Updated Oct. 2 at 7:55 p.m.: Denver City Council voted unanimously Monday night to delay the collection of fees on property owners to fund sidewalk fixes and construction.
Fees will start being collected July 1, 2024.
Our original story follows below.
Property owners in Denver will likely get a six-month reprieve from a new fee that will fund fixes and construction of the city's crumbling and incomplete sidewalk network.
Voters approved the fee in November 2022. But the City Council will take a final vote Monday evening on a delay to it so city officials and stakeholders can make tweaks to the fee's structure.
A City Council committee and the full Council last week gave their unanimous approval to the delay. Monday evening's meeting will also include an opportunity for public comment.
Councilmember Amanda Sandoval and other policy makers have worried that the fees will be burdensome on low-income residents.
The fees are designed to scale with the amount of street frontage a property has and are also higher for properties on busier streets.
Annual fees will range from $100 to $200 for about half of all single-family homeowners, according to city data from August. But people who own corner lots or other especially large parcels could pay much more.
"I just want equity to be baked into this fee structure," said Sandoval, who sponsored the amendment.
If the Council gives its final approval Monday, the fee would kick in on July 1, 2024 instead of Jan. 1. A working group is meeting now to recommend changes to the fee structure.
The Denver Streets Partnership, a local street safety advocacy group that wrote and campaigned for the sidewalk fee, also supports the delay so unintended consequences can be ironed out.
But it also wants the city to act as quickly as it can because delays mean less revenue for the ultimate goal of building a complete sidewalk network across the entire city.
"The sooner the city can launch the program, the better," Jill Locantore, the group's executive director, said in an interview last month.
