Mayor Hancock brought together people who love and need the South Platte River on Thursday, December 2. The opportunity: Sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that could help attract federal funds to improve the river.
Twenty-five partner institutions co-signed the mayor’s letter. Some were environmental groups, like Denver Trout Unlimited, and education hubs, like Colorado State University and the University of Denver.
Property developers made up about a third of the list, including Trammel Crow, which worked on Union Station, and Revesco Properties, which is behind the massive River Mile plan that aims to create a new neighborhood along the South Platte.
There is a lot of money waiting behind projects like River Mile that need a clean and healthy river as their central facility. These future construction sites are also in a tenuous flood plain, and federal government money will help mitigate some of the risks associated with this type of environment.
Still, Hancock said his offer of federal credits was not about trade.
“It has nothing to do with the development projects adjacent to the river. It’s about the health and really about the restoration of the river itself,” he told us after the press conference. “To make it flow. To keep it healthy and safe for everyone.
But it’s clear that these ambitious developments rely on offshore, shallow, sediment-filled solutions from the South Platte. The same goes for longtime residents of the Westside, who have historically been prone to flooding and displacement as the city gentrifies.
Hancock and residents of West Denver may also need developer interest in the area to lock in the funding needed to complete these environmental projects.
Here is the agreement with the plan of the river:
In 2008, the United States House of Representatives sanctioned an Army Corps of Engineers study of flood dynamics in Denver. The Corps completed this study in 2019 and provided a modification plan for the South Platte River, Harvard Gulch and Weir Gulch.
Plans focus on flood management and restoring ecosystems for animals that may be at risk. It calls for the restoration of 450 acres of riverine and wetland habitats, which would increase the city’s wetland coverage from 0.7% to 6.5%. The river would also become narrower and deeper.
In 2020, Congress approved the Corps’ plan under the Water Resources Development Act of 2020. But their endorsement did not include money. Denver must now lobby the federal government for $350 million and raise $210 million in matching funds to move forward.
This is where developer support comes in:
Jeff Shoemaker, the director of the Greenway Foundation who facilitated the MOU signing on Thursday, said the heavyweights who co-signed Hancock’s letter will help show Denver is ready to receive federal funds.
“What it says to Congress, and what it says to the Army Corps of Engineers, is that they are real in Denver. Because they have to choose. There are only so many apples on a tree, and they can choose which cities get which apple,” he told us. “The thing is, I want us to be standing under this tree.”
Shoemaker’s father, Joe, started the Greenway Foundation in the wake of Denver’s massive flood of 1965, which washed trash and debris from the South Platte River bed onto city streets and filled with water the neighboring houses. He knew early on that he needed investment to improve the region, and that trade and environmental progress were linked.
“They’re intertwined,” Shoemaker said. “My dad’s thing was: I want eyes and ears on the river.”
To that end, Shoemaker said it was important that financial interests were behind Hancock’s bid. Remember, Denver is on the hook for $210 million, and authorities need to see that Denver is capable of lifting it.
“We have to be ready and you have to show that level of community spirit,” Shoemaker said. “When Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper come in and plead for this project, they roll out a goddamn memorandum of understanding and they say, ‘Look who’s on this. We are not BSing you. “
Flood projects and development have not always been favorable to the city’s historically underrepresented populations. But they also need these changes.
Denver City Council Member Jamie Torres also attended the Mayor’s Memorandum of Understanding event last week. She told us she was staying as close to the project as possible because residents of her western neighborhood had long been at risk of flooding, especially along Weir Gulch. She said officials had thought of ways to avert another 1965-style disaster in the area before developers even started pouring in to the riverside.
The Corps project, she said, is as much about the river as it is about the people who already live along its banks.
“When I watch this, I also try to make sure that Barnum and Barnum West and Sun Valley and La Alma/Lincoln Park are made aware and involved in this process,” she told Us.
While Torres said these needed upgrades don’t depend on lucrative development plans, Tanya Heikkila, an environmental economist and professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, said a big tent is sometimes needed to push through this kind of things.
“History has just shown that we’re pretty bad at tackling environmental justice issues, in part because those affected often don’t have the political power or voice to tackle these issues on their own” , she said.
She said this can be true both for helping disaster-prone communities and ecosystems that might otherwise go unprotected.
“It really makes a lot of sense to work with the private sector,” she said, “especially when there’s a direct benefit to their bottom line.”
John Loomis, environmental economist at CSU, told us that ecosystem improvements can increase property values. While this is good for developers, it will also help bolster property taxes which can help fund the city’s share of the river project.
But rising property prices, large developments and flooding projects also raise the specter of displacement in neighborhoods that have long struggled with gentrification. Officials used the 1965 flood as leverage to clean up a dense Chicano neighborhood in Auraria, for example, to make way for a multi-institutional educational campus.
Torres said that concern is likely why his predecessors, Paul Lopez and Rosemary Rodriguez, stayed close to the river improvement plans when their colleagues first started talking about it.
“It’s not just about the River Mile and the stadium area,” she said. “It can’t be, and it didn’t start with them.”
