Aurora legislator behind push to block blight tags for farmland

By SARA CASTELLANOS
The Aurora Sentinel
Thursday, March 11, 2010
http://aurorasentinel.com/articles/2010/03/11/news/metro_aurora/doc4b9931101b375444979201.txt

AURORA | Farmland shouldn't be considered blight, say state legislators who have proposed a bill that would impose stricter requirements for declaring agricultural lands blight.

The bill would make it more difficult to declare an empty plot of land a ‘blighted' area and pave the way for a developer to use a partially public-financing method to fund a project.

The bill's sponsors have said their motivation for developing the bill was because current urban renewal practices are unnecessarily costing the state and taxpayers millions of dollars.

If House Bill 1107 passes, an agricultural land could not be declared blight unless: it's considered to be environmentally contaminated, or most of the area on the perimeter of the land has already been urbanized, or it has been fully surrounded by urban development for at least three years, or all parties that would be taxed agree to include the land in an urban renewal plan.

H.B. 1107 has passed through three readings in the House and one in the Senate. It passed out of the state, veterans and military affairs senate committee on a 4-1 vote Monday.

Opponents of the current urban renewal development system have said it has become too easy to declare empty fields blight, which has caused private developers to take advantage of the funding method.

Current practices allow developers to create a Tax Increment Financing district and use property tax revenues meant for school districts to fund an urban renewal project if the land is declared blight. Under state laws, the state has to backfill any money lost from school districts. Recent urban renewal projects have cost Colorado about $50 million per year, said the bill's sponsors.

"This whole process takes place in a very non-transparent way," said state Rep. Randy Fischer, D-Fort Collins, the bill's primary sponsor. "Most taxpayers have no idea that the taxes they voted on would be diverted to private developers, or that the state is backfilling this lost school revenue with their state tax dollars, so I think it's a real problem."

State Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, a primary sponsor of the bill said that the bill addresses the original intent of the urban renewal process.

"Urban renewal was always meant to be urban," she said. "What they originally had decided was the (broken-down) tenants. Sometimes property becomes so dilapidated ... that it contributes to the spread of disease and crime. No one would develop without that incentives."

The state could potentially lose even more money in the future if current practices continue, Fischer said.

"It's at a very steep growth curve, and if we don't take action to at least put on the brakes a little bit, I think we're going to be seeing hundreds of millions of dollars in backfill to local school districts in the not too distant future," he said.

Fischer said the agricultural lands that are being declared blight are sometimes perfectly good farming lands that would potentially attract developers anyway, such as the land on Interstate-70 and E-470 that would use the public financing method to create a $1.8 billion mixed-use development. City council members decided Monday to designate the empty field blight, which is going to jumpstart the Horizon Uptown project, which will include homes, office space, a school and a library.

"They are some of the most prime pieces of real estate in our communities that, it could be argued, don't need to be subsidized for development," he said. "When we're cutting so much money out of our general fund we need to really examine and reevaluate why we want to be subsidizing some of these projects with general fund dollars."

At the Lend Lease hearing Monday, Councilwoman Renie Peterson suggested that council wait to make a decision on whether to declare the land blight until after H.B. 1107 has passed.

However, the vote went ahead as planned and council approved the project on a 6-4 vote. If H.B. 1107 does pass, it would not effect the Horizon Uptown project. The bill states that if the land was included in an approved urban renewal area prior to the effective date of the law, it is immune to the law.

The city's government liaison said city officials will not take a stance on the bill.

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