On November 5, residents and business owners within the boundaries of the proposed Old Colorado City Downtown Development Authority (DDA) will likely have their votes tallied on whether to authorize its creation.
If approved, the district will extend to the Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs boundary to the west; to the north by the alley between West Pikes Peak Avenue and Colorado Boulevard; to the east by I-25; and to the south by the alley between West Cucharras Street and Colorado Boulevard. It would also include slightly expanded southern nodes at I-25 and 21st Street.
It should energize and revitalize OCC and Colorado Avenue. The business associations that now support merchants (an alphabet soup that includes OCCA (Old Colorado City Associates), OCCP (Old Colorado City Partnership) and two Security and Maintenance Districts (SIMDs) would be replaced by the DDA, a single, well-funded entity.
Its structure duplicates the long-established Colorado Springs DDA, which has been an essential building block in Downtown’s 20-year journey from irrelevance to explosive prosperity.
The Colorado Avenue DDA will be funded by a capped 5-mill levy on residential and commercial properties in the district and will also be able to utilize “tax increment financing.” That’s a way of borrowing money that will be repaid by anticipated growth in property tax receipts. It’s a flexible and useful tool to encourage business expansion and help create the infrastructure to sustain it.
How will it affect the historic Westside residential neighborhoods that surround it? Here are four possible scenarios for the near term:
1. It makes little immediate difference. OCC remains as it is – reasonably prosperous but the DDA doesn’t bring much change. Existing businesses see little benefit and new businesses don’t increase along the Avenue. Traffic along Uintah, 21st Street and Pikes Peak Avenue remains tolerable and life goes on.
2. It succeeds at or beyond expectations. Existing businesses prosper, new ones open and Westside property values soar. OCC’s political power increases, and Colorado Springs funds changes and upgrades along Colorado Avenue. The DDA doesn’t operate in a vacuum but is sensitive to the needs and desires of the surrounding community. Prosperity and growth bring more traffic, but it’s entirely manageable.
3. It’s not great. Traffic worsens, the City continues to delay Colorado Avenue improvements, crime and homelessness worsen, residential property values slide and Colorado Avenue businesses struggle with ballooning insurance costs.
4. Worst-case scenario: The voters reject the DDA. Disheartened and disillusioned, the young and youngish entrepreneurs who put the deal together gradually pull up stakes and move. OCC stagnates, recriminations fly back and forth and businesses flatline.
Yet regardless of near-term scenarios, if passed the DDA will bring long-term benefits. A united business community with a single voice may make a mistake or two in the beginning but enjoy long-term success. Vision and change have been essential to our neighborhood and to OCC since 1859 when, as OCC’s website reminds us “The small settlement of El Dorado, at the eastern entrance to the pass through the mountains to the west, was renamed Colorado City by the founders Melancthon Beach, Rufus Cable, Anthony Bott and George Bute. Colorado City became the first permanent town in the Pikes Peak region.”
Our fun and illustrious past far eclipses that of our stodgy rival east of I-25. The women and men who came after the founders built this city and this neighborhood and now, 165 years later, it’s up to all of us. Our predecessors had plenty of faults, but they weren’t afraid of the future. They tried to shape it, rather than rely upon capricious fate.
So, let’s go forward, take risks, have fun and support OCC and the Avenue!