtown residents,” Johnston said Thursday morning. “Starting today we will go public with a website on which every Denverite can chime in with their own hopes and dreams for what they want from downtown.”
Residents can visit Denvergov.org/DDA for more information and share their thoughts.
A handful of levers must be pulled before the plan can take effect, Johnston said.
The Denver City Council will have to take action on the plan. The mayor was flanked by council members Darrell Waston, Amanda Sandoval and Chris Hinds, whose district includes downtown. They will be leading efforts from the council side, Johnston said.
The governing board that oversees the Downtown Development Authority would also have to approve the changes as would the original residents and businesses that voted to establish the authority in its current footprint more than a decade ago, Johnston said.
Doug Tisdale is the chair of the Downtown Development Authority, a post he was elected to after being appointed to the board as a representative for the Regional Transportation District. He sees Union Station’s success and the avalanche of private sector investment that followed its reopening a decade ago as a key sales pitch for the proposed expansion.
“There’s no reason we can’t replicate elsewhere what we did here,” Tisdale said Thursday, gesturing toward the station.
Property owners in the proposed new footprint would not be obligated to pay into the authority. They would opt in, Tisdale said.
Johnston laid out the importance of downtown Denver in his view. It’s not only an economic engine and key tax generator for the city at large, but the entire state and Rocky Mountain region, he said. Its current situation — a 30% office vacancy rate as of the end of 2023 — isn’t unique in urban areas across the country, according to the mayor.
But reversing the trends is vital to the future.
“The COVID pandemic left our downtowns deserted. Hybrid working environments have reduced the demand on commercial office space. Without the commercial activation and life that made them vibrant, these deserted downtowns saw historic increases in homelessness and crime accelerated by a deadly wave of fentanyl addiction and commercial vacancies skyrocketed,” Johnston said, describing the “doom loop” he and other partners are seeking to break.
But, he added, “Denver refuses to walk away from our downtown as the vibrant center of financial, cultural, social, athletic and artistic activities.”
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