Photo by Daniel J. Chacón

The Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority held a special meeting at City Hall this week to talk about, among other things, how the Ivywild project led to a public blowup with Mayor Steve Bach.

Chuck Miller, a contract employee who works for the authority, explained that staff prepared a “working document” showing the authority would collect $1.25 million in fees from the project.

But he said the spreadsheet was never seriously considered and that it was only a test document.

Board member Dottie Harman chastised Miller and another contract employee, Jim Rees, for letting what they called a “working document” get out in public, igniting a public relations nightmare for the authority.

“Nothing should go out like that. I mean, here we had people standing up and using it as an example … and that was our fault,” she said.

“That bothers me a lot.”

Miller threw the blame on Mike Bristol and Joe Coleman, who are pushing the urban renewal project.

Miller told Harman that he and Rees “made a critical error in assuming” that Bristol and Coleman understood the process.

“When you negotiate this type of thing, you’re slinging numbers all over the place and all of that kind of stuff,” Miller said.

“They did not understand what was going on, and that’s our fault.”

Here’s video from that portion of the meeting:

The scolding starts at about 5 minutes, 30 seconds into the video.

(There was no sound in the room, so you might need to wear headphones.)