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On 6 January 2026, the Loveland City Council bundled two unrelated proposals into one political moment and then voted them as severable items. Ordinance 6806 removed the requirement that the city offer shelter and sixty-day property storage before clearing a homeless encampment. Ordinance 6807 appropriated $2,850,000 to conditionally purchase a 14,130-square-foot warehouse at 599 W 71st Street as a future shelter, contingent on a qualified non-profit committing in writing to operate it.
The conditional half failed in seventeen days. The unconditional half (the anti-encampment rule) became law on second reading 3 February 2026.
The trade
The fiscal posture council had set for itself was already adverse to shelter funding. Two voter actions in 2023 had stripped the General Fund by roughly $10.4M / year (Measure 300 sales-tax repeal on food, plus a rejected TABOR override). By the 2026 budget cycle, the cuts had reached police overtime, less-lethal equipment, low-income utility assistance, and partner-org funding.
Against that backdrop the 21 October 2025 FY 2026 budget added four new sworn Loveland Police Department positions: a detective, a lieutenant, a patrol officer, and a marijuana / alcohol / tobacco enforcement specialist tied to the 2027 retail-marijuana rollout under Measures 2F and 2H. The recurring General Fund cost is roughly $600,000 to $900,000 per year with no sunset, about $6 million to $9 million over the ten-year staffing horizon. That commitment was permanent and visible. The budget passed 8–0 on consent-style second reading, before McFall’s November mayoral election, before his December swearing-in, before the public-rhetoric incident later cited at 9 December 2025 (the “Endless Summer Tanning” incident, referenced in council debate but not yet sourced in this dossier to a news or police-blotter record — flagged as a verification TODO), and before either Ord 6806 or Ord 6807 reached first reading.
The shelter half was structured the opposite way. Ord 6807 split the $2.85M as $2,754,011 (96.6%) from restricted Capital Expansion Fees (Fund 268, General Government) plus $95,989 (3.4%) from the General Fund. Fund 268 holds impact fees the city collects from developers on new construction, restricted under the Krupp v. Breckenridge framework to capital projects with a rational nexus to the category collected. It cannot be redirected to police salaries, library hours, or utility-bill relief. The headline number read as “$2.85 million of spending,” but the politically-felt General-Fund cost was under $100,000.
When the shelter half collapsed on 26 January 2026, the $2,754,011 CEF share returned to Fund 268 reserves and the $95,989 General-Fund slice was absorbed back into reserves. The four PD positions stayed. The 137 S Lincoln building (the existing Loveland Resource Center, ~$410K basis) remains city-owned and is planned to be sold. On 3 February 2026, during the Ord 6806 second-reading debate (Cablecast #669), LPD leadership stated on the record that the enforcement workload created by Ord 6806 would not change staffing levels: the four new sworn positions added in October were already the standing capacity.
See /overview/ and the Trade sankey diagram.
The Costco deal
Two weeks after Ord 6807 was abandoned, council adopted R-10-2026, a Build-to-Anchor Agreement involving Centerra Properties West, the same urban-renewal counterparty that appears in the Ernst & Young Phase I audit delivered to the LURA board on 15 October 2025. The agreement commits identifiable contractual city financial components on the order of $25M (bond-proceeds OR 25-year PIF rebate cap) + $11M (Kendall Parkway net city cash) + $6.5M (aggregate developer reimbursement, $300K/yr × ~22 yrs) ≈ $42.5M in identifiable contractual commitments over 25 years; AIR-102809 separately projects “over $100MM” of city revenue into the city over 25 years from the retained 1.75-cent share of Costco sales tax, contingent on a Costco sales-volume counterfactual. The $125M figure does not appear as a single line item in R-10-2026 itself; the composition is documented in Chapter 06 and fact card facts/f3e. The audit identified roughly $34.5M of PIC-to-CPW transfers (developer reimbursement) as identified but not tested in Phase I; Phase II testing of that path was not authorized at the time the Costco resolution was passed. Within a $51.1M publicly-bid testing universe (2015–2023), the audit also identified $6.2M of project spend not subject to public bid but potentially-should-have-been depending on the interpretation of “Construction” in the MFA.
See /centerra/ and the Centerra flow-of-funds diagram.
Who voted which way
Eleven roll-call votes between October 2025 and March 2026 resolve a stable five-vote majority and a four-vote minority on shelter, encampment, and Centerra-related items. Mayor McFall and Mayor Pro Tem Samson are the consistent anchors of the majority. Cortez and Rothberg sit in the minority. Light-Kovacs flipped on a single Centerra-procedure vote in March 2026.
See /rollcalls/ and the coalition heatmap.
What the public record shows
Every figure in this dossier traces to a primary record. Council minutes and voting tabulations come from cilovelandco.civicweb.net. Property records come from the Larimer County Recorder (Landmark Web) and Assessor (apps.larimer.org/api/assessor2/). Nonprofit financials come from IRS 990 filings via the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. State entity registrations come from the Colorado Secretary of State. Video and meeting transcripts come from the city’s Cablecast archive, transcribed locally with whisper.cpp.
The full retrieval matrix and the legal posture are documented at /methodology/ and /about/.
What this dossier is not
This is not a legal complaint and not an allegation of personal criminal conduct against any named person. Entity names and amounts are as filed. Inference is labelled as inference. If something here is wrong, the source link is the place to start, and the contact path is in the footer of every page.