Due to what officials ascribe to an “intentional march toward sustained growth” by previous town boards, Erie is more than $100 million in debt and searching for a cost-effective plan to serve a population that is projected to more than triple in size over the next several decades.
The bulk of that debt — roughly $83 million — is sunk into water and wastewater infrastructure and treatment facilities taken on in installments over the past 11 years, a period that also has seen Erie leaders repeatedly commit to residential development that Mayor Tina Harris said was approved in order to lure businesses that the town’s residents are still waiting on.
“Definitely, the Board of Trustees in 2015 is challenged with trying to redirect the ship,” Harris said Friday at the board’s annual retreat in Boulder. “A lot of the decisions that were made by previous boards to take on debt were made to help us grow, but it’s like a Catch-22, where, if we didn’t take on enough debt to have the water to grow, we couldn’t grow.
“It’s that chicken-and-the-egg argument: Do you get the water to be able to have the growth? Or do you grow and then scramble to find the water?”
‘We don’t advertise it’
By the end of 2005, when the town re-drafted its comprehensive plan — which is being updated now and likely will be complete later this year — Erie had a population of about 12,000, but had either built, approved or committed to enough residential units to house about 33,000 people.
Since then, Erie, now with about 22,000 residents, has either tentatively or officially signed on for enough development to bring the town’s total population up to at least 60,000 — and maybe closer to 75,000, according to Town Administrator A.J. Krieger — in the next roughly 40 years.
In a presentation at the town board’s retreat, Krieger said “a lot of people don’t know” about the hole Erie’s in.
“We don’t advertise it,” he said of the debt, which also includes more than $20 million in bonds that paid for the construction of the Erie Community Center and the new police headquarters.
Harris said that the commitments to so much water infrastructure and residential construction were made in order to attract the kind of commercial tax revenue for which the town is still starved.
“We wanted to be able to have commercial development in town, like King Soopers, like a Super Target in the future, hopefully — just the amenities that our citizens would want to have in town,” she said. “We had to have enough rooftops to get those amenities even interested in Erie, so previous boards made decisions to build so much residential to try to prove to the commercial industry that Erie had enough residents that would be their customers.”
The King Soopers appears to be en route, as part of the planned 125,000-square-foot Vista Ridge Marketplace at Sheridan Parkway and Colo. 7.
Even if it’s indeed built — which won’t happen until 2016 — it’ll provide but a dent in the city’s revenue problem. Erie brings in roughly one-third the sales tax revenue that’s collected in Lafayette, its similarly sized neighbor to the south, and recently voted to initiate development of 29 acres of land at U.S. 287 and Arapahoe Road, on the border of the two municipalities.
Erie hasn’t announced publicly what it’ll build on that plot, but Harris said she felt an “urgency” to move on it — to the chagrin of Lafayette — because additional retail is necessary to her town’s vitality.
‘Dirty little secret’
Whether boards of years past were right or wrong to put Erie on the fast-track to growth without an adequate revenue stream, Krieger said, the town “can’t turn our back” now.
“The dirty little secret here is that we have to grow,” he said. “Many, many decisions have been made for us … I’ve lay awake the last couple nights trying to figure out 75,000 people. Maybe it’s 65,000, maybe it’s 62,000, but how do we serve 60,000-plus people?
“The answer isn’t just as simple as, ‘Well, we won’t.'”
At Friday’s retreat, the board made no official decisions, but the trustees generally were receptive to considering a sales tax increase or higher fees for developers.
This month, the town also will begin surveying residents before deciding whether to allow retail marijuana, a sales tax goldmine that some Erie residents say would compromise the town’s family-friendly identity.
All were agreed that if the town is serious about tripling in size, retail must be the priority. The vast majority of the approved but as-yet-unbuilt homes in Erie will go on the Weld County side of town, which has even less business than the Boulder County side.
“When I look at the (comprehensive plan) map and I think about this population, I say to myself, ‘It’s not laid out right.’ We’re not going to be able to function commercially,” Mayor Pro Tem Mark Gruber said. “We need to start carving out some commercial property and start losing some of this density.”
‘It has to grow’
Without revenue, the city not only remains in debt, but struggles to finance its most basic public services.
Chief of Police Marc Vasquez said Friday that while total arrests in Erie have soared from about 300 in 2013 to nearly 450 last year, the town remains well below the desired number of officers per capita, and cannot afford to equip its officers with body cameras.
“The demands on the police department are growing and will continue to grow,” he said. “There will come a time in the not-too-distant future where we can’t commit the time to code enforcement.”
Vasquez floated the idea of a public safety tax, but the trustees seemed hesitant.
Beginning in June, the board is expected to hold multiple study sessions on the broad topics of debt and development, both residential and retail. Those conversations can’t come soon enough, Krieger told the trustees Friday.
“This town has created a situation where it has to grow in order to retire the debt,” he said. “Every minute that we aren’t spending talking about how we’re going to develop an annually renewable revenue base in Erie is a minute that we’re wasting.”
Alex Burness: burnessa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/alex_burness
