Denver voters gave the green light for city officials to allocate nearly a billion dollars for 460 citywide projects as part of the city’s growth plan, so now what?

Mayor Michael Hancock says it’s a vote of confidence from the people and a huge responsibility that won’t be taken lightly.

“With a yes vote, we are now as a city prepared to improve and repair our critical infrastructure in our neighborhoods all over the City of Denver,” he said at a press conference. “But these bonds are more than just about building projects, they’re also providing jobs for the people in the city… This is about building a workforce that is resilient and prepared to move this city forward over the next two to three decades.”

Hancock says he wants to bring on board people who are in the beginning of their careers and are ready to advance with the city over the next 10 to 20 years.

“We’re going to be rolling out new partnerships that help our residents with landing jobs in the construction industry, hopefully building the framework in every potential project that we have going forward under this bond,” he said.

The first step

City government has not been sitting idle waiting to see if the measure passed. Hancock says work began internally long before Election Day to be proactive in taking on what he calls “a monumental effort in the next ten years” for the city. That means he and his finance team have been vetting projects, understanding the state of readiness for each of them, and will be laying out the RFP process for a project management team by the end of the year.

He says the framework the city laid out to carry forward the 2007 bond, then the city’s largest in history, was successful, and so they’ll be following that same formula. He hopes to have a project management team in place by February 2018 to oversee the $937 million in spending over the next decade.

Next, they’ll be prioritizing each projects so they can be in the financial markets by the second quarter of 2018.

“That will inform what that first issuance in the financial markets look like,” he said.

Working with each sector to determine the timing of resources and funding agreements will also be an ongoing part of the process, he said.

“We are fit for the challenge over the next ten years.”

It’s all about transportation

It’s not surprising, Hancock said, that the transportation part of the bond proposal received the most support from voters.

The fact that it got the “highest number of votes shows it’s a priority for the people of Denver. This is the first step in transportation and mobility that we’re going to have to make in this city for the next 12 years,” Hancock said. “We talked about $2 billion dollars that we’re going to have to invest; $491 million of this investment is really just the first step.”

The city’s mobility task force is going to have to continue to identify where strategic investments are needed and how the city is going to pay for them going forward, he said.