Once again this November, Denver government is asking voters to sign off on a grab-bag of construction, maintenance, and street projects all over the city using general obligation debt, that is, debt that is not tied to any particular revenue stream.

Per the state Constitution, general obligations debt must be approved by a vote of the people.  In this case, five votes; the city has broken the so-called Vibrant Denver Bonds, into five separate packages – transportation and mobility, city facilities, parks and recreation, housing and sheltering, and health & human services.

I’ll be voting no on all of them.

Juice not worth the squeeze

For one thing, the projects are simply too expensive for what we get.  Requirements to use union labor and pay prevailing wages, as well as the extended times for planning and public comment (most of which will be cheerfully ignored if it turns hostile), and the snarl of regulations for in-city construction, combine to raise costs far beyond what they should be.

These projects also take approximately forever.  I can cite two examples from my own neighborhood.  In Crestmoor Park, the city is replacing the playground equipment.  The existing equipment was put in perhaps 10-15 years ago, but the city claims that it requires “frequent and expensive repairs.”  (My son has played there on a regular basis for about 3 years and we’ve only seen a couple of minor repairs, but perhaps there have been more that we were unaware of.)

That said, the city has already ripped out the existing equipment as of Summer 2025, and estimates that construction will take until the Summer of 2026, about a year.

Similarly, we need a new bridge for Monaco Parkway over Cherry Creek.  The entire span is a distance of perhaps a couple of hundred feet.  Construction on that will run from October 2024 to December 2026.

By comparison, the Empire State building took 13 months to build.  During the Depression.

It took 16 months to build the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building.  In the middle of World War II.

Traffic on Monaco will be disrupted for over 2 years, and kids will be without a playground in Crestmoor for over a year.  The new playground looks like a lot of fun and I’m sure that’s going to be a really great bridge, but neither one of them is likely to become a center of the national military or an enduring symbol of global commercial dominance.

If we’re going to spend $1.8 million on new playground equipment, can’t we at least get it built expeditiously?

Inconvenience is a feature, not a bug

For some construction projects, disruption and inconvenience is actually the point. Take for example the endless number of “traffic calming” projects around the city, faithful servants of the city council’s ongoing hostility to the automobile.  Ostensibly designed to protect pedestrians, the net effect is to make useful traffic corridors less and less drivable, with more and more restrictions and more and more distractions.

For example, two of these traffic calming projects involve one-way streets on the east side of town that move traffic fairly efficiently.   Fourteenth Avenue is one-way eastbound, and Thirteenth Avenue is one-way westbound.  The plan calls for turning them into two-way streets; good luck fitting a turn lane into the middle, so traffic will stop for anyone wanting to make a left-hand turn onto one of the side streets.

According to Denver’s own traffic incident reporting, from 2013 through now, there have been, on both streets combined between Colorado and Quebec, a total of twenty-five incidents involving a pedestrian or a bicycle.  These aren’t necessarily fatal incidents or even ones resulting in injury.  Just incidents.  That’s about one every six months., and it amounts to 3% of all incidents reported.

Rather than spend money on transportation and mobility, making it easier for most citizens to get around the way they choose – by car – the city will be spending our own money to make our commutes and errands worse.

Landing on No

Leaving behind transportation and immobility, a case can be made that some of these projects are worthy.  For example, the new Children’s Advocacy Center is supposed to make it easier for guardians and parents of children in abusive or even just difficult circumstances to navigate a confusing bureaucracy.  But there doesn’t appear to be any corresponding move to reduce or simplify that bureaucracy.  It might be more convenient to walk papers all over a single office building than to drive them all over town, but the real frustration comes from how the system works, not from how far-flung it is.

Finally, there’s the question of city finances.  After years of being thousands of dollars per resident short of what it needs to cover expenses, Denver finally got to with $15 of break-even in the latest Financial State of the City Report from Truth in Accounting.  Much of that was on the strength of increased tourism tax revenue, but much of it also was getting to the point of having finished the projects from the last general obligation bonds.

With tax revenue falling at the same time spending is up, the city has had to revise its budget several times to stay balanced.  Add to that the additional liabilities from the bonds, and we’ll be right back where we were before, only without the net in-migration to grow the tax base.  Remember that this is general obligation debt, so without it being tied to any dedicated revenue stream, bond payments will compete with – and crowd out – other priorities.

At this point, there’s no reason to be voting for unsecured bonds to fund expensive projects, many of which will result in in no particular benefit at best, and permanent inconvenience at worst.

Joshua Sharf is a Denver resident and frequent contributor to Complete Colorado.