Opinion: Give the voters what they want on growth, development

In June 2022, Rasmussen Reports did a poll of 1,024 Colorado voters regarding their attitudes toward growth and development. Per their summary, 61% of voters say Colorado has developed too much, and only 8% say too little. That’s pretty overwhelming. The Legislature should take note. I’ve pulled a few quotes from their survey statement below, with the response statistics.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that Colorado, over the last four decades, has turned more than 1,250 square miles of Open Space, natural habitat, and agricultural land into housing, shopping malls, streets and other urban development.” 62% of voters say that, on balance, this has made Colorado a worse place to live, with only 14% saying it is better.

“If recent trends continue, Colorado demographers project that the state’s human population of 5.8 million will grow by another 1.8 million by 2050, joining Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins together into a single “mega-city.” 76% see this as negative, and only 13% as positive.

“Colorado cities compete for scarce water with the agricultural industry, which relies on irrigation for most of its cropland. Should water used to cultivate crops be diverted to support additional human population growth?” 71% say water should not be diverted from agriculture to support more residents, and only 15% say water should be diverted from agriculture to support more residents

“Colorado’s population has approximately doubled since 1980. Would you prefer that Colorado’s population continue to rapidly grow, that it grow more slowly, that it stay about the same size, or that it become smaller?” 32% say become smaller, 27% say stay about the same size, 31% say grow more slowly, and only 7% say continue to grow rapidly.

Housing affordability and having an adequate water supply are two of the Democrat’s legislative priorities. Given the above, the Dems should first take a serious look at reversing policies that subsidize more and more growth.

For example, continuing to promote more and more housing without restricting both prices and job growth is growth for no benefit — we’ve seen the results. And forcing existing residents to pay for the infrastructure needed to serve growth, whether housing or job space, just provides windfall profits for developers, since the developers in effect are selling access to these facilities and services without paying their full costs.

So the Legislature should immediately start working on legislation to require full-cost development impact fees for the transportation, schools and other essential infrastructure required to maintain current levels of service. Because of TABOR II, which restricts fee increases to $100 million over five years unless voter-approved, the simplest way to do this is to require the five regional transportation organizations and approximately 180 school districts to individually do the calculations, and mandate that cities, towns and counties collect the fees since they issue the building permits.

Based on my recent calculations, transportation fees should collect around $1 billion per year at current growth rates, and school fees around half of that. This is serious money. These fees will also remove a lot of the profit from the development game, and so slow growth. Additionally, get rid of state-issued tax breaks for business growth.

The Legislature should also start looking at balancing job and housing growth in developing areas by restricting employment development to what the housing will support. This could also significantly reduce commuting.

To further improve housing affordability, jobs-housing linkage fees paid by commercial development will reduce housing costs for workers in areas with new employment development. But they must be set high enough to solve the problem, and not be just for show.

At some point, Colorado needs to face up to the facts about our water supply, which climate change has significantly reduced. It is virtually guaranteed that the feds will impose drastic reductions in the Colorado River’s use, including on Colorado, and there are also serious shortfalls for the Rio Grande. The question is: Do we want to reduce growth now to sustainable levels so that we can maybe avoid the worst? Or will we blindly pursue more and more growth, and then run into a wall?

Finally, we need constraints on the conversion of farmland, prairie and forests into development, and even reversals back to more natural environments. That will help preserve Colorado’s open spaces, which make our state such a great place to live. Perhaps a statewide effort modeled on the American Farmland Trust and various cities’ open space programs can show the way. Let’s have bison, not buildings!

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