Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert.hampton
And this is why the proposal is so foolish. For storm water it absolutely makes sense - the less impervious area your property has the more stress you are putting on the cities wastewater system. Of course your fees should be proportionate.
There is ZERO parallel for sidewalks. It’s a common good. People on corner lots don’t use sidewalks more than anyone else. They don’t damage sidewalk more than anyone else. Residents of apartments, proportionately, use sidewalks and cause wear and tear on sidewalks far more than the owner of SFH on a corner lot. There’s just no parallel to wastewater where impervious area has a clear correlation to storm water use.
It’s a stupid, stupid analogue and just reinforces the idea that this proposed fee was not accompanied with serious thinking (I have many other issues with your argument but this is the most obvious)
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I understand all of this, but the reality is also that this system, by virtue of being the least bad option, is exactly how every other major city in the country handles this issue, via a tax or fee assessed to the property owner on the basis of property value or property frontage.
Denver is the last remaining major city where it is still the responsibility of the property owner.
Furthermore, EVERYTHING this government does is in some sense a public good.
We have stormwater drains so that it isn’t the case that when it rains, everyone’s property floods (thereby providing both a personal and a public service), but the cost of the infrastructure comes disproportionately from larger plots and plots with more impervious cover and so we charge those property owners more in an absolute sense (but the same in a relative sense).
Likewise, we have sidewalks so that when a person goes outside of their house, they can connect with the outside world and allow others to do so as well (thereby providing both a personal and a public service), but the cost of the infrastructure comes disproportionately from larger plots of land and corner plots and so we charge those property owners more in an absolute sense (but the same in a relative sense).
And as others have said, this new system would be no more and no less equitable than the current system in the way that it is funded (property owners will essentially have to pay the same thing, and usually less, as what they’d pay to replace their sidewalks), but because of the way that it will be executed will be way more effectual, it will produce a more equitable
outcome, which is the point of equitability anyway: more than only the homeowners will now be able to get around this city, which include renters and the disabled, who will no longer have to use streets to walk or use their wheelchair. THAT is equitability.
Having a storm drain system that is patchwork, where some properties which have drains are intermingled with many who do not, will not provide an effective public service, which is why most municipalities enforce the system on all and benchmark the funding to how the money is dispensed across space. Would it be equitable, should there be a flat fee, for owners of small lots to have to front the cost of the additional infrastructure required by a larger lot, or should that additional cost be born by the property owner of that large parcel? Likewise with sidewalks. And it is NOT as if renters will not pay this cost at the end of the day, as the market will respond by raising rent when property owners of multi-family complexes start getting bills. The renters do pay, they are just paying the landlords, so that the landlords can pay Uncle Denver.
This is the fundamental difference between cities and suburbs in America. Cities generally do not expect small property owners to bare more than their actually fair share, wheres suburbs infrastructure is generally subsidized by the cities themselves and, within themselves, don’t get fine grained with properties enough to even care how big they are and levy a flat fee or, in most cases, the infrastructure provided by the developers is so new that it hasn’t yet required upgrades or is in such a state of disrepair because the suburb expects the homeowner to take care of it. Is Denver a suburb of Aurora? To my knowledge, Aurora handles sidewalks in a manner consistent with the sidewalk petition.
You bought the land, you pay for any infrastructure via a tax, levy, or fee which the city has placed in any easement. That is a generally an assumption of property ownership. And it is also generally true that more land means more infrastructure.
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