[BoulderCouncilHotline] CAC's Discussion of Opportunity Zones

[Jones, Suzanne]

Dear colleagues—

I want to provide more information on CAC’s discussion of the issue of Opportunity Zones, which was only mentioned briefly in the notes from yesterday’s CAC meeting.

Yvette Bowden, our Director of Community Vitality, Parks & Recreation, is actively researching and compiling information about the new Opportunity Zone program, which she will share with us and publish on a city webpage for the public to review as soon as she is done. She hopes to have that done within a few weeks, although the IRS has released very limited guidance to date.

What we do know is that the newly enacted Opportunity Zone program is a federal program enacted as part of the 2017 tax reform package (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) that provides a federal tax incentive for investors to invest in low-income urban and rural communities through favorable treatment of reinvested capital gains and forgiveness of tax on new capital gains. In order for investors to invest in an opportunity zone, they must first create an investment fund that meets IRS criteria, although few details have been provided to date.

As a federal program, local communities do not have control over it, however, it does not change our local land use and regulatory powers. While it is an issue we should look into in the near-term, staff did not think it was so urgent to add to the agenda tonight given that the program is still being defined.

That said, CAC agreed that Council should discuss OZs, and in particular thought Council should examine whether we have the zoning and land use governance in place for the one designated OZ in Boulder, in case it does attract investment, to ensure we get the outcomes we want—a discussion we thought would be most fruitful after staff had time to gather more information. If we do want to make any regulatory changes, it might affect our workplan next year, and so we thought it would be useful as part of the pre-retreat discussion on January 8th.

If Council wants, we could discuss before then, however, Yvette was going to inquire whether the state OZ representative could be available for that meeting to answer more in-depth questions about how the federal program would function.

Lastly, while some have said we won’t need three hours to discuss the future funding of our library system this evening, staff and CAC disagreed -- the number of questions about funding options at CAC alone made us think otherwise—so we resisted changing the agenda on such short notice.

CAC strives to be responsive to the request of our colleagues and I hope that sheds more light on our thinking. We can, of course, alter course as the majority of Council desires.

Cheers,

Zan
Suzanne Jones
Mayor, City of Boulder
(720) 633-7388
joness at bouldercolorado.gov

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