Denver city planners and promoters have developed a first-rate design to expand the Colorado Convention Center, but it comes with some big problems. Chief among them is that its plan to pay for the upgrades is too clever by half.

City Council members and residents should be concerned. While expanding the facility makes sense to fulfill a reasonable need – and the designs are really cool – the novel scheme the city developed to pay for the upgrades strikes us as a bad precedent. We hope council members send this plan back to the drawing board.

The scheme intends to deal with the eye-popping new cost estimate for the expansion. When the city went to voters in 2015 to ask for the right to raise tourism taxes to fund the National Western redevelopment and the convention center expansion, voters were under the impression that the $104 million to be raised for the Big Blue Bear’s den would cover it. Now the city estimates it will take $233 million – an increase of 124 percent.

Read more at The Denver Post.