What the Broncos have to do to build in Burnham Yard

Burnham Yard in Denver on Wednesday, September 10, 2025.

The Denver Broncos ended their search for a new stadium location, but it is only the beginning of a long process to make the team's new home in Burnham Yard reality.

There will be joint negotiations. There will be an environmental cleaning. There will be planning and design. And there will be a lot of bureaucracy.

The city and the team will try to compensate for the importance of each of these steps with the impending period of the expiry of the rental agreement of the Bronco at Empower Field at Mile High at the end of the 2030 season. The team hopes that his stadium and a neighboring mixed development in the slope to has been completed or completed.

Together with governor Jared Polis and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, the Broncos announced that Burnham Yard was the preferred place for a new stadium.

The team plans to buy the 58 -hectare former Railyard from the state and 25 hectares from Denver Water. Last year, the Broncos acquired other plots around the former Railyard, east of the Interstate 25 and north of US 6, south of the city center. The courtyard extends from the 13th Avenue to the south of the sixth Avenue Bridge.

The Broncos expect to spend $ 4 billion for the construction of a state-of-the-art stadium as well as in the entertainment district and an entertainment quarter that would pull events and people all year round.

But first the team has to navigate the following process:

Develop a community beefic agreement

Many of the decisions about the new stadium will weaken from a community beefic contract that has not yet been developed. It is a kind of contract that is negotiated between developers of a project and the surrounding districts that are increasingly common in the stadium offer.

Under CBAs, developers can be forced to meet certain requirements in order to support the environment, e.g.

A CBA for the planned renovation of the area around the Ball Arena had to build developers an early learning center, finance youth programs and establish it near pedestrian and bicycle connections.

The Broncos have agreed to deal with managers in the La Alma Lincoln Park district in order to develop such an agreement.

The city councilor of Denver, Jamie Torres, who represents the area, said that she had sent several CBAs from stadium shops, including the agreement for the renovation of the Ball Arena, to prepare her for negotiations.

CBA agreements can take months or years, but Torres said that she would not rush it.

The city council weighs

As a rule, the city council is waiting to take one of the formal voices required for a project until the municipality is satisfied with the conditions of the CBA.

As soon as this contract is negotiated, the Council will probably choose the first vote on the Burnham Yard Small Area plan, which the officials will probably develop in October and will end at the end of next year.

The small area plan, which is compatible with the CBA, is a lead document that releases land use recommendations for the stadium and the surrounding area and decides which types of uses and density can go there.

Alex Foster, spokesman for planning and development from Denver, was expected that the Council will be correct about the recovery of the country currently known as industrial zone. The new zon is decided during the land planning process, said Foster. Council members will also consider a development agreement that is the plan for the actual stadium site as part of the reconciliation process.

The Council can consider creating a new metropolitan area to pay infrastructure and maintenance if the developers demand one.

The 13 elected members also have a role in playing whether the new stadium is entitled to finance tax increases, which is essentially a tax beneficiary. The financing of the tax increase is an instrument with which cities sometimes incentive to develop in areas that are otherwise too expensive to build up.

In order to obtain tax benefits, the country must be considered “faulty”, which generally means that it has a combination of factors that make it difficult to develop it, such as B. dirty land, deteriorated structures, inadequate infrastructure and uncertain conditions. The tax money can be used to fix the expenses required for the preparation of the website.

Tracy Huggins, which heads the Denver agency that develops these tax plans, said that the website is a strong candidate for the financing tool.

“Many of these conditions are probably on the website,” she said. “If you go in, there is at least a reasonable expectation that there can be some financing challenges.”

The authority of Huggins' agency, Denver Urban Renewal Authority, will first carry out a formal examination of property in order to decide whether it is dirty. Then you have to research the project yourself to find out whether it could be set up without public subsidies. If the authority determines that the cost of preparing the location and the country is too expensive to justify the project, this is an option for tax benefits.

The tax capacity is freezing by freezing the amount of real estate or sales taxes, which owes the project for up to 25 years. The city then returns all taxes that the developer will be charged about this amount in order to regain the costs of the permissible expenses.

Need for environmental renovation

The contamination of Burnham Yard as a railway depot is distributed over the property.

Before the Colorado Ministry of Transport bought the Railyard in 2021, Terracon, an environmental consulting company in Denver, hired it to carry out a location analysis to identify potential environmental hazards.

This study resulted in several toxic chemicals in the soil and in the groundwater together with three underground feathers, which were probably caused by diesel fuel and oil storage.

The Terracon engineers also reported that a power supply rod had been shortened, which had damaged several transformers, spilled the oil on the floor. The area was covered with scrap metal, asphalt waste, thrown away railway bonds, coal and ashes.

The engineers also found garbage, drug utensils and human excrement due to camps on the property, as from a copy of the location examination report from Terracon, limited by Denver Post via a Colorado Open Records Act.

Contaminants found in the soil comprise overall meat hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds, lead, arsenic and chrome, according to the Terracon report.

Groundwater contamination included additional hydrocarbons in petroleum, volatile organic compounds, lead, cadmium and polatilized biphenyla, which were banned in the 1970s because they were so harmful to human health.

Burnham Yard is also close to the environmental protection authority for radium contamination, but the Terracon report was no indication that a considerable amount of radioactive material was underground.

The next contamination in Burnham Yard is underground in Atlas Metals & Iron, a junkyard on the west side of the property, compared to a series of railway rails. As long as Atlas keeps the parking lot, the EPA is viewed as a cap that contains contamination.

CDOT still has the property and any cleanup is under the supervision of the state agency. Details of a potential sale were not announced, although the team and the state have announced that they have a “conceptual agreement” for a purchase.

In April, an contractor who worked for CDOT received dangerous materials and waste department from Colorado, asbestos from Burnham Yard from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environments. This material is probably in old station buildings that were demolished at the end of July.

For the time being, these are the only permits for environmental cleaning for the Railyard.

If the Broncos buy the former Railyard, the team would have to apply for the necessary environmental permits. It is unclear whether the organization could begin with the work because they are pending. The State Ministry of Health did not respond to the questions of the Denver Post to allow it on site.

Sports teams often choose a beak property for the construction of stadiums, including in Denver, where Coors Field was also built on a former Railyard. Dick's Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City was built on a former superfund location where the US Army produced chemical weapons.

However, the Broncos need permits for removing dangerous waste and probably for rainwater outflows on the construction site.

John Spear, Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, said that the period of time that is required for environmental treatment depends on what is located when scientists and engineers carry out a detailed examination of the property. There could be unknown persons underground, since the location was used as a Zughof from 1871 when there were no environmental laws and no official records of what was done on the property.