Photo by Ant Rozetsky / Unsplash
In Pueblo, Colorado, four competing land-control authorities are each trying to write the city's second act — and none of them can finish a sentence.
Wade Broadhead, city planner, is standing somewhere in Bessemer — the neighborhood that sits in the steel mill's shadow the way neighborhoods always sit in steel mill shadows — and he is doing what planners in Bessemer do: he is looking at blight and seeing something else. "Everything can't be a brewery in Colorado," he told a reporter in February 2025. "I don't see a lot of the boarded-up buildings. I see 'That's a good historic preservation tax project' or 'That's a good brownfields cleanup project.'"
That's the kind of sentence that takes ten years in public sector real estate to be able to say without flinching. It's the trained eye — the one that looks past the peeling paint and reads the underlying structure of a block, weighs subsidy eligibility against market timing, and decides there's something worth saving here. Not everyone in Bessemer has that sentence available to them. For most residents on the East Side, what they see is what has been true since the Colorado Smelter began laying its heavy metals into the topsoil over a century ago: ground that smells wrong, buildings that can't be sold, and a government forever about to fix it.
In January 2025, the city had a moment of possibility. The EPA awarded Pueblo a $1 million Brownfields grant — real money, specific to the East Side and Bessemer and Downtown. Council members accepted it formally on a Monday. By Tuesday, an email arrived from the EPA: the funds were frozen under a presidential executive order. "The swiftness of this is kind of catching people a little bit off guard," Planning Director Scott Hobson said, in what may be the understatement of the Pueblo fiscal year.
The money was eventually unfrozen after legal challenges in federal courts. A kickoff meeting happened in mid-February. The project moved forward — slowly, carefully, as brownfields projects always do. But the 24-hour window between grant-accepted and grant-frozen did something to the civic atmosphere in Pueblo that money can't fully undo. It made visible, briefly and sharply, exactly how thin the line is between the plan and the empty lot. Wade Broadhead still sees the historic preservation project. The question is who controls the land underneath it.
Pueblo's land problem is not a shortage problem. The city has an enormous amount of land in various stages of controlled transition. The problem is that control is fragmented across four distinct actors — each with different legal authorities, different financing structures, different timelines, and, as of late 2025, different levels of dysfunction. The result is a reinvention that proceeds as a collection of disconnected moves rather than a coherent strategy.
The mechanism runs as follows: a century of heavy industrial production — first the Colorado Smelter, then Evraz's steelworks — deposited contamination that legally and practically locks land out of private capital markets. Contaminated land cannot attract commercial development without someone absorbing the cleanup risk first. In Pueblo, that someone is always government. Which means land control has migrated, over decades, into quasi-sovereign entities that operate with public authority and public financing but without consistent public accountability.
As of December 2024, the Colorado Smelter Superfund site in Bessemer — one of the most contaminated urban parcels in southern Colorado — had only 8 operating businesses on-site, employing 35 people and generating approximately $23.2 million in annual sales revenue. That is the output of more than two decades of Superfund designation and public remediation investment. The land is not yet ready for private market entry at scale. (Source: EPA Superfund Redevelopment page, Tier A)
The four actors operating in this environment have distinct geographies and distinct failure modes. PuebloPlex, a state political subdivision, controls approximately 16,000 of the former Pueblo Chemical Depot's 23,000 acres — land transferred from the U.S. Army in tranches, the most recent being a 1,111-acre parcel in September 2025. CEO Russell DeSalvo has been direct about the timeline: Parcel 7, a 7,000-acre section contaminated with unexploded munitions, will "likely take more than my lifetime to finish." The total cleanup bill is estimated at approximately $1 billion; Congress currently allocates $10–30 million per year. The math produces a 30-to-100-year pipeline before that land becomes economically viable at scale.
PURA — the Pueblo Urban Renewal Authority — is the actor closest to the downtown core. In 2019 it established the EVRAZ Urban Renewal Area, issued $91.2 million in TIF bonds for steel mill remediation, and received a $15 million city contribution from a half-cent sales tax. In theory, this is exactly the financing architecture that brownfield redevelopment requires. In practice, 2025 was not a good year for PURA. Executive director Jerry Pacheco resigned under accusations of "egregious unprofessional conduct." Auditors found $124,647.58 in payments made without written contracts. The authority purchased a $400,000 property — the Stein property — outside its TIF district with no articulated plan. "There was no direct plan on what the property was going to be used for," Councilor Flores observed at the June 2025 work session. PURA's board then compounded matters in early 2026 by committing two Colorado Open Meetings Law violations.
The City of Pueblo terminated its contract with PEDCO — the Pueblo Economic Development Corporation, its primary economic development arm — effective December 31, 2025. The PURA governance collapse and the PEDCO termination occurred within the same calendar year, eliminating two of the city's four main development-facing institutions in rapid succession. As of early 2026, no confirmed replacement structure for PEDCO has been documented. The governance gap is not theoretical — it is current and unresolved. (Source: Colorado Politics, Tier B)
The fourth actor is private: Atlas Holdings, a Connecticut private equity firm that acquired Evraz North America — including Pueblo's steel mill — for approximately $500 million in 2025, after the property had been on the market for nearly three years. The mill now operates as Rocky Mountain Steel Mills under the Orion Steel brand. It is, by any measure, a significant asset: the largest solar-powered steel mill in North America, employing roughly 1,000 workers. But the land decisions now belong to a PE firm with no public accountability. The PURA bond structure means local taxpayers retain some residual risk exposure even as ownership is fully privatized. Translation: the public absorbed the remediation risk, and the profit upside now accrues to Connecticut.
Entry friction in this environment is severe and layered. Private developers cannot enter without government-subsidized cleanup, which requires grant continuity that proved interruptible in under 24 hours. Community organizations in Bessemer and the East Side — the neighborhoods that have lived with the contamination longest — have no seat in any of the four governance structures. All of the voices captured in the public record are institutional. The land strategy is being made entirely above the community.
Pueblo is not the only American city to have inherited this problem, but it may be one of the most concentrated examples of what happens when industrial cleanup requires multiple layers of public intermediation operating simultaneously — each with different incentive structures, different time horizons, and different political principals. The academic literature on urban renewal authorities documents a consistent pattern: TIF-funded entities established to solve specific market failures routinely expand beyond their original mandate when they are given broad property acquisition powers without proportional accountability requirements.[1]
The Brookings Institution's research on brownfield redevelopment in post-industrial mid-size cities identifies federal funding continuity as the single largest determinant of whether cleanup timelines convert into economic activity.[2] Pueblo's approximately $33 million in federal annual inflows — cited by city planner Wade Broadhead — is not a supplement to a functioning local development apparatus. It is the primary engine. When that engine can be frozen by executive order in hours, every downstream planning decision becomes provisional. Site selection, anchor tenant recruitment, infrastructure sequencing: all of it depends on a federal spigot that is, in the current political environment, structurally unpredictable.
The pattern in comparable post-industrial cities — Youngstown, Ohio; Gary, Indiana; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — shows that the transition from cleanup to productive land use requires a unified redevelopment authority with binding coordination power over all cleanup actors, not merely cooperative agreements among co-equals. Youngstown's 2010 City Plan, often cited as a model, explicitly reduced land inventory by accepting managed shrinkage rather than attempting to redevelop everything simultaneously with fragmented resources. Pueblo has not made that choice. It is attempting to redevelop a steel mill site, a Superfund neighborhood, a 23,000-acre military depot, and a downtown core at the same time, through four uncoordinated actors, on federal grant funding that just demonstrated its fragility.[3]
The signal's broader implication is this: in post-industrial cities where land reinvention depends entirely on public intermediaries, governance fragmentation is not a process problem — it is itself the land-control problem, and it compounds contamination risk with institutional risk in ways that private capital will not absorb.
The institutional turbulence at PURA and PEDCO may represent normal transition — a city correcting dysfunctional structures rather than collapsing into a vacuum. Under this interpretation, the PURA executive removal and the PEDCO termination are evidence of accountability functioning correctly: bad actors identified and removed, outdated models replaced. The governance disruption is temporary, and the underlying land assets (PuebloPlex acreage, brownfields grants, steel mill TIF) remain structurally intact. This interpretation has validity. Institutional reform often looks like chaos from the inside of a fiscal year. The counter-evidence: two governance collapses in the same year, with no documented replacement for PEDCO and a PURA board that continued violating open meetings law into 2026, suggests the problem is structural rather than personnel-level.
The Atlas Holdings acquisition of Rocky Mountain Steel could be read optimistically: a well-capitalized private owner now holds the city's largest industrial asset, removing it from the ambiguity of an extended sale process and providing operational stability for 1,000 jobs. Private equity, in this reading, resolves the steel mill uncertainty that hung over Pueblo's economy for three years. This argument has merit at the employment level. The risk is structural: private equity ownership introduces financial-return timelines (typically 5–7 year fund cycles) that may not align with the 20–30 year cleanup and community benefit timelines Pueblo requires. When the fund needs to exit, the land decisions — workforce levels, mill expansion, environmental liability — will be made in Greenwich, not Pueblo. There is no contractual mechanism requiring otherwise, and no documentation that the Evraz-to-Atlas transaction included any community benefit agreement.
What is not known: The exact acreage, deed status, and environmental liability transfer terms of the steel mill land in the Atlas Holdings acquisition have not been publicly documented. The BNSF shipping dispute (December 2025) may signal operational instability under new ownership, but causal direction is unconfirmed.
Research gap: All sources are institutional. No resident or community organization voice from Bessemer or the East Side is captured in this dossier. The community perspective on land governance — who they trust, who they distrust, what reinvention they would want — is entirely absent.
Monitoring to confirm or deny: Watch for (1) announcement of a PEDCO successor organization, (2) PURA board reconstitution and whether new governance protocols are adopted, (3) Atlas Holdings' first major capital or workforce decision at Rocky Mountain Steel, and (4) whether the EPA Brownfields kickoff meeting produces contracted deliverables by Q3 2026. If the PEDCO void is filled by a structure that unifies the four actors, the fragmentation thesis weakens. If it is not filled by mid-2026, the vacuum is likely permanent for this political cycle.
Stein property detail: The PURA $400K property purchase outside the TIF district is sourced from a CitizenPortal.ai AI summary of the June 2025 council work session. Verify against the original Pueblo City Council meeting video or a Pueblo Chieftain follow-up report before citing as fully confirmed.
[1] EPA. "EPA Awards $1 Million to City of Pueblo, Colorado for Cleanup and Redevelopment Projects." FY2024 Brownfields MAC Grant press release. epa.gov
[2] EPA Superfund Redevelopment Initiative. "Colorado Smelter — Redevelopment." Updated December 2024. epa.gov
[3] PuebloPlex. "Resources." Official documentation of Army-to-PuebloPlex land transfers, including September 24, 2025 transfer. puebloplex.com
[4] Colorado Public Radio. "Colorado EPA Projects Impacted by Trump Funding Freeze — Pueblo, Longmont." February 19, 2025. cpr.org
[5] Denver Gazette. "Welcome to PuebloPlex: The Economic Future of Colorado's Steel Town." March 16, 2025. denvergazette.com
[6] Pueblo Chieftain. "Pueblo Mayor Questions PURA Payments Allegedly Made Without Contracts." October 13, 2025. chieftain.com
[7] Colorado Politics. "City of Pueblo Ending Contract with Pueblo Economic Development Corporation." October 1, 2025. coloradopolitics.com
[8] Colorado Sun. "Pueblo Steel Mill — Evraz Sale." June 27, 2025. coloradosun.com
[9] PURA. "EVRAZ Urban Renewal Area." Official project page documenting $91.2M bond issuance and city half-cent sales tax contribution. puebloura.org
[10] Maes, Dennis. "Pueblo Board Violates Open Meetings Law." Op-ed, Colorado Politics. March 6, 2026. coloradopolitics.com