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Posted May 16, 2025, 4:12 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Dec 2019
Location: Albuquerque, NM
Posts: 1,340
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Here's a story that KOB-TV had yesterday about the efforts to create a business improvement district in Downtown Albuquerque.
https://www.kob.com/news/top-news/bu...rove-downtown/
Quote:
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Albuquerque city leaders have been promising to bring downtown back to life for years and now business owners are stepping in.
Bill Keleher is leading the effort. He owns a parking lot on Second Street and Central Avenue. Keleher said he has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in the neighborhood.
“Mostly what we need is people, people coming downtown and being here and for that (it) needs to be a little cleaner and a little safer,” Keleher said.
He and about a dozen others are creating the framework for a Business Improvement District, or BID. It would require business owners to contribute money to pay for more resources in the area.
“As much as I love Albuquerque, we can do better,” he said.
Keleher said the city already pays a crew to clean up and patrol the streets, keeping an eye out for crime and calling 311 or 911 if an incident escalates. The BID money would expand those services, paying for more people to work seven days a week.
“When there’s graffiti or other incidents, we’ll have a team to clean it up right away quickly,” he said.
To form the BID, Keleher and those he’s working with have to petition the businesses that would be included in the district. Right now that includes properties from roughly Broadway Boulevard to 10th Street and Lomas Boulevard to Coal Street. They plan to start circulating that petition later this month. If they get more than half of the business owners’ support, it will go to city council for approval.
Keleher said he has support from dozens of property owners, but not everyone is on board just yet.
“In a best-case world, you shouldn’t have to pay extra,” he said. “But are you satisfied with the current state of affairs and do you think that not taking action is preferable to taking action? I want to do something and this is something that we can do.”
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Downtown Albuquerque News also had a story about the efforts this morning. They spoke to Jim Long who says that he's overall supportive of reestablishing a BID in Downtown Albuquerque, but with a caveat about the signature-gathering process. He led the efforts to dissolve the previous BID about ten years ago, which was originally created back in 1998 at the beginning of this current era of Downtown revitalization efforts. Their story included a map showing the two zones for BID services and fee collection.
https://downtownalbuquerquenews.com/
Quote:
Long signals tentative support as petition drive for Downtown BID hits the streets
Owner of Albuquerque Plaza building, who helped bring down the last BID, wants signature checks
'Assuming that the signed BID forms are legitimate, we will support the BID'
Design details go public: Proposal calls for tripling hours devoted to cleaning, expanding to seven-day service, adding new security role
Potentially transformative revitalization effort needs about 90 signatures from property owners to advance
The push to form a Downtown business improvement district enters a critical new phase this week as organizers, who until now have been operating in the realm of trial balloons, informal conversations, and tentative concepts, hit "print" on a detailed proposal and ask fellow property owners to sign on the dotted line.
The "operational framework" now being circulated details what the BID would do, and it is a reasonably straightforward business that includes cleaning, security, and beautification, plus marketing and Downtown advocacy. But behind that simplicity is a larger goal: Literally thousands of other cities across the continent have found that such intense focus on those nuts and bolts has the knock-on effect of breathing new life into their urban centers. There's a direct line, in their experience, between basic "clean and green" efforts and more businesses, more visitors, more residents, more tax revenue, and more prosperity.
Launching such organizations is never easy. The same goes for actually administering them, as Downtown found out during its last run with a BID, which formally ended in 2015 following much general rancor, plus litigation initiated by Jim Long, the owner of the Albuquerque Plaza Building (sometimes known as the WaFd Building).
But already this week, the new push has seen a tentative boost from Long himself, who said the effort has been "well organized" and that he would support it pending an audit "to determine the validity of the signatures obtained"
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Here's another quote of the DAN article that details more about the proposed zones and fee breakdowns. I've also included portions where they talk about the city’s commitment to pay the proposed fee on its properties and to allocate the current funding that goes toward the Duke City Community Ambassadors program to the new BID should it gain enough signatures to be formed.
Quote:
How would it be paid for?
The proposed BID would divide Downtown into two "service zones."
The premium zone - roughly the area between Copper and Gold (see map above) - would pay the highest rate. Property owners there would be assessed 13.2 cents per square foot of both land and building space. The standard zone - basically the rest of the Downtown core - would pay a lower rate of 8.2 cents per square foot using the same formula.
The idea here is that properties in the premium zone would get about twice the level of "clean, green, and safe" services as those in the standard zone. The change stems from the last BID, under which property owners farther from Central felt like they were getting less attention even as they paid the same rates, organizer Bill Keleher said. In the new arrangement, the areas closer to Central "will get more service, more attention, and will pay a little more," he added.
Here's a real-world example: If you owned a 10,000-square-foot building on a 10,000-square-foot lot, you'd pay $1,640 per year in the standard zone and $2,640 per year in the premium zone.
Altogether, the BID would raise around $1.7 million annually through such payments, with about $1.25 million going to the clean-and-safe services described earlier. The rest would be divided between marketing, special projects, BID management, and advocacy.
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...the city does have a significant role in the proposed BID. It has tentatively committed to chipping in about $400,000 a year by way of continuing its current spending on Downtown cleaning services (as delivered by the Duke City Community Ambassadors, formerly Block by Block - DAN, 3/5/21).
The city has also tentatively agreed to pay BID assessments on its long list of Downtown properties, though they are not legally required to. That not inconsiderable portfolio includes City Hall, the KiMo Theatre, and the convention center, to say nothing of various parking garages and small parcels like the Sixth-and-Central home of Studio 519, where public access TV is produced. Bernalillo County has also indicated support, Keleher said, though final approval of such a deal will need to come from the City Council and the Bernalillo County Commission, respectively.
The support, in any event, will be critical: "If those commitments from the governmental entities are not forthcoming, it just doesn't work - because of their large footprint," Keleher said. "This is a chance for them to demonstrate in a nuts and bolts, meat and potatoes way that they are willing to work with the property owners to make Downtown a better place."
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Here's a nice pic of Downtown Albuquerque that I thought I'd take this opportunity to share. It was taken about two years ago from the Anasazi Downtown structure looking east towards the mountains.
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