Boulder Chamber seeks end to OZ moratorium, urges restraint on new land use regs

BOULDER — While Boulder Chamber of Commerce leaders support a proposal to end the development moratorium within Boulder’s designated Opportunity Zone, the group is urging city leaders to consider linking the moratorium reversal with a set of amendments to local land use regulations.

The Opportunity Zone program, established as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, allows investors to realize certain tax incentives if they put their money into projects within economically distressed neighborhoods. 

“This is an opportunity for our community to target investment to areas where we know we have redevelopment challenges,” Boulder Chamber president John Tayer told BizWest Monday. “It’s an opportunity for us to fulfill out goals of more mixed-use [development] and greater housing diversity.”

Boulder leaders implemented the development moratorium in February as a way to address concerns that the investors in the city’s Opportunity Zone — a 2.5-square-mile tract stretching from 28th to 55th streets and Arapahoe Avenue to the Diagonal Highway — will reap all of the rewards and their money will speed up gentrification rather than assist the disadvantaged. Critics argued that without changes to the city’s land-use table, the city’s “jobs-housing imbalance” would be exacerbated by commercial development within the zone. That imbalance is a reference to Boulder’s ongoing challenge of providing affordable housing options for the city’s workforce.

“We don’t typically think that this type of moratorium is the best approach to addressing land use concerns,” Tayer said. “…That said, we do understand some of the issues that City Council wanted to address.”

The Boulder Planning Board voted unanimously last month to recommend that the Boulder City Council end a development moratorium within the city’s designated Opportunity Zone. However that move has been tied to a proposed series of changes to the regulations that guide land use in Boulder. That linkage is a sticking point for some in the business and development community.

“While it is an absolute necessity to overturn the moratorium, we think tying it to this use table effort is not the right approach,” Tayer said. “We have grave concerns about the impacts that these use table changes will have on business development throughout the city.”

New features of amended land use regulations would limit office uses to no more than 25 percent of building floor area unless onsite affordable housing is included. The proposed rules would also prohibit the construction of additional offices in certain mostly residential areas where office space is already abundant, and they would increase scrutiny of single-family home development proposals.

Developments — including expansions of existing commercial spaces — that don’t fit within that newly defined scope would be subject to additional scrutiny through the non-conforming use review process, potentially slowing or stalling projects. 

That type of use review “can take four to five months and can cost significant dollars,” Tayer said. “It becomes a significant hurdle for small businesses.”

According to figures published by the Boulder Chamber, the more restrictive land use tables would affect 22,000 properties city-wide, not just those properties within the Opportunity Zone. 

“These changes would significantly hamper the ability of our local small business to build out in order to address their business needs,” Tayer said. “That kind of restraint on business expansion within existing buildings is something that will create major problems.”

The city council will hold a Sept. 3 hearing on the Opportunity Zone and land use tables.

Tayer said the Boulder Chamber is working to get the word out about the hearing to the business and development community. The city could have assisted in that effort by sending notices to all business that could be impacted by the land use table revisions, but that did not occur, he said.

“We have had conversations with city leadership and city staff, and we know they are all trying to do the right thing,” Tayer said. “But we think in this instance that they aren’t fully understanding the magnitude of the negative impact that this kind of zoning change could have.”

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