That means doing away with annual fees that would have been charged to property owners based on the size of their lots in favor of a — mostly — flat rate that would charge the largest properties extra money.

But even as the council voted 13-0 to approve the changes on first reading Monday night, members noted that the heavy lifting — including future rounds of property acquisition needed to widen sidewalks in places where they are too narrow today — is still years in the future.

“I am looking forward to the implementation aspect of this because I think there’s a lot of challenges there as well,” Councilman Kevin Flynn said before voting yes on Monday.

Flynn opposed the 2022 ballot measure but also served on the task force that came up with the program changes considered on Monday night.

Pending the outcome of a second and final council vote next week, the city Department of Transportation and Infrastructure will get to work setting up the first round of bills for a program that voters approved almost two years ago in November 2022. Fee collections were delayed for a full year to allow the stakeholder committee to complete its work.

As outlined in a staff presentation, property owners should expect to see sidewalk fees included as part of their semi-annual wastewater bills starting in the first half of next year. For more than 95% of homes and commercial properties, those charges will be $75 per bill or $150 for the entire year.

But for some property owners with large lots — like Belcaro neighborhood resident Thomas Herrington, who spoke as part of a public hearing Monday night — those bills could be significantly higher.

In order to keep the program revenue neutral so that it will bring in the roughly $40 million per year voters signed off on in 2022, the task force suggested extra fees for large lots. Any property — including city parks and public schools — with more than 230 linear feet of property frontage would pay an extra $3.50 per foot.

For Herrington, whose property doesn’t have a sidewalk today, that means bills of roughly $2,400 per year, he estimated.

He agreed larger lots should pay more, but not 16 times as much as the standard rate.

“All I’m asking is that larger lots should pay more but that it be a reasonable amount in relation to the fees that are being charged,” he said,

Councilman Paul Kashmann, whose east Denver district includes Belcaro, indicated the further tweaks may be coming. He also served on the stakeholder committee, which will be reconvening this year.

For now, Kashmann is excited progress is finally being made on a program that transfers the responsibility for sidewalk conditions from property owners to the city.

“This is an issuance policy where everyone pitches in and if any sidewalk gets messed up the city will come in and fix it,” he said.

In addition to changes to the fee structure, the council signed off on the following other changes Monday:

• Rebates will now be provided to low-income homeowners based on whether they have applied and qualify for discounts to the city’s trash collection program. Households making 60% or less of the area median income could see half or even all of their fees wiped out.

• Apartment building owners can qualify for 20% discounts if at least a quarter of the units in their buildings are income-restricted affordable housing.

• Fees will now go up annually based on a formula that factors in a combination of general consumer and construction-industry-specific inflation rates.

• While voters approved a program in 2022 that suggested work could be completed in nine years, that language will now be changed to “in nine years or as soon thereafter” as deemed feasible by city transportation officials.

With the final vote seemingly a formality at this point, some longtime advocates of better pedestrian infrastructure — in a city with more than 1,500 miles of missing or inaccessible sidewalks — looked to the future on Monday. That included disability rights advocate, Regional Transportation District board member and wheelchair user Jamie Lewis.

“I think a world-class city deserves world-class sidewalks,” Lewis said.

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Nicholas Orlin and Shawn Murphy jointly sued the city and up to five unknown police officers in January 2022, seeking damages for eye and facial injuries they sustained in those incidents while protesting against police brutality on May 30, 2020. Those payments were approved as part of the Denver City Council’s consent agenda on Monday afternoon.

Both men have also received payments from the city of Aurora in the same case, according to their attorneys.

An amended version of the complaint identified Aurora police officer Cory Budaj as the person who fired the projectile that injured Orlin and Aurora police sergeant Matthew Brukbacher as the one who fired the projectile at Murphy.

Orlin and Murphy did not know each other but were both near Lincoln Park at the intersection of Colfax Avenue and Lincoln Street that evening, according to the lawsuit.

Orlin was knocked unconscious by an unknown hard projectile after covering a tear gas canister with a traffic cone, according to the suit. A short time later, Murphy was shot in the face with a hard projectile after he kicked away a tear gas canister.

In both instances, officers did not issue warnings before firing, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Both men suffered from vision problems and facial disfigurement after the incidents.

The two settlement agreements with the city of Denver designated $210,000 for Orlin and $255,000 for Murphy.

Orlin already had been granted $100,000 through a settlement with Aurora. Murphy received $175,000 from that city, according to attorney Birk Baumgartner, adding up to total compensation of $310,000 and $430,000 for the two men, respectively.

The men were jointly represented by the Denver firms Baumgartner Law and Beem & Isely. The men have dismissed individual suits against the Aurora officers.

“I wouldn’t call it justice. I would say it is absolutely accountability,” attorney Danielle Beem said of the settlements Monday.

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Draft plans for Weir Gulch — which envision the acquisition of up to 70 residential properties — are now more than five years old. But they’ve attracted only limited public notice as city officials have discussed larger plans to revitalize the South Platte system.

City and federal officials emphasize that those plans are subject to change as they ramp up public outreach to impacted residents and get a clearer picture of what flood risk looks like in 2024 and beyond.

While some potentially affected residents in the Barnum and Barnum West neighborhoods told The Denver Post they were aware of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 2019 study and property map, the risks and project recommendations were news to at least some who live a stone’s throw from Weir Gulch.

Miki Yang, who lives two doors down from the gulch on Perry Street, had no idea last week that her property was part of any federal environmental study or real estate plan. She has lived in her home for three years but has owned the property for over a decade, renting it out to others before moving in with her family.

“Kind of strange,” she said after learning from a reporter that her home was circled on the Army Corps map, recommended for acquisition. “I never heard about it.”

Improvements along Weir Gulch and Harvard Gulch are planned as part of a larger South Platte revitalization project that has won $350 million in federal funding for the city. The Post reported Sunday on the significant potential impact on the horizon as city officials, developers and nonprofits work on projects to improve the South Platte and build dense new neighborhoods alongside it.

Water-flow and habitat projects along the gulches, which travel through Denver neighborhoods on their way to the river, are still being solidified.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2019 published a report identifying roughly 70 residences — mainly in the Barnum neighborhoods — that may need to be acquired to make room for the expansion and improvement of Weir Gulch. The total value at the time was $23.1 million, the report says.

As for south Denver’s Harvard Gulch, the Army Corps determined that there was no economically feasible plan for acquiring structures. Instead, it recommended voluntary participation by some homeowners in flood-proofing measures, such as elevation improvements to their lots or having their basements filled in.

Reducing flooding during storms

Weir Gulch, a zig-zagging waterway, takes the form of a close-to-natural creek bed in some places. In other segments, it’s an open-air concrete basin or runs completely underground. It travels under roadways, park space with playgrounds and even some buildings as it ferries water from Lakewood to the Platte in the Sun Valley neighborhood.

Weir Gulch and the areas around it represent the largest unmitigated flood risk in the city, said Ashlee Grace, director of Denver’s Waterway Resiliency Program, an overall $550 million project.

“The intent is definitely to increase the conveyance capacity so (that) it keeps the flows in the channel, and not spilling into the community that surrounds it” after heavy rainfall, Grace said.

Despite that 2019 report, officials say it’s not a certainty that the city and its partners with the Mile High Flood District will need to acquire the homes identified by the Army Corps.

Design work is complete only for the portion of the Weir Gulch project in Sun Valley between where it meets the river and West Eighth Avenue, city officials say.

The city negotiated the purchases of five commercial properties last year to make that first phase possible, according to Nancy Kuhn, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. Of those parcels, two were vacant land and the others housed tenants including a construction company, a software firm, and a granite slab testing and storage business.

“Additional portions of Weir Gulch have not yet moved into the design phase, so it’s too early to know what, if any, property impacts there will be,” Kuhn wrote in an email last month.

In an emailed statement, Bert Matya, the project manager overseeing the South Platte River and tributaries work from the Army Corps’ side, also said that it was too early to specify property impacts beyond the Sun Valley section.

“The Corps looks forward to working alongside Denver to develop innovative approaches that deliver the intended benefits of the project to the community,” Matya said.

City-led outreach aimed at better determining the risk in those neighborhoods will begin in 2025, according to Kuhn, though she said the Mile High Flood District may start reaching out to people who live along the gulch sooner.

The study phase of the broader Waterway Resiliency Program dates back to the Obama administration, and the program has evolved over the more than 10 years since the Army Corps launched that assessment. It reached two major milestones in 2022, Grace said, when it was granted the $350 million in upfront federal money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Denver became part of an Army Corps pilot program.

That pilot is aimed at overhauling how the U.S. government approaches massive infrastructure projects, with an aim of speeding up timelines and saving money. Part of that is accomplished by giving local governments more control.

“That puts Denver in the driver’s seat of project delivery and the Army Corps in the approve-review role, which is a complete role reversal,” Grace said.

Moving “would turn my life upside down”

In the Barnum West neighborhood, Caroline Cordova has had a portion of the concrete channel of Weir Gulch as a neighbor for 25 years. She knew her home on Quitman Street was on a map of potential acquisitions for the waterway project after attending some community meetings about it a few years ago, she said.

Her takeaway from those meetings was that officials hoped to avoid using eminent domain to acquire properties to make way for the work.

But Cordova has no interest in selling her home and moving. She said she’d never been affected by flooding even when the water was high in the channel next door. In the high-priced Denver housing market, she’s not even sure where she would go. Her house has tripled in value since she bought it.

“It would turn my life upside down if I had to move,” Cordova said.  “As far as I am concerned, I am there until the day I die.”

City Councilwoman Jamie Torres, who represents west Denver neighborhoods, said improving Weir Gulch is going to be a very challenging project that will require “potentially scary conversations.”

She emphasized that discussions about home acquisitions, should any be necessary, could still be years in the future.

But Torres has already advised one homeowner who lives near the gulch not to build an accessory dwelling unit on her property, at least not before the city has provided more clarity.

“I hate to think of my residents taking on additional real debt when we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen in this gulch area,” Torres said. “At the end of the entire process, though, we want to help create a much safer corridor. We want to help utilize this open space so it can be a better park system for residents (and) a better trail system for residents.

“So we’re just trying to make sure that we’re very honest and very careful about that conversation.”

Grace, from the city, said the city’s increased authority over how the project is run already is netting some benefits.

The section of the Weir Gulch that the city will get to work on next year in Sun Valley was eyed for a long box culvert in the 2019 study. Denver instead will build a bridge over an open channel at Decatur Street, a design change that Grace says will improve safety during high-water events and provide more accessible open space the rest of the time.

“One of the strengths Denver brings to the table is we know our community,” Grace said. “We’re in the midst of updating what was understood to be the conditions in 2019.”

Barnum and Barnum West have been identified by the city as neighborhoods vulnerable to economic displacement. After looking at the Army Corps’ map, Ean Thomas Tafoya couldn’t help but notice all the Latino last names listed on the properties identified for potential acquisition.

Tafoya is a former Denver mayoral candidate and the Colorado director of Green Latinos, which advocates for environmental justice issues. He also grew up in Barnum and remembers catching crawdads in Weir Gulch.

Tafoya said he supports projects that protect water quality and reduce flood risks. But he has seen Denver’s minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of the impacts of other large infrastructure projects, like the recent Interstate 70 expansion in northeast Denver.

He expressed hope that city leaders could find solutions that don’t uproot residents along Weir Gulch.

“In the middle of a housing crisis and a climate crisis, we think the solution is to displace historic Latino communities?” Tafoya asked.

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Even now, after decades of revitalization and efforts to stabilize flows, sections of the urban South Platte still smell of decay and waste, and city officials discourage swimming. But cyclists also pedal along miles of paved trails on the riverfront. Kayakers and surfers play in the whitewater. Carp and trout lurk under bridges, while families of ducks paddle along the calmer waters. And strips of green parks border long stretches of the river where, in previous decades, factories spewed sludge and landfills leached pollutants.

After a long era of neglect and abuse, city officials, nonprofit leaders and developers hope to build on that progress as they pose a question for the future: How can we turn the city toward the river — the waterway that made Denver’s existence on the High Plains possible — instead of putting it at our backs and ignoring it?

More than a quarter of a billion federal dollars are flowing into ecosystem restoration and flood management along the South Platte. For the first time, the Denver City Council recently created a committee dedicated to issues on and development near the river.

Developers plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars along the river in coming years, building as much as 15 million square feet of combined new residential and commercial space on the land where Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park sits today. If completed, that square footage will be nearly five times larger than Denver International Airport’s terminal building.

Should that and other ambitious projects reach their full potential, the Platte would serve as a focal point of brand new high-rise urban neighborhoods that expand the city’s skyline in a new direction.

“The South Platte River is the birthright of Denver,” said Jeff Shoemaker, who for 40 years led a nonprofit group created to advocate for the river. “We took that birthright and made it a toilet. Fifty years later, it can once again be celebrated as its birthright.”

Property owners ranging from the Denver Housing Authority to Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, to the city itself will all play roles in determining how new construction capitalizes on a restored South Platte.

The impending turnover of underutilized and unappreciated land has generated buzz and a glut of glossy renderings. At the same time, it’s inducing heartburn in some corners of the city that have seen new investment like that drive gentrification in nearby low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Still, establishing the river as an asset rather than a barrier to urban growth is a sea change that veteran Denver city-builders like architect Chris Shears have hoped for decades would come.

His firm, Shears Adkins Rockmore, has its hands in nearly every landscape-shifting project being contemplated near the South Platte today. The plans include transforming the vast parking lots around Empower Field and Ball Arena into new mixed-use neighborhoods.

Another project to the south would turn the long-vacant field once occupied by the Gates Rubber Co., just south of the Regional Transportation District’s Broadway Station, into a mixed-use community. Plans call for more than 550,000 square feet of office and retail space and nearly 900 apartments.

He compares the opportunities in front of the city today to the 1980s, when then-Mayor Federico Peña set an ambitious agenda that would lead to Denver’s evolution from a stagnant plains town to a modern metropolis.

“This is the time to plan for the future and be optimistic,” Shears said. “The river is going to be much, much more important.”

The South Platte has served as a geographic divide between east and west Denver for nearly all of the city’s existence. Generations of city residents compounded that division by adding man-made barriers, including Interstate 25 and the consolidated freight rail lines, that follow the river’s path.

For Denver city planner David Gaspers, the public and private investment in the river’s restoration and the surging interest in new development near the water present a chance to overwrite some of the mistakes of the past.

“It’s an opportunity to make Denver feel whole again,” Gaspers said. “It’s not a barrier. It’s actually a place where people want to come together.”

After century of neglect, a flood changed everything

French explorers named the South Platte River for its lassitude — in French, “platte” means flat. Some called it the “upside-down river” since, in some places, one had to dig into the riverbed to find water.

Indigenous people for centuries wintered near the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek, eventually joined by explorers, French trappers and Mexican gold seekers. In 1858, after prospectors found gold nearby, Denver was born on the banks of the confluence.

The South Platte’s year-round water allowed for settlement and population growth on the arid High Plains.

“The South Platte is the cradle and birthplace of the city,” said Tom Noel, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado Denver who has authored numerous books and textbooks about Colorado history. “But it took quite a while for people to respect it.”

Early Denver’s industry grew along the river. Hog farms, stockyards, factories and landfills sprouted on its banks in the late 1800s because the river could carry off all the waste, Noel said.

Workers at a paint factory on the river used to stand behind the facility and watch the river turn the color of the paint being made that day as the factory’s discharge reached the water.

The river held the city’s darker secrets: bodies, cast-off burglary loot. Only the poorest of the poor lived near the water.

The waste, the chemicals and the sludge accumulated. A Rocky Mountain News reporter in 1962 toured the river as the city considered building a sanitation project and wrote that he came away with tears in his eyes.

“The tears weren’t from emotion,” the reporter wrote. “It was from the stench. The foul odors were enough to lift the hat from your head.”

The neglected river took its vengeance in 1965. After days of rain, its waters surged on June 16, building into a moving wall that picked up debris as it rushed toward Denver — cars, mobile homes and heavy equipment all caught in the swell.

The flood killed at least 20 people in the Denver area and caused $5.4 billion in damage in today’s dollars — one of the most devastating natural disasters in city history. It wiped out railyards, warehouses, neighborhoods and all but one of the city’s bridges spanning the water.

As the river split the city, Denver state Sen. Joe Shoemaker received a call while working on his family’s farm in Iowa during a summer break. His son, Jeff, remembered his father coming back from the house, face white as paper. He told the family the river had flooded.

“What river?” responded Jeff Shoemaker, then 11 years old.

Despite growing up in Denver, he didn’t know a river existed — an ignorance, or at least common disregard, held by many in the burgeoning city until the river tried to wash it away.

The flood — and the phone call to the Shoemaker farm — altered the future of the South Platte.

In the aftermath, Denver Mayor Bill McNichols created the Platte River Development Committee in 1974 to restore the river and mitigate future flood risk. He appointed Joe Shoemaker as chairman.

A year later, the committee opened Confluence Park — the first park on the river. Though crews could build only a quarter mile of riverside trail in either direction before being blocked, the creation of the park marked a turning point in the river’s history.

The committee in 1976 morphed into the nonprofit Greenway Foundation, which methodically transformed landfills and industrial sites along the river into parks. A landfill became Globeville Landing Park. Eleven industrial sites became Commons Park, a stretch of green behind Union Station. A city maintenance site became Gates-Crescent Park, now home to the Children’s Museum of Denver.

“My dad’s motto, which is now mine, was: ‘There’s no done, there’s only next,’ ” said Jeff Shoemaker, who took over leadership of the Greenway Foundation in 1982 and worked there until his retirement in 2022.

As green spaces prospered on the riverbanks, more Denverites came to run, bike and picnic. The Greenway Foundation looked to the future, creating a series of master plans for the river and the land around it.

But the foundation — and other advocates who hoped the river could be more than a moving sewer — needed to overcome a culture that for decades ignored or scorned the South Platte.

While most Denverites now know the river exists, there is still work to be done to overcome its negative image, said Ryan Aids, current executive director of the Greenway Foundation.

“Every great city has a river running through it: Chicago, New York,” Aids said. “And every city has done what Denver did to its river in the beginning, which is neglect it, abandon it, pollute it, turn its back on it.

“Then cities started revitalization — to turn their front door to the river. And Denver is starting to do that as well.”

“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”

City documents recognize the potential in the land along the river.

The 2019 version of Blueprint Denver, the city’s comprehensive plan, includes a growth strategy map. It shows clusters of dense future development along the river, marking those areas as “regional centers.” Regional centers, as a category, are expected to provide 50% of the city’s job growth and 30% of its housing growth by 2040.

But with the renewed attention to long-neglected areas near the South Platte comes the specter that new money will push out longtime residents. As the city mitigates flood risk and pollution — the factors that made living near the river more of a curse than a blessing — low-income residents will be vulnerable to rising costs.

That’s a reality Denver knows well after some of its long-established Black and Latino neighborhoods, themselves largely the result of racist housing policy, faced rapid demographic change as the city’s population grew over the last two decades.

In west Denver, Councilwoman Jamie Torres’ district includes some of those long-neglected areas that are now seeing a swell of interest and investment.

Sun Valley is home to both subsidized housing and the Denver Broncos’ stadium. A framework plan to build on Empower Field’s south lots could be a catalyst for a stampede of new development — though that is on hold for now and depends on the whims of the franchise’s new ownership group, which hasn’t ruled out the option of building a new stadium elsewhere.

On the east side of the river, the Auraria neighborhood is the epicenter of ambitious projects that, if fully realized, could see the city’s skyline roughly double in size.

Much of that neighborhood, once home to a largely Latino community, was already wiped away and remade in the last century. After the 1965 flood battered the economically marginalized neighborhood, voters in 1969 passed a bond measure that laid the groundwork for the multi-school college campus that anchors the area today.

All the potential development near the river “can marginalize existing communities if there isn’t any way of shepherding that dialog together — because it’s just so based on property ownership,” Torres said. “That could be a really gentrifying factor.”

But the council’s newly formed committee promises to shape the future of Denver and its river. And Torres is its chair.

The South Platte River Committee has met just twice since forming in July, but even its creation sends a message, according to council leaders. City staffer members focused on the river see it as much more than a sleepy procedural step.

“What will make any project (or) any effort great is leadership support,” said Ashlee Grace, the director of the city’s Waterway Resiliency Program, the name of the city-run river project fueled by $350 million in federal river restoration money. “This committee forming, I think, is a huge step for the city. Our elected leaders recognize the value of the South Platte River and how it can truly be a part of a vibrant future for Denver.”

The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and then-Mayor Michael Hancock signed the agreement launching the Waterway Resiliency Program in May 2023 after years of study, negotiations and wrangling for federal funding. But even that mammoth undertaking is focused only on a portion of the river, along with its Harvard Gulch and Weir Gulch tributaries.

Private projects such as the long-awaited River Mile development — slated to eventually replace Elitch Gardens — are also aimed at improving the health of the river, while adding recreational opportunities and housing for thousands of people.

Council president Amanda Sandoval highlighted other projects with the potential to transform the city, all within half a mile of the river, including the still-progressing National Western Center campus overhaul north of downtown and the 60-acre blank slate of state-owned land at the former Burnham Yard railyards, south of the city center.

The river “is literally running through all of the catalytic projects that are all coming to fruition at the same time,” Sandoval said in an interview. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If we don’t prioritize it, it will be done piecemeal.”

Smaller projects have tested the waters

The megaprojects on the horizon follow smaller redevelopments on the South Platte.

Developer Susan Powers remembers when she first came across the abandoned warehouse and barrel-roofed building that she and her partners eventually would turn into the $65 million mixed-used development dubbed Steam on the Platte.

She was riding her bike along the river when she came upon an unexpected detour that routed her onto Zuni Street near Old West Colfax Avenue. There she spotted the cluster of buildings on the river’s eastern bank. That former warehouse has been transformed into an office building that appeals to techie tenants, while the barrel-roofed building is occupied by Raices Brewing Company and its often-bustling taproom.

As far as Powers knows, Raices is the only bar or restaurant in the city that offers outdoor seating along the South Platte — for now, at least.

“When you go there, it has its own little ecosystem,” Powers said. “Rabbits are still running around. There are lots of birds, and you can really get away from what really, only a couple of blocks away, is more urban life.”

Powers has sold her stake in the office building and plans to sell Raices’ owners their building. She also hopes to sell a vacant chunk of land that could see a new condo development, with the building facing the river.

Steam on the Platte may gain much more company along those banks in the decades to come.

On the east side of the river, the potential vertical development would come on the seas of asphalt parking along Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway, turning them into lively mixed-use neighborhoods. The River Mile and Ball Arena projects are siblings divided mainly by the consolidated rail tracks that run between the arena and the amusement park.

The South Platte River Committee on Aug. 14 received a briefing from city planning and finance staff regarding plans to rezone 70 acres of land around Ball Arena.

Details shared in that briefing included 6,000 units of apartments and other new housing, more than 1,000 of which would be reserved for low-income residents. There would be no limit on building heights on the land if the property owner — billionaire developer and sports mogul Stan Kroenke’s company, Kroenke Sports and Entertainment — were to live up to city-brokered affordable housing conditions.

The arena district wouldn’t directly touch the river, but a network of walking and biking trails would help weave it into the city’s multimodal transportation network, providing easy access to the river for future residents and visitors. In fact, plans call for eight bike and pedestrian bridges that either carry users to the South Platte or Cherry Creek or take them over those two waterways, said Greg Dorolek a landscape architect working on that project.

Dorolek is co-president of Wenk Associates, which is among the many cooks in the kitchen for the Ball Arena area redevelopment. It’s also involved in the neighboring River Mile project.

“You can live on this river and restore it at the same time, and I think it’s going to be exciting,” Dorolek said, adding that Denver is on the verge of becoming “a river city.”

The River Mile made a big splash when its ambitious plan was unveiled in early 2018. It’s a joint endeavor between Kroenke’s KSE and boutique developer Revesco Properties, and the development’s leaders seek to fill in what Revesco president and CEO Rhys Duggan has referred to as “the doughnut hole” between downtown and the rest of the city.

Renderings released over the years have shown attention-grabbing details, from tall, spindly residential towers to grand promenades that step down to the water. Anchoring it all is the river.

The development team also has pledged to invest $100 million in reinvigorating the milelong stretch of the South Platte, including likely dredging 6 to 8 feet of sand from the riverbed to create a narrower, deeper channel that would help restore fish habitat.

For now, the ambitious project is in a holding pattern as Duggan and company keep their eyes on the ebbs and flows of another often-unpredictable force: the U.S. economy.

“Obviously, the interest rate environment has shifted dramatically in the last two years, and I think we need to come into a period of normalization before we can get to work on the river,” Duggan told The Denver Post.

The development team continues to work on designs, engineering and entitlements as well as seek local and federal approvals needed for the work.

Meanwhile, Duggan is celebrating the momentum on the river.

When he rides his bike along the banks, he sees a buildup of exciting new development, including the Hurley Place and Denargo Market projects in the River North Art District northeast of downtown.

The South Platte isn’t a barrier. It isn’t a dump. Now, Duggan said, it’s a public asset.

Finding an oasis close to home

On a recent afternoon just north of Denver, Jack Borthwick tossed his fly fishing rod off the bridge to a friend standing below on the riverbank. A giant carp thrashed on the line, bending the rod — now in Nic Hall’s hands — into a sharp U.

Car tires, a Mountain Dew bottle and an Amazon box littered the bank. A broken-down and opened-up trailer sat abandoned just off the road, and an eerie industrial siren screeched from across the river.

On one side of the bridge, a water treatment plant churned through 2.2 million peoples’ waste, its smell sitting on everything in its vicinity. On the other, the smokestacks of Suncor Energy’s oil refinery thrust toward the sun.

But this is one of Borthwick’s favorite places to fish, and the carp pulling on his rod made the scramble up and down the banks worth it.

He said the thrill of sight-casting to huge carp on unoccupied riverbanks beats fighting crowds for prime fishing spots on the more famous trout waters an hour or so outside of Denver.

Best of all, this spot — known as “The Stank” —  is 10 minutes from his house in northwest Denver.

The river and its parks are critical pieces of nature accessible to people in the city who don’t have the money, means or time to drive to the mountains, said Nic Hall, Borthwick’s fishing partner and the president of Denver Trout Unlimited. The Denver chapter of the national fishing and conservation group is the only local affiliate dedicated to a city river.

“A lot of people look at an urban river and think, ‘Gross,’ ” Hall said as he scouted for carp. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Slowly, Denverites’ perception of the river is shifting, said Jolon Clark, the executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation.

He worked for the Greenway Foundation for 18 years and served two terms on the City Council before joining new Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration last year.

“There’s still a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on down on the river,” Clark said. “But being in the middle of the city and seeing a skyscraper — and a blue heron fishing right beneath it — that’s just a magical experience.”

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As the local government mandate forces wage increases on an industry that already operates on thin margins, he fears an accelerating die-off of independent restaurants in Denver, where his company operates Tavernetta and Sunday Vinyl near Union Station.

“You’re going to see so many” closures, Stuckey predicted. “You’re going to have a whiplash and you’re going to have fewer jobs really quickly.”

The Michelin star-earning restaurateur is adding his voice to a chorus of operators who view the 2019 city law — which increased Denver’s minimum wage above the state’s rate and later pegged it to inflation — as a heavy burden that makes an always-challenging industry increasingly brutal. The city’s minimum wage this year is $18.29, and it’s set to increase again Jan. 1.

Restaurants are perhaps the most prominent sector squeezed by the city’s escalating wage floor, but they aren’t the only portion of Denver’s small business community struggling to keep up.

At Twist & Shout, an independent music institution that sells CDs, records, Blu-ray movies and other media at 2508 E. Colfax Ave., owner Patrick Brown says keeping up with his labor costs sometimes means making tough decisions, like cutting back on new inventory. A longtime employee and manager at the shop, he bought Twist & Shout from founders Paul and Jill Epstein in 2022.

“It has an impact on our bottom line,” Brown said of the minimum wage. “Payroll is double what it was, easily, since I started doing the payroll here 10 years ago.”

Denver city officials announced earlier this month that the city’s minimum wage would rise to $18.81 per hour in 2025. Wages for tipped workers (those who make at least $3.02 per hour in tips) are set to increase from $15.27 to $15.79.

The upcoming 52-cent increase is gentler compared to the full-dollar increase that took effect at the start of this year, and it’s much milder than the $1.42 jump from 2022 to 2023, as inflation soared in recent years. The latest increase is more in line with the pace of growth city leaders expected when the City Council voted to tie the minimum wage to increases in the Consumer Price Index.

But looked at cumulatively, Denver’s hourly minimum wage will be $7.71 higher on Jan. 1, 2025, than it was in 2019. That’s a rise of nearly 70% in six years.

“We are the cornerstone species of the American economy,” Stuckey said of independent restaurants. “And these cities that are raising the minimum wage are about to torpedo that cornerstone species.”

Denver’s minimum wage this year is nearly $4 higher than the state’s $14.42 hourly minimum for non-tipped workers, which also is adjusted for inflation annually. The state capital was the first city to take advantage after lawmakers lifted a law prohibiting local minimum wages.

Since then, Edgewater (now $15.02 per hour) and Boulder County ($15.69 in unincorporated areas) have followed suit. The Boulder City Council is now considering setting a city minimum wage higher than the state’s.

Workers “keep continue getting squeezed”

A Boulder minimum wage would affect Stuckey’s Frasca Food and Wine and Pizza Alberico. In Denver, his two restaurants are in Councilman Chris Hinds’ district, which covers most of downtown and other dense neighborhoods populated with small businesses.

Hinds was elected in the spring of 2019, just in time to vote for the minimum wage increase that fall. The councilman says he hears the concerns of restaurant owners, but those concerns are not his highest priority.

“Our housing continues to be more and more unaffordable, and people continue getting squeezed,” Hinds said. “I hear all the time from people who can’t make ends meet because their wages are too low.”

That was also his rationale for voting recently to refer Mayor Mike Johnston’s 0.5% affordable housing sales tax measure to city voters in November. He knows higher wages are only part of the puzzle.

If the restaurant industry wants to advocate for solutions to the city’s cost-of-living woes, Hinds said its advocates should lobby the state legislature to give municipalities the power to adjust the tipped income credit for minimum wage workers. Right now, Denver is beholden to the state-set maximum credit of $3.02 per hour.

Colorado’s cost of living — driven largely by the heavy burden of housing costs — is making the state less attractive to businesses generally. Or at least that is what CNBC suggests in its 2024 ranking of states based on their business climates.

Colorado fell to 16th among states this year, down from 11th in 2023 and fourth in the cable news network’s 2022 rankings. The category that hurt the state the most was its cost of living, where the network ranked Colorado 46th out of the 50 states; Colorado also ranked poorly, at 39th, for cost of doing business.

Rachel Beck is the executive director of the Colorado Competitive Council, an offshoot of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce that lobbies for policies that support a strong economy and good jobs in the state.

The organization’s leaders know housing is driving business costs in Colorado, Beck said, but she argues that putting pressure on small businesses by mandating higher wages is not a workable solution. Instead, the state and local governments need to focus on drastically increasing housing supply.

“Proponents of minimum wage increases are very well-intentioned because, theoretically, it’s a way to ensure people have enough money to live in a given location,” Beck said. “But the increase in cost of housing has far outpaced wages. And instead, you end up with unintended consequences, like restaurants struggling to stay in business.”

Rising housing costs also are among the first things cited by proponents of Denver’s strong minimum wage when emphasizing its importance.

Aderaw Belay, a baggage handler and wheelchair agent at Denver International Airport, holds jobs with two contractors there and often works 16 hours days, not including commuting time.

A member of the Service Employees International Union, Belay says the $18.29 per hour he makes thanks to the city’s minimum wage is not life-changing money — it’s money he needs simply to survive when a one-bedroom apartment costs $1,500 a month. Most of his coworkers at the airport have similar stories, getting by with two or three jobs.

“Right now,” he said, “we are thinking about basic life. We are thinking about basic needs.”

“Constantly a challenge just to break even”

Progressive policy advocates have praised Denver’s higher minimum wage. Last year, the Colorado Fiscal Institute cited data compiled by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment in arguing that it didn’t hurt Denver’s economic performance relative to the rest of the state in the first three years.

“Opponents of local minimum wage policies claim that such laws cause businesses to cut jobs, cut hours and pass the higher costs to consumers in higher prices, which can result in fewer purchases,” CFI senior economist Chris Stiffler wrote in a blog post in July 2023. But in Denver, compared to other cities, “unemployment was lower, weekly earnings increased, and sales tax collections all outpaced the rest of Colorado.”

But restaurant owners and other small business owners have reported more difficulties.

At the Colorado Competitive Council, Beck says having rigid minimum wage laws that cut across industries doesn’t account for the conditions and circumstances in each industry. Anecdotally, she hears that restaurants, in particular, respond to the challenge by cutting hours.

That is the case for Sam Armatas, vice president of Sam’s No. 3 diner, a family business with two locations, one in Denver and one in Glendale.

Armatas said his downtown Denver restaurant at 1500 Curtis St. was running a $19,000 deficit for the year as of last week. Wages — especially for tipped bartenders and waitstaff — set the location apart from Glendale, which is operating in the black, Armatas said. Glendale follows the state’s minimum wage.

One way he has had to adapt is by tailoring his hours to the whims of the city center, which no longer has reliable officer worker foot traffic.

He’ll serve the pre-performance crowds that flock to the Denver City of the Performing Arts on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday nights for plays and musicals, but it’s not worth it to sit mostly empty for a few hours waiting for the crowds to come back after the shows are over. The restaurant closes at 8 p.m. on those nights, Aramatas said, to go out on a high note.

“It’s constantly a challenge just to break even now,” Armatas said.

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The agency first posted about the closure on X at 6:25 p.m. on Friday.

The Denver Police Department reported on its X account that the accident occurred near the Santa Fe Drive interchange and involved two cars. One person was prounounced dead on the scene.

Further information about the crash will be added to this story as it becomes available.

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Brian Chacon, 33, has been in police custody since Aug. 11 after the sheriff’s office investigated his activities, which involved taking vehicles he had no legal right to impound or possess and bringing them to salvage lots Eagle Wing was not approved to do business with to sell as salvage.

During the investigation detectives also found that Chacon possessed child pornography, the sheriff’s office said in a news release Friday. He was arrested in Denver after the Douglas County officials issued a warrant for his arrest in the case on Aug. 9.

Chacon is now being held at the county jail in Castle Rock on a $350,000 bond. Detectives are recommending charges including 48 counts of motor vehicle theft, five counts of possession of child pornography and dozens more counts of forgery and chop shop activities.

The investigation into Chacon dates back to December, according to the sheriff’s office.

Rather than taking cars to the one impound lot Eagle Wing Towing was approved to do business with, detectives determined Chacon was taking cars to U-Pull-&-Pay junkyard and salvage lots in Denver and Aurora to sell.

Investigators looked into 81 vehicles connected to Eagle Wing and Chacon and found that 48 of them were confirmed stolen. Another 29 of those vehicles may or may not have been stolen because the most recent owners could not be identified, according to the sheriff’s office.

“I am very proud of our patrol deputies and detectives’ work on this case,” Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said in a statement. “This suspect was preying on people who trusted that their vehicles would still be in the locations where they left them, whether they were disabled or otherwise.”

U.S. 6 has been reopened in Clear Creek Canyon between Colo. 93 and Colo. 119 after a semi overturned on Friday afternoon leading to a more than five-hour closure of the highway in both directions, according to state officials.

Colorado Deparmtnet of Transportation spokeswoman Tamara Rollison told The Denver Post that the long stretch of mountain highway was officially open to traffic again just after 6:15 p.m. Friday.

The portion of U.S. 6 that had been closed runs west from Golden and is a connection to Colorado’s gambling towns of Black Hawk and Central City.

The Colorado State Patrol received the first report of the semi rollover just before 1 p.m., according to Trooper Sherri Mendez. No other vehicles were involved in the wreck. The driver was transported to a hospital. Mendez did not have information about that person’s condition on Friday afternoon.

The Colorado Department of Transportation first announced the closure on social media at 1:27 p.m.

Traffic on the east end of the closure was diverted onto Colo. 93. On the west end, drivers were routed onto Colo. 119,  Rollison said.

That closure had impacts elsewhere on the highway system, particularly on Interstate 70 at the beginning of what promises to be a busy holiday weekend.

The Golden Fire Department and Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office responded to the accident the scene, Rollison said.

Peavey, 57, was found dead on Saturday by a search party of his family and friends after being reported missing earlier in the week. He had last been heard from on the evening of Aug. 19, according to the sheriff’s office.

Within hours of Peavey’s body being discovered, the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office with support from the Georgetown Police Department apprehended Ferrer. He was arrested on warrant for failure to appear in court on an unrelated weapons charge in Nebraska but he had already been identified as a person of interest in Peavey’s death, according to Friday’s news release.

The sheriff’s office, state investigators and the 5th Judicial District Attorney’s Office have now collected enough evidence to charge Ferrer with first-degree murder, felony murder and aggravated robbery, according to Firday’s announcement.

Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder and aggravated robbery in the case, the district attorney’s office announced Friday. Ferrer appeared in court Friday afternoon, where a judge set his bond at $1 million. He is being held in the Clear Creek County jail and his next court date is Sept. 18.

Peavey lived in Idaho Springs and bred Dobermans through his company Elite European Dobermans. After his body was found, the sheriff’s office announced that as many as 10 puppies were missing from his property. Anyone who has recently purchased a Doberman puppy in the last two weeks is asked to contact the sheriff’s office. Peavey’s dogs are microchipped for identification.

Friday’s release noted the puppies are still unaccounted for.

Following an autopsy, the Clear Creek County Coroner’s Office determined that Peavey likely was killed around the time he was last heard from on Aug.19. The cause of death was a gunshot wound.

Anyone with more information about the ongoing investigation is urged to call the sheriff’s office at 303-670-7567 or send an email to crime_tips@clearcreeksheriff.us. Anonymous tips can be submitted online at bit.ly/CCSOCrimeTips.

The department posted on its X account that officers responded to a shooting in the area at 2:05 p.m. Thursday. The victim was taken to a hospital.

On Friday, the department posted an update announcing that the victim had died. That update described the circumstances of the shooting as an apparent road rage incident.

The intersection of Byers and Kalamath is near a busy tangle of roadways including the West Alameda Avenue interchange with Interstate 25 in Baker.

The department has not shared further details about the victim or any suspects in the case.

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