“Every single neighborhood” will benefit from budget increase
The city of Denver has laid out some ambitious ideas for its parks system in the last few years: Green space for every resident. An urban forest. Changing stations for bike commuters.
The only question was, “Who’s going to pay?”
“All of us,” 60 percent of voters answered earlier this month, approving a new sales tax that may pump more than $45 million a year into the parks department.
That’s an increase of about 45 percent compared to the city’s current spending on parks and recreation operations, maintenance and construction — the kind of change you rarely see in a government budget.
It will prime the city for the biggest transformation of its parks system since Mayor Robert Speer’s era of “City Beautiful” in the early 1900s, as deputy parks director Scott Gilmore put it.
“It’s huge,” said Councilman Jolon Clark, a key backer of the proposal. “I expect that every single park, every single neighborhood in Denver is going to feel these changes, and fairly quickly.”
It’s not just parks: Voters also approved more than $60 million of annual tax funding
for nonprofit institutions to provide mental health care, college scholarships and healthy food for children. With all four measures combined, the city’s sales tax will increase from 7.65 percent to 8.31 percent, costing an extra 6.6 cents on a $10 purchase.
But the new parks spending is likely to happen quickest. The money will start flowing Jan. 1, and the city can start spending it immediately.
What will it buy?
Some of the early money could revive projects that were in discussion just a year ago, when the city was planning the $937 million package of “Elevate Denver” debt spending, which included $137 million worth of parks and recreation projects.
Two projects that didn’t make the cut in that plan were an Arapahoe Square park near downtown and further improvements to Confluence Park. Now, they and others will get another chance.
“There’s so many existing plans already in place to guide us moving forward,” said parks spokesperson Cyndi Karvaski.
The parks department also has more than $100 million worth of deferred maintenance, Karvaski said — fixing up old equipment and infrastructure, in other words. Or the city might restore trash bins and other services to parks where they were cut, Clark said.
And then there’s the grand “Outdoor Downtown” plan that the city published last year. It outlined ideas for “iconic” projects, such as a walkingbiking loop around downtown and an “arts and culture” park.
The parks department will publish a five-year plan for its new money in 2019.
Who will benefit?
“Before, it used to be a trailer park and a bar,” said Hector Cordova, 60, looking out last week over Cuatro Vientos park and its panoramic view of downtown Denver.
The city bought the land from its longtime owner in 2009 and opened the park in 2014, describing it as Westwood’s first new park in 30 years.
Residents have “a place that they can take their kids, to go and have a good time and play some games,” Cordova said of the park, which plays host to birthday parties on most weekends.
The park was the backdrop for Mayor Michael Hancock’s endorsement of the new parks tax in October. It was a symbol of a new idea that the city has embraced in its new plans: that everyone in Denver should live within a 10-minute walk of a park.
The areas with the worst access include historically black and Latino communities in north and southwestern Denver, including Elyria Swansea, Globeville, Sunnyside and Westwood.
The city’s parks and finance departments already are preparing to search for new land in those areas — a shift from the old approach of picking up the occasional bargain, Clark said.
The councilman acknowledged the criticism that new public investment can attract new property buyers, potentially accelerating gentrification and displacement. But he argued that the sheer size of the investment will ensure that the health benefits of parks are spread evenly throughout the city, reducing the chances of a land rush on a specific neighborhood.
The new money also could be used to create parks space alongside new housing communities, he said.
“This does deliver the complete solution,” Clark said, “and not a part of the solution.”