Sparks fly over Ivywild deal

A blowup between Mayor Steve Bach and a board member of the Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority has sparked a closed-door meeting Thursday to clear the air.

The verbal tussle at Tuesday’s City Council meeting was ignited by the widely hailed Ivywild renewal project, which calls for transforming the former Ivywild Elementary School south of downtown into a brewery, bakery, coffee shop and offices, among other uses.

The council pulled a resolution approving the deal from the consent portion of Tuesday’s agenda. The aim was to bring recognition to the project, which has been years in the works.

Instead, a confrontation ensued.

It started when Bach said that authority staff had asked his office last fall for a line of credit to fund their overhead, including salaries.

“That was shocking to me that an independent entity would come to us and ask for a loan from the general fund,” he said.

The mayor also said that the authority wanted to take $50,000 a year in fees for 25 years – or $1.25 million total – from the Ivywild project when the construction costs were only $3.2 million.

“The good news is we intervened,” Bach added. “Had we not done so, Urban Renewal would have extracted $1.25 million out of this project in fees.”

The Urban Renewal Authority on Wednesday acknowledged it has defaulted on a repayment of money it borrowed for the North Nevada Avenue redevelopment project.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Jim Kin, a local attorney who serves on the authority board, said the mayor had his facts about the Ivywild deal wrong.

“It’s embarrassing to us that somebody would comment that our board would attempt to collect a fee in excess of $1 million from any project in the urban renewal system,” he said. “It’s just frankly not true. I don’t know where that number came from.”

Kin said the authority assesses $50,000 a year in fees “against projects for a period of time.”

On the Ivywild project, the authority projected about $400,000 in fees, he said. When the developers said they wanted the authority to take another look at the fees, the authority recognized that the project was smaller than others and adjusted the numbers, he said.

“This is not the way we should be communicating,” Kin said. “We shouldn’t be communicating with statements to council that haven’t been vetted and made sure that they are correct. We’ve asked for a number of months to meet with the mayor and with city staff to discuss this, and we have not been afforded that opportunity.”

Bach fired back Tuesday, saying he got his information from his staff, who he believed “communicated regularly” with the authority. He also said he had three financial documents showing the authority taking as much as $1.25 million in fees.

Bach summoned Steve Cox, his former chief of staff, to ask if the documents were accurate.

“Is this what you gave me?” he asked Cox, who is now the mayor’s chief of economic vitality and innovation.

“That is absolutely what we gave you, Mr. Mayor,” Cox said.

Senior Analyst Bob Cope agreed, saying the authority’s “first submittal” included a fee schedule of $50,000 a year.

Council President Scott Hente finally intervened, saying he feared the “back and forth with he said, she said” wouldn’t end.

“I really would like to resolve that matter outside of council,” he said.

The resolution approving the Ivywild deal eventually passed unanimously.

Hente, who also serves on the authority board, said after the meeting that the $50,000-a-year fee for Ivywild was only a scenario and that it was never approved by the board.

“That was a hypothetical among many hypotheticals,” he said.

After the war of words, the mayor left council chambers, so Hente said he talked to Laura Neumann, the mayor’s new chief of staff, about scheduling a meeting to smooth things out.

“I said to her, ‘I think there’s been some misunderstanding, some miscommunication. I’d like to get together with the mayor, one or two members from Urban Renewal and kind of clear things up.’ She said OK,” he said.

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