Voters in Colorado Springs will not be asked to change the city’s charter to require a public vote on a City for Champions sports and events center.

In a surprise move this week, Councilwoman Jan Martin asked her fellow council members to instead make a public promise, by way of a resolution, to citizens saying they would get to vote on a City for Champions sports and events center. But, she said, there was no need to amend the city charter.

The City Council is expected to vote Jan. 27 on a resolution – which is a formal expression of intent – that promises citizens will get to vote on any City for Champions sports and events center if taxpayer money is used to build it.

“This council wanted to send a message to the public that we support a vote of the citizens when public funds are used for a sports and events center. A resolution would do that,” Martin said.

Laura Neumann, a spokeswoman for the project, said City for Champions organizers support a public vote on a sports and events center if taxpayer money is used to build it. But she has argued for months that a charter change was unnecessary.

“A charter is our city’s constitution – an amendment is a pretty big deal,” she said.

Neumann said City for Champions organizers, who had been consumed by the political discussion surrounding the sports and events center, now can buckle down and hammer out financial details for the project. She hopes the group will have details to discuss in the next six months.

“We will be excited to bring forward options and have the public participate and have a voice,” she said.

City for Champions got off to a rocky start with the council when the proposal for four tourism projects – an Olympic museum, an Air Force Academy visitors center, a university medical and training facility and a downtown sports stadium – was announced with great fanfare in the summer of 2013. But council members said they were left out of the project plans.

That ignited a series of moves including a public statement by five council members that they would ask voters if they wanted to use tax money for the downtown sports and events center, the only project of the four that calls for using local tax money through a tax increment financing district.

In August, former Councilman Joel Miller proposed a ballot question for April 2015 that would ask voters to amend the city charter to require prior voter approval for any sports and events center. Miller said then that building a stadium did not fall under the role of government, but the latest City for Champions financing plan called for spending $200 million in local public money on the downtown stadium/sports and events center.

Miller resigned his City Council seat in November to run for mayor. But Councilman Don Knight picked up the proposed ballot question and argued for it. He said the only way to guarantee that voters get a say in the center is to change the city’s charter.

But Knight couldn’t pick up the support from the council, who denied his plan and two similar proposals Tuesday.

Miller’s proposal wasn’t overstepping, Knight said. It was modeled after an existing charter change that was hard fought by supporters in 2005. It says: “Colorado Springs shall be prohibited from planning, building, funding or financing a convention center with or without a hotel or another ancillary structure, unless a majority of voters gives prior approval to complete the project at a regular or special municipal election.”

At the time, a proposed convention center would have been in competition with The Broadmoor’s convention space, Martin said.

Asking voters to make charter amendments for specific taxpayer funded projects should rest with the City Council and should not muddy up the city’s constitution, she said.

“The question is if we put every decision in the charter because of the potential that a future council could change it, the city’s charter becomes unwieldy,” she said.

–

Contact Monica Mendoza: 
636-0187

Twitter @Mendo1987

Blog: City Hallways