Walking the Talk: City Wants Feedback on Changes to Its New Sidewalk Fees

The City of Denver is inching closer to making the sidewalk fee that voters approved in November 2022 a reality, and now wants feedback from the public on three tweaks to that ordinance before it begins collecting fees this July.

A stakeholder committee established by the Department of Transportation & Infrastructure to refine Sidewalk Ordinance 307 has suggested reworking the fee amounts for certain residential lots, changing the structure for discounts and softening the language around the implementation timeline.

Residents are instructed to weigh in by February 27. According to Jill Locantore, executive director of the Denver Streets Partnership and chair of the committee, the proposed changes are all about making sure the ordinance is implemented fairly.

“We had a really robust debate on the committee about what did it mean to be fair,” Locantore says. “We ended up with a fee that’s reasonable, that people could live with, and I feel pretty good about the recommendations we came up with.” And the committee recognized that no one will feel the system’s perfect, she adds.

The Denver Streets Partnership had been advocating for switching the responsibility for repairing sidewalks from individual property owners to the city since 2015; an ordinance that does just that finally passed with 56 percent of the vote in 2022. Denver Streets estimated it would take the city 400 years to complete its sidewalk network without the ordinance, which instead is looking at completing it within nine years.

“It’s like asking people to fill the potholes in the street in front of their house; this doesn’t make any sense,” Locantore says of the old system. “Most U.S. cities have that policy of placing the responsibility on the adjacent property owner, so Denver really, with this initiative, is becoming a national leader on the issue.”

The property owners may not be responsible, but they will be paying to repair sidewalks. As approved by voters, the law instituted an annual fee for property owners based on the linear square footage of frontage on their property. Those fees are to be paid into a fund that will be used to build out Denver’s sidewalk network and upgrade existing sidewalks in disrepair or that don’t meet Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations.

But in October, Denver City Council voted unanimously to delay implementation of fee collection from January of this year to July because residents were concerned that the fee structure would mean that some homeowners – such as those with corner lots – would end up paying double the fees of those with smaller lots, no matter the condition of their own sidewalks.

The committee’s first proposed change addresses that worry: It suggests that all single-family residential units that take up their entire lot be charged a flat rate of $148.64. Multi-family residential units would be charged $27.83 per unit on the parcel of land.

“Instead of having it be a variable fee that could be something very low to something very high, we’re just charging everybody in that property category the average fee,” Locantore explains. “It still ties back to single-family homes being more spread out. They require more sidewalk to be built, so they’re paying a higher fee. Multi-family properties are more compact, so the fee per housing unit in multi-family properties is lower.”

All other properties would keep the linear foot fee, which ranges from $2.15 per linear foot for local roads as well as residential and commercial collector roads to $4.30 for main streets and downtown roads.

The second change would rework fee discounts. Rather than the original idea, which called for all neighborhoods identified by the city’s Neighborhood Equity & Stabilization (NEST) program to get an automatic 20 percent discount, there would be a 20 percent instant rebate for income-restricted housing where at least 25 percent of the residential units are available only to households meeting low-income criteria.

Proponents originally wanted to remove an administrative burden that could cause people not to apply for a rebate if they needed one. “But the concerns that we were hearing from people were, first of all, not everybody in a NEST neighborhood really needs the discount; there are higher-income households in these neighborhoods, and they should be paying the full fee,” Locantore says. “Also, there are lower-income households outside of NEST neighborhoods that could really benefit from a discount. We tried to address both those concerns.”

As a result, the committee has suggested implementing an instant rebate program for property owners that works with Denver’s new Pay As You Throw trash fee system. Under that program, those making less than 60 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) get a 50 percent discount; those making less than 50 percent AMI get a 75 percent discount; and those making less than 30 percent are exempt from payment.

“We thought, ‘Well, let’s just piggyback off of that,'” Locantore says of the trash rebate. “So people can use the exact same application process and they can get a discount on the sidewalk fee, as well.”

In a third proposal, the committee suggested changing the timeline for implementation to specify that the work be done within nine years of the effective date of the updates or “as soon thereafter as determined feasible by the manager of transportation and infrastructure.”

“People voted on this back in November 2022 and are starting to ask, ‘Where’s my new sidewalk or repaired sidewalk?’ So we don’t want to delay it any more than necessary,” Locantore says. “But we also recognize this is a brand-new program for the City of Denver and it’s unprecedented nationally, so there’s a lot of details to be worked out.”

The committee will read through all the feedback submitted before the deadline and make any final adjustments before sending its recommendations to Denver City Council in early March. The hope is that council will be able to hold a final public hearing and vote on the changes in June, before the new date for fee collection kicks in July 1.

“This program is for the people of Denver, and so we want the people of Denver to have input on how it’s designed and implemented,” Locantore says.

Learn more about the changes on the DOTI Sidewalks web page and take the feedback survey here.