Last December, the Union Station Neighborhood Company announced that, factoring in changes to construction costs and the economy, the publicly funded portion of Union Station's redevelopment would cost an estimated $477 million. That didn't include the 1.35 total million square feet of commercial development it planned to build around the station, including the parking garage and four commercial buildings that will house offices, ground-floor retail, high-end residential and possibly an entertainment complex and a full-service hotel, all of which the developer plans to finance itself. Because of the rearrangement of the rail lines and the bus station, the bill for the transit work was considerably less than it would have cost to build everything underneath the historic station, but it was still a lot more than the $208.8 million set aside from the FasTracks money.
Filling that gap was left to the station's four public agency owners — RTD, CDOT, DRCOG and the City of Denver — entities that don't always see eye to eye about how best to scramble for dollars. "Everybody has got a different focus, and rightly so," says Cole Finegan, Mayor Hickenlooper's former city attorney and chief of staff who's now representing the agencies in negotiations with the developer. "For the City of Denver, one of the key areas has to be the public areas and public spaces and how they fit into the right of way and the 16th Street Mall. RTD is doing FasTracks, so they are focusing on the transit elements, how we're going to put in light rail, commuter rail and bus and move everyone around. For CDOT, it's how we're going to spend the dollars we're getting from the federal government and use these transit elements to hook up to other transit elements throughout the state."
Courtesy of the Union Station Neighborhood Company
An artist's rendering of what Union Station will look like in 2012.
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Peter Park (left), Cole Finegan and Tom Gougeon help keep the project on track.
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And then, last April, the protesters showed up. Wearing tri-corner Revolutionary War hats and chanting "No taxation without representation," a coalition of labor, environmental and affordable-housing activists called the Campaign for Responsible Development rallied on the steps of the City and County Building to demand that the station's redevelopment include well-paying jobs, affordable housing, local business opportunities and environmental sustainability. Initiated by FRESC, an influential local nonprofit formerly known as the Front Range Economic Strategy Center, the Campaign for Responsible Development had succeeded in winning similar concessions in the plan for the tax-supported redevelopment of the Gates Rubber plant.
"It's going to be built on public land and involve a significant amount of city funding," says organizer Blake Pendergrass. "If we can't accomplish these goals with a public project, how can we do it with private development?"
In June the city council agreed to ask that the developer work toward these community benefits — community benefits that don't come cheap.
"I'll bet the design team and the city thought they had closed the financial gap many times, only to find, with new information coming out, that...there was more work to do," says Buchanan at the Buchanan Yonushewski Group, considering the financial imbroglio he and his colleagues narrowly avoided.
But now that gap has been closed, more or less, say the number crunchers behind the project — though the finances are tight. "The numbers don't add up," worries city council member Jeanne Faatz. "People are going around and saying, 'This is very, very tight.' It's so tight you can't squeeze into those pants in any circumstance."
Along with the $208.8 million of FasTracks money, Union Station's owners have been approved for $40 million from the Federal Highway Administration and scored $8.6 million from the Federal Transit Administration, as well as $16.8 million from Colorado's Senate Bill 1, which funnels surplus state funds to transit improvements. The agencies will also contribute the $40 million or so that the Union Station Neighborhood Company is paying them for development sites at Union Station and to acquire the Market Street Station property.
On top of that, in November qualified electors will be asked to vote on a series of new civic entities that should pitch in roughly $145 million from property and sales taxes expected to be generated by the redevelopment. (Since the electors are either associated with the master developer or are nearby landowners who stand to gain from the project, there's not much chance they won't vote yes.) All that, say planners, plus about $20 million more that they expect from additional grants and government monies, will be channeled through a complex arrangement of metropolitan districts and project authorities in order to foot the bill.
While those behind FasTracks are considering cutting costs and other changes to keep the region-wide transit plan on schedule in the face of rising construction expenses, Union Station's portion of the pot shouldn't be altered. "Union Station is a little bit different than the other corridors," RTD's Nery says. "We have a certain dollar amount from FasTracks, $208.8 million. That number hasn't changed."
The developer insists the bill will also cover at least some of the community benefits demanded by the Campaign for Responsible Development. They say they plan to abide by sustainable development standards, set aside some of the storefronts for local businesses, and allow an independent agency to study the viability of including low-income rental units at the site.
