LOVELAND — Loveland City Council on Tuesday is poised to enact language for two citizen-initiated measures for the November ballot.  While the two issues may seem to have little to do with each other at first glance—requiring voter approval for urban renewal and a food tax repeal—they both were prompted as push-back against the city council granting taxpayer subsidies for private development.

But the council also appears ready to fight back with an “emergency” ballot measure essentially tying a sales tax hike to the food tax repeal, added after it became official that proponents of the ballot measures were successful in gathering the signatures required to force the votes.

Food taxes and developer subsidies

For months, a group of Loveland residents have tried to stop the Centerra South project, which includes a new multi-use urban renewal project that will be located just south of the existing Centerra development at the northeast corner of the intersection of US Hwy 34 and Interstate 25 in Loveland, a city of about 80,000 people, 50 miles north of Denver.

Loveland City Council agreed to subsidize the project using tax increment financing (TIF) as the funding mechanism, which amounts to forgoing collection of 1.75 percent of its overall 3 percent city sales taxes on anything sold within the development for a 25-year period to offset the infrastructure costs required by the development.

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