AURORA | It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of an Aurora Cultural Arts District was laughable. The same goes for a 100,000-sqaure-foot, mixed-use foodie marketplace off of East Colfax Avenue.
Aurora is now getting the last laugh. Both of those projects, and many others in the city, are now realities in a place once written off by many as Denver’s lagging, nagging step sibling.
That’s largely because of urban renewal.
An idea that was first rolled out in the 1950s as a response to America’s crumbling urban infrastructure, urban renewal is a municipal tool meant to help finance the redevelopment of blighted, largely undesirable areas. It can be used on any patch of land — ranging from less than a dozen to several hundred acres in size — that meets at least one, or in some cases four, of the state’s 11 blight factors. Once determined to be blighted — a legal, not a literal designation — urban renewal areas are then typically funded through the property and sales taxes generated from present and future development in the area for up to 25 years. It’s a subsidy system known as Tax Increment Financing. The long-standing system’s bedrock is that if a site is not designated an urban renewal area, and developers have no tax incentives to build, it will never be revitalized, which in turn could result in withering property values and tax revenues.
In Aurora, the Aurora Urban Renewal Authority now controls 14 urban renewal areas across the city, which make up about 2 percent of the city’s total land area, according to Andrea Amonick, manager of AURA. Amonick said that in Aurora, urban renewal areas are project-based, meaning that instead of using tax-increment financing on an entire swath of blighted land, the subsidy system is initiated only when plans for a specific project — often a new or soon-to-be-overhauled building — are finalized. So although the city currently has 14 renewal areas, it has 18 active TIF sites, with some areas hosting as many as three active TIFs and others with none.
“That allows us to be more deliberate with the financing in terms of providing our partners, like the schools and counties, with the best information for what the gap (in financing) is,” Amonick said.
The city recently started eyeing an alternative to urban renewal areas for sites that are either not creating enough tax revenue to support new development or have passed their 25-year urban renewal clock.
City Councilman Brad Pierce brought the use of Downtown Development Authorities to the attention of the council last September and asked AURA to see if the city would be able to utilize them going forward. Amonick analyzed the DDA usage of several Front Range cities including Golden, Fort Collins and Loveland.
DDAs differ from URAs in their governance structure, their usage of tax increment financing and how long they can remain in place. They can also be used only in designated downtown areas.
Amonick said that DDA’s are an attractive tool for Aurora, though the city’s lack of a true downtown district presents a challenge as to where exactly they could be implemented.
“Part of the question that came up was what defines downtown,” she said. “And we’re going to ask the attorneys to help us out with that.”
The downtown development tool has never been utilized in Aurora, but it joins several redevelopment mechanisms, like business improvement districts and general improvement districts, that the city has used for decades.
“My sense is that we’re not ready for (a DDA) in downtown Aurora — downtown meaning Colfax,” said City Councilman Bob LeGare. “If we can take the Havana BID model and duplicate it for Colfax, that would be phenomenal. But I don’t think we have the same buy-in for business owners on Colfax as we did on Havana.”
The Havana BID currently operates under a self-imposed five mil commercial property tax levy, but is prohibited from creating a TIF site under state statute. A DDA is eligible for TIF subsidies as well as property taxes.
LeGare has opposed several smaller “micro-TIF” areas in north Aurora because “they were so small that if you blinked or sneezed on Colfax you’d go in and out of the district without knowing,” he said.
So for now, Aurora is sticking to its reliance on urban renewal areas and its project-based TIF system.
Through a resolution approved by city council on April 13, the city’s newest TIF-funded urban renewal project is Stanley Marketplace, a 100,000-square-foot retail and gastronomic bazaar located in the long-neglected Stanley Aviation factory at 2501 Dallas St. Following council approval, the 25-year clock for the site to receive TIF funding will begin ticking as of the next official AURA meeting in May.
Amonick said that the city has struck a deal with Aurora Public Schools and Flightline Ventures, the Denver-based firm spearheading Stanley Marketplace, to give a percentage of the project’s TIF money to APS. Critics of both Urban Renewal and TIF have long argued that the subsidies withhold necessary funding from other entities like counties and public schools. Amonick said that APS will only receive more funding from a Stanley TIF, but never less than what they are promised in the annual state budget.
“When the property value goes up, AURA by statute takes those increased revenues — the school district wouldn’t normally get them because the values wouldn’t be going up without development,” Amonick said. “We’ve calculated how much of the revenues we need and we will return what we don’t need. How much this normally goes up depends on the amount of investment.”
Stanley Marketplace is a $25 million project with $7.6 million in public improvements, according to a presentation Amonick gave to city leaders during a Downtown Institute symposium last year.