A bill for an ordinance approving a proposed Purchase and Sale Agreement between the City and County of Denver and The Nichols Partnership Inc. for the sale of 1701 Platte Street. Approves a $13.5 million purchase and sale agreement with The Nichols Partnership Inc. to sell property located at 1701 Platte Street in Council District 1. The Committee approved filing this bill at its meeting on 3-27-18.
12,694,000 some dollars and for just 150 days. And so I've asked the airport to try to come up with, you know, how that happened, to escape attention. But when they give us descriptions of contracts, it be very helpful if they can be very scrupulous about getting the amounts correct. The contract itself does have the correct amount. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Councilman Flynn, for pointing out that detail. Okay. Can you please bring up Council Bill 259? And Councilman Herndon, we please put that on floor. Yes, Mr. President. I move the council bill 18 0 to 5 nine be placed upon final consideration and do pass. It has been moved. And second, it comes from the council. Councilman. No, go ahead. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. This bill has been really difficult issue for me. You know, the we're we're selling this property, and half of it is going to be going toward expanding our affordable housing fund. You know, several years ago, when we approved the Affordable Housing Fund for $15 million a year, several of us thought it was enough money. And and now we're saying, yes, that's correct. It's not enough money. And we've and finance has come up with an excellent proposal we heard this morning about expanding the affordable housing fund from 15 to $30 million a year and doubling the unit production over the next five years, which is really great news. The issue I have with is, is this piece of property is a vacant piece of property the city owns is basically, you know, we're going to sell this property. You know, he's basically valued at nothing, dollar a square foot. And we're going to sell it for about $400 a square foot to a good developer. But the main thing is especially free land. When we talked about this affordable housing expansion, the Denver Housing Authority, a wonderful organization, is helping us provide, you know, affordable housing and for low income citizens, is going to talk about expanding to 25 projects, about 2 to 3 acres per project. That's about 50 to 75 acres of land. This land, they're going to have to buy that land. Part of the affordable housing fund will be that $50 million that they're going to do with a bond issue to buy land. And they're saying that land will be back 45 to $50 per acre that they're going to try to buy. And here we have a piece of property that's basically free and a dollar per square foot, you know, that we could be using for a start up for affordable housing. But no, we're going to sell it for first can be done for commercial development, which I you know, I appreciate commercial development. Nothing wrong with that. But the main thing is we just need to make sure we understand how we're using our city owned properties. In the past, we've asked for an inventory of city owned properties or I believe we have and and if we haven't, I'm asking for it now of what city properties we own so we can make a decision of how we use those properties, especially when we have such a need for affordable housing. This is going to be for this affordable housing expansion, be from 0 to 30 AMAYA The low income. But we've got workforce housing, we've got all kinds of housing issues around the city. And so I'm just really troubled. I won't have this money from the proceeds. The sale will go to help fund the the affordable housing. But I'm just convinced with a $1.5 billion, you know, general fund budget that we have this year, we could have found seven and a half million dollars from our general fund and use this plan to to jump start affordable housing development. So that's the dilemma. I mean, and and but I don't want to take away from the excellent plan that they put together this morning. I'm so happy that we're going to go from 15 to $30 million a year for affordable housing and expand our production. And I definitely want to finish by saying I want to thank the All in Denver organization. They're the catalysts that really encouraged us to expand this affordable housing fund and that community citizen driven effort really did a wonderful job. So I'm going to vote against this tonight. I know it'll probably it'll pass, but I'm going to vote against it tonight because I think we should you should be using this land for affordable housing development. And I think we could take the seven and a half million dollars that we need for affordable housing out of the general fund. Thank you, Mr. President. All right. Thank you, Councilman. New Councilwoman. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to thank my colleague, Councilman Yu, for raising some questions about this property. I just want to share, I guess, for transparency sake, some of the conversations that I had. And I believe Councilwoman Ortega was also involved in these conversations. We in the city, you know, there's an executive order that helps to guide how the city disposes of additional land. And it's, you know, signed by the mayor. It's not subject to council approval. And I think that what we learned as we, you know, kind of dug into that a few years ago is that it does not require the use of excess land for affordable housing. It at the time when this parcel first came up, I think it basically said, like, we'll check with OED. It was very, very light requirement and it might not have even been housing people who actually looked in, determined whether land could be used. And so through the process of asking questions and pushing the administration, thinking about whether we could or should do an ordinance, the charter was a barrier to having us legislate higher standards on this. We certainly can look at that again. But but the administration did change the executive order to at least create a much clearer process of how land would be evaluated for affordable housing. So we took a step in the right direction, but it simply just doesn't require land that could be used for housing to be used for affordability. And I will I just want to, you know, share your concern that many cities do say that San Francisco, many others say if this land can be used for housing at all, then it should be used for housing and it should be used for affordable housing and or for homeless housing. So so it is possible and other cities do have stronger requirements. We do not. I will say I spent a lot of time learning about the projects and I'm not sure there were a number of parking requirements that we placed on this property. I we the size of the property shrank throughout the process. And so as I shared with the media, I can't be 100% sure that it would have been appropriate for affordable housing at the end. I don't know that, but I certainly agree that we should have had and in can have and the mayor has the power to do an executive order that says flat out we won't do this kind of sale if we can do affordable housing and we'll do that first and only if we can't do that, then do we move on to commercial or other uses. So so I think it's an important conversation to raise. I thank you for raising it, but because I can't necessarily guarantee the ins and outs of how this would have turned out and because I do believe that the resources are being dedicated appropriately, not just to affordable housing, but the other another portion of these funds are going to go back to some some funds that provide homeless emergency services. To me, I feel like this is a project worth going ahead and approving at this point. But with the important caveat that we could have a stronger policy and the executive order could be strengthened even further. We may or may not be able to legislate that, but it's certainly an option opportunity and many cities have much stronger standards than we have. So with that, I will be voting for it today, but with, you know, appreciation for the important issues being raised. Thank you, Councilwoman Canete. Seeing no other comments for this body, Madam Secretary, roll call. New York. ORTEGA Minus a reluctant eye. SUSSMAN Eye. Black eye. Clark, I. Flynn i Gilmore I Herndon I Cashman. Know. Can each. Lopez, I. Mr. President. I believe so is voting and thus results. That's right. Tonight's tune is. Tonight's two nays to 59 passes. All right. We have one other. Please bring up three or six. Madam Secretary, Councilman Herndon, will you please make a motion to take counsel about three or six out of order?