CrossCurrents - Amendment B

[Music] [Music] [Music] hello welcome to cross currents produced by the city of fort collins in cooperation with the larimer county league of women voters i'm barbara ruttstein the moderator of today's program the views expressed on this program are solely those of the participants and do not reflect the city of fort collins or the larimer county league of women voters views today we are meeting on zoom because our usual in-person format in the city council chambers is not available we hope we can have a full discussion of the issue without having any technical difficulties our topic is amendment b should gallagher be repealed the gallagher amendment to the colorado constitution was passed in 1982 to protect homeowners to some degree from rising property tax assessments and to make sure that businesses paid their fair share of property tax it also stipulates that residents will pay 45 of the statewide property tax and businesses will pay 55 because of the exponential growth in residential property and the increased value of residential property the assessment rate has gone down from 21 of value in 1982 to 7.15 percent now over the same 38 years the non-residential rate has stayed the same at 29 the result is that businesses pay more than four times the residential property tax rate the original intent of gallagher was that the tax rate would go up or down to maintain the funding of local services however when the taxpayers bill of rights or tabor was passed in 1992 the tax rate could not go up without a vote of the people some communities have passed mill levy overrides for education and special districts but many especially in rural areas have not seen the growth in residences and businesses that would increase their tax base thus rural areas have not been able to pass mill levy increases to keep up with their need for various services school fire and hospital districts have been severely impacted gallagher and tabor together have created a fiscal not in the state and local budgetary practices amendment b hopes to untangle one part of this knot a question for voters is whether this is a good way to fix the problem to discuss this issue we have bernie boucher chair of b for colorado and clay vigoda campaign manager for protect our colorado homes joshua fudge is budget director of larimer county and he will give us some local perspectives welcome to you and to our viewing audiences first what would you like to add to my description what have i left i out go first and clay if you would prefer to go first that's fine you know bernie you i'm more than happy to go after either way okay clay and i have worked together on other issues and known each other for a long time first of all thank you for the league and thank you for uh the city of fort collins for putting this together it's important that folks understand gallagher and the implications of gallagher this is probably the most complex thing in our constitution with the possible exception of taper itself the one thing i would add barbara to your description is that repealing the gallagher amendment leaves in place the 7.15 assessment rate for residences which means that you pay property taxes on 7.15 of the value of your property and it will leave in place the 29 uh for all other categories um colorado is blessed um with the third lowest residential property tax burden in the country and it will leave that very low rate in place which can only be passed by a mat measure voted on by the entire state so um i think i'll stop there the rest of your summary i think was very accurate very well done and i appreciate it okay clay and i do want to thank the league and larimer county for putting this together for us in city fort collins um bernie hit on the biggest point of contention between the pro and the proponents of this amendment and the opponents of this amendment bernie just talked about that this would keep the 7.15 percent rate in place but what it doesn't tell you is that this amendment is not about assessment rates this amendment is about dollars in your pocket and how many of those dollars you end up having to pay in taxes and according to the tax administrator the state of colorado in a and a briefing she gave the state legislature uh back in the early summer if amendment b passes homeowners in this state will pay an additional 450 million 566 thousand 168 dollars in the very first year and in every year going forward that amount will either stay at that 450 plus million dollar additional amount that homeowners would pay if that they otherwise wouldn't if the gallagher amendment stayed in place or it will increase this amendment over time and over time meaning in the next five or six years if it passes will be the largest tax increase in the state's history okay forever okay we'll get into the details of that i think a little further and the only thing i want to add into that is when you gave your description you talked about the fact that the rural areas of the state have been unable to pass no levies uh to to fund different districts it's not they've been unable to do that they have chosen not to do that okay they don't have the tax base that the urban areas do but it is a choice that you see you know gallagher is unique to colorado but in 49 other states this disparity between urban and rural is the exact same rural voters by and large don't look for the same level of services that urban voters do and you see this back filling in school districts and in different special districts in every single state so this is not unique to gallagher josh uh would you like to add anything i don't have a whole lot to add i think you gave you all gave a really excellent overview of it the one interesting thing about it um maybe a lot of folks don't realize is that it it considers the split in values and property tax paid statewide so it treats if you live in the front range or you live out in the plains in the east or you live in a ski resort town it has an impact on your community pretty much all the same and so as far as the tax rate goes and the the impact on the finances of any local district whether it's county school district or whatever can really depend on where in the state it is um and maybe i'm getting a little ahead larimer county has been okay even as the residential assessment rate has ratcheted down over the years because of strong growth in population and growth and values but there's other you know as you all mentioned there's parts of the state where that hasn't happened so the gallagher amendment has had a more of an impact on them okay very good now what was the amendment supposed to accomplish and did it do that over 38 years why don't we go ahead clay i'll go first and maybe bernie you and i just alternate back and forth on it um the amendment is was intended to do exactly what it has done which is that it's kept residential property rates from becoming the major tax property tax um source in the state it has saved homeowners in the state over 35 billion dollars in the last 38 years and you know one of the people involved well two of the people involved in in the opponents on this are dennis gallagher and ron stewart state senators who wrote the gallagher amendment and then asked about this they will tell you it is working exactly the way it's supposed to that there are all sorts of other areas where big business corporations oil and gas interests have the opportunity to do tax breaks and do do tax breaks 161 of them i think at the last uh count on this that keep their taxes low this is really one of the only tax breaks that homeowners have it's been institutionalized in the in the colorado constitution and so it is working exactly the way it's supposed to okay bernie well i i would differ with that and and i've gone back and looked at some of the newspaper coverage from 1982 when this was was proposed and it it was intended to keep a reasonable balance between the amount of taxes paid by residential properties and all other properties and because the balance a couple years before this was 45 by residences and 55 by everything else it set up this really bizarre process of adjusting the assessment rates to maintain that level of tax generation i don't think anyone expected that the result would be that commercial interest your your coffee shop your hair salon your child care center pays property taxes at four times what residences do um and and the other thing that i think is really important to understand is because the way that this formula works the rate of transfer of taxes to small businesses is accelerating if the next round of cuts is allowed to go into place small business will pay taxes at five times the rate that residences do and the projection for two years after that could be seven times at a certain point this has just become unfair it's killing jobs um and the impact that nobody really anticipated is that when this ratchets down the amount of revenues produced for school districts and 51 of local property taxes go to school districts the state is required to backfill that when gallagher was passed the state paid about a third of the cost of education for k-12 in the state that number is now about 70 but the really urgent thing that everyone should keep in mind is the state's budget is in crisis okay let's we'll get to that too josh did you want to add anything there no okay that's fine now why did a bipartisan group put this on the ballot this year and i want to emphasize that it is bipartisan which in this day of age is pretty amazing so does anybody have a good uh reason for that or did it have to do with uh the current economic situation because of the pandemic barbara it actually started before that um discussion about gallagher has been going on for a good number of years and two years ago the general assembly created an interim study group of legislators and others to consider what could be done about gallagher at the same time a non-partisan group called building a better colorado did focus groups all across the state over 10 000 members of colorado citizenry participated in those they they were a group that very much reflected the state urban and rural democrat republican unaffiliated and their strong recommendation over 80 percent was the best solution is repeal gallagher that's the message that got to the legislature and over three quarters of all of the legislators agreed that that's the best fix and referred this to the ballot for consideration by the voters next month okay clay and and and i guess i'd have to know that um the pudding of if the issue is in our taxes is not about gallagher it's about the tabor amendment and the gallery amendment and amendment 23 which is done talks about funding of of schools and it's how all three of those work together and we're not going to sit here and say that there isn't a serious issue with with the tax structure in the state of colorado that's been talked been talked about since bernie was in the legislature there you know for the last 20 plus years since tabor almost almost 30 years since tabor passed this the way those three uh pieces work together has created a huge issue but going after one rather than doing full tax code restructuring they've gone after only the gallagherman in the midst of a pandemic when 500 000 coloradans are either unemployed or underemployed with the economic turmoil that's going on to do what effectively amounts to a tax increase on homeowners when colorado yo bernie talks about that that gallagher is a job killer and creates issues for our business community in december of 2019 u.s news and world report said colorado had the fourth best economy for businesses and the number one performing economy in the entire country so the idea that gallagher or anything else is killing business here is a fallacy the fact is is that the nas nationally we're one of the best economic places to do business in this country and in the midst of a pandemic it's it's i hate to use the term but it's virtually immoral to be doing this on the backs of homeowners okay well let's talk about how the repeal would definitely affect property taxes would they go up or down or stay the same you're saying the 4.15 would be the same and you're saying that they would go up a lot how do we do that or josh do you know what what effect it would have well as i understand it um if the if the referendum passes and gallagher is repealed that would enable the residential assessment rate to stay at 7.15 percent until the legislature acted to change it what that would likely result in at least here in larimer county is as we all know the values of our homes have gone up quite a bit over the last five years that's slowed down a little bit here in the past year or so and so theoretically your taxes would likely go up um in the 2022 when you pay taxes in 2022 um by whatever the value of your home increases because the the residential assessment rate has stayed the same and so the value you know will push that up there's um there's a little bit of variance in tax rates counties and school districts and everybody else can can change their military for a couple of little things but in general your taxes would go up um if the value of your home goes up as a result of the the economic situation in kovic combined with what was already a slowing down of a housing market they could go down if the val if the assessed value of your home dropped as well because again that rate stays the same if the amendment or if the referendum does not pass then what would happen is that when the assessors value your homes in next year for the 2022 budget so they'll go on 21 asses assessed value of homes the state has projected that the residential assessment rate would drop under 6 so from 7.15 down to about 5.88 and so just think if if the value of your home if you could sell it for a hundred thousand dollars currently it would be taxed on uh seven seven thousand one hundred fifty dollars instead after that if it stayed flat uh you would be taxed on uh five thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars and so certainly your taxes would drop uh for the the drop in the assessed or taxable value of your home and it's highly unlikely that a home would lose value it might stay the same but it's not likely that it would lose value in colorado it seems to be safe there can be some variants but yeah in general you can you can plan on it rising probably not as fast as it's risen over the five or six years but theoretically it should rise a little bit the tax administrator of the state of colorado in that same report that estimated that the assessment rate dropping down to the 5.88 has estimated that um the assessed values uh you know what the actual values of houses um could raise in the 10 range in some places denver some of the some of the places along the front range that number could be approaching 20 and so you could see a situation where even as the assessed value or the actual value of your house goes up and the assessed value rate goes down you could see yourself paying the same amount of taxes or even more if the actual value of your house has gone up the one thing that i think is is very clear on this is that in the next few years the amount of taxes that the state is going to be able to collect is going to go down significantly we are in the midst of one of the biggest economic downturns in in this country's history and so there is no question that that is going to affect and i and i think that josh you have a graph that you'll be putting up you'll see the amount of revenues going in i think the governments need to look at what we all have to do when we have an economic downturn we have to budget our money better we have to be smarter about how we do things and i'm sort of not very sympathetic to the state's plight when between 2009 and 2019 the amount of actual dollars that were raised by the state through residential property rates increased almost 62 percent 61. and a half percent in that 10-year period of time and we had more people move into the into the state but those increased residential rates have been a huge boom to the state in its ability to do stuff and in good times you know that it's one of the problems we have with tabor and and bernie can speak to this in good times we don't necessarily get to reap all of all of that but we do on the property taxes and we have over the last 10 years gone you know from from 3.1 to 5 i think it was five seven billion dollars raised in residential property taxes and so if we find ourselves in a short-term place where we have to budget tighter that's what we all have to do and i think throwing out this is going with amendment b right now is throwing the baby out of the bathroom there were other things the legislature could have done like ask the you know hold the the renewed assessment and moved it from 2021 further out and i've been told two things either that would take a vote of the people or that what could be done legislatively because it's not in the constitution but in either case we could have asked the voters for a temporary hiatus until we all get back on our feet again that's not what this does this is an accident to homeowners forever okay bernie yeah you know clay um you you say that this affects the state's revenues it doesn't i mean exactly and i think it's disingenuous to mix those two this is a local issue and there is an impact on the state budget when it is required to backfill the loss of education revenues but the state's budget is not um the recipient of of any property tax revenues but it has was the counties that took advantage of that 61 increase the other thing that i that i think needs to be pointed out is joanne groth has has walked back those numbers that she gave us because of a very important factor many districts have de-gallagherized and most of our mill levy bond overrides have a factor in them that says if the residential assessment rate goes down the mill levees automatically go up our numbers suggest that that's about 300 million dollars of automatic adjustments to increase uh revenues and and maintain the money necessary for bond issues so that has become pretty standard across the state but it doesn't deal with those districts that are not using bond issues like your fire district like your ambulance districts like your um library district explain that again to me or let me repeat it to you so i understand you're saying that if pooter r1 floated a bond for building schools there can be a provision in that that would what exempt it from gallagher or allow you to show up it's a it's a work around and it's it's uh it solves one problem but it creates another when the residential assessment rate drops the mill levy automatically increases to keep that stream of revenue revenue neutral ah okay josh has the county been involved in that we've had a few bond issues so um the county did look at the idea of floating its mill levy our commissioners had a couple of work sessions on that idea what it would do for the county is similar to what bert how bernie described it ask the voters in the event that the residential assessment rate causes a reduction in revenues may the county float its mill levy or basically increase it to generate the same amount of revenue that it would have had the residential assessment rate not dropped they ultimately decided not to put that question on the ballot in november the reason being it's it's a complicated issue as we're learning tonight so there wasn't a whole lot of time to educate the voters on the impacts of that it's also it can be difficult they said to try to educate folks on what may happen uh you know the county could lose a lot of revenue [Music] if if if the state referendum doesn't pass and you don't vote for this and that's a really hard argument in case to make they felt so they ultimately decided not to put that question on the ballot in november there are a few counties across the state i believe that are doing it i think they would be the first to ask that question i don't believe any counties have done it yet fire districts have there's a few here in larimer county that have done it i believe boulder is one of them i think city and county of broomfield is one and then some smaller ones as well and so they and and what they ultimately decided is you know there will be a new well two new county commissioners next year and so should the residential assessment rate end up dropping then um they could if that new board of county commissioners decided they could go to the voters in november of 21 to ask that question and barbara if i could add on to that i josh you described it exactly correctly uh i don't think at this point any counties have uh de-gallagherized but a number of fire districts have and it has become relatively standard when school districts do bond issues that this is included our numbers show that the amount of increases that will automatically happen if this um if if b doesn't uh pass is in the neighborhood of about 300 million dollars a year eating up a good portion of the 500 million that clay just described but i i and i think but i think that you know both josh and bernie have hit on what i believe is the best kind of politics local politics people deciding for themselves if they want to fund something and the gallagherizing and or the increasing of a mill levy on your special districts on your fire districts your library districts your school districts these are all things that people can and should have the opportunity to do and make the decision for themselves now that hasn't worked in uh well in some of the areas of this state but by and large especially in the urban areas you have seen that those kinds of of special district elections have a a good percentage of passing because people get to decide for themselves what is important getting statewide and go ahead bernie well you know there's a number of issues there um first we've got over 3 200 special districts in colorado and and that's one of the offshoots of tabor good or bad it is what it is um so what you're really talking about is over 3 000 elections to try to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish in one election for the entire state um the special districts association has strongly endorsed the repeal because they see the impact to all of their members of these steadily decreasing residential assessment rates but but bernie part of the reason they endorse this is that if this if the assessment rate stays at 7.15 instead of 5.88 that's more money for their districts on an ongoing basis and understand more money it's just not a it's not less but but but it's it and but it's and the less that we're seeing is a momentary drop in time it is a pandemic drop in time special districts haven't been affected school districts certainly have the and because of the state's inability to backfill but the idea you know we that 450 million i talked about was with was only the county taxes and the school taxes because that's all that joey and groff the tax administrator gave the one thing they didn't talk about was the amount of money which we've calculated as another 180 million on top of that that go to those 3 200 special districts that you're talking about and of course they're going to vote to keep your taxes higher that makes you know the idea that they're endorsing but they're not voting to keep their taxes higher they're voting to keep from having to make cuts of 18 you know that that means that an ambulance district has to decide are we going to lay off people or are we going to sell an ambulance those are those are real discussions i've had those discussions with special districts and they're being forced to make decisions that they don't want to make let me tell you a discussion let me tell you a discussion i had last week bernie talking with a an elderly couple who lived in denver who if with the assessed values going up on their houses are just barely staying in the house they've been into in for over 40 years and if this passes and they don't see that decrease in their assessment rate and their assessed value keeps going out they're going to be they're going to be priced straight out of their homes and in that situation where does a where does an elderly couple in denver colorado go go to when they can't afford their house anymore this affects amendment b and the and the keeping this the assessment rate high also affects the cost of renters that's why the apartment association of of the state is is strongly opposed to amendment b because this is going to make rents keep going up so for this affects our ability to provide affordable housing this affects all of those things that yes the fire district may the fire may come but if you can't afford to stay in your home that's not a maybe situation that's a real life thing that will happen if you can't afford your mortgage just like 32 percent of americans across the country in august couldn't afford to do their mortgage payments on time or in full the fire just the fire may come but you know for sure that your mortgage is coming every month and if you can't afford to stay in your home this is a serious problem okay i have a question for josh i know that larimer county uh we passed a a bond issue for the mental health facility so that brings in a certain amount of money if this were to pass or to fail would the bonds then be in jeopardy for not being paid because they're not bringing in enough money or was it de-gallagherized that's a new term for me i haven't heard that before so um fortunately larimer county doesn't have any uh general obligation debt or revenue uh bond debt the the mental health facility and those programs were funded with a sales tax and so okay yes so that's that rate is set and uh the revenue will come in or not uh depending on how the economy does okay so that's based on sales yes yes okay bernie i think you wanted to answer clay in some way about the residents now the only thing i would ask both of you i guess is when we talk in big numbers of billions that doesn't mean a lot to me but it's just too much but when you're doing a billion year a couple of billionaires yeah right and you're talking real money yes but when you're talking about a homeowner who is facing a tax increase um what are we talking about are we talking a thousand dollars are we talking fifty dollars are we talking five hundred dollars do we know we we ran those numbers for for the city of denver city and county of denver because it's you know it's going to change how much for every homeowner because the number of special districts any particular home is in changes you know you could have your what your house on one side of the street and the exact same house on the other side and you're at how much you pay in taxes could vary wildly depending on which special districts you're in and where the the uh the lines are for that so denver was easy for us to do just to give us sort of instructive on that and what we found is that it's about you know that assuming 10 percent increase in uh in assessed in actual value after the next assessment next year um which in denver is low but we assumed the 10 that the tax administrator talked about that came out to about 568 a year which for some people is i'm sorry an increase of five an increase of 568 dollars how much you would otherwise pay on this okay are you talking a million dollar house are you talking uh that was that was usually that was using the average house cost in denver which i think was is currently at 386 000 and so we use what the average house cost in denver was and we and we ran the numbers what it would be with the five point eight eight assessment rate and at the what what amendment it would be would do which is the seven point one five and so that's that's what that number difference is i can tell you the numbers that we've we've looked at are significantly different using three hundred thousand dollars of value and a seven point one five assessment rate means that uh twenty two thousand hundred 500 of that house is taxed and the average mill levy around the state is 60 mils that works out to write about 1200 total taxes on that house it's higher in the denver metro area it's lower in in some of our rural areas because of different mill levees the difference would be um about 10 or 15 percent if the house maintains its value now in value which it may have done in the metro area but it has not done in rural colorado then the assessment rate is the determining factor in in how much taxes change and and that's interesting because the the things i've seen i think i actually pulled this off of the special district association of colorado's website i'm not 100 sure of that but i'm pretty certain they said that the average mills across the state when you included special districts and you included local colleges and you included municipalities and you included counties and you included school districts which is all of that but that the mill number was 91.16 mills so that's that's another 40 mil uh 30 plus mills off of what you were saying bernie so and clay i'm not going to dispute that i the middle levees vary pretty widely around the state all over the place right you know the militaries for school range from 2 to 28. um and and that's a whole other problem but but but you hit on that's exactly right bernie is that you've hit on the fact that some rural districts tend to vote less liberally as far as going for tax hikes and that brings me into something now how does that affect the state budget because we we read and we hear that the state then has to back up i mean backfill these various i don't think they backfill hospital districts i don't know that they're school district school districts so then they take that out of the general fund of the state budget right and so yeah yeah so here they were looking for a university that keeps getting less and less and less money from the state and so how do we solve this mishmash of of a problem barbara you're you you hit on one of the key factors um the the change in assessment rate next year will if it's allowed to go into effect would drive approximately a 500 million dollar decrease to school districts around the state the uh the way that the 1992 school act works is that the state is required to backfill that 500 million dollars but though you don't have to really do that clay talks about the um um the effects of the coronavirus but one of those effects is that the state's budget doesn't have that 500 million they're already not fully funding k-12 this would certainly result in less dollars to k-12 and almost certainly a considerable amount less to higher education that's why for example today i talked to western state university a couple days ago we talked to adam state all of these colleges and universities that are looking at this are saying you've got to pass amendment b because the alternative is we're going to get less from the state and kids are going to pay higher tuition okay but that brings up one of the big problems that i have about amendment b birdie which is that if amendment b passes gallagher dealing with gallagher alone doesn't get the states out of the state out of its its whole that it has right now gallagher doesn't solve your issue on this but it does it's called this issue it's all it solves it doesn't solve the amount of unfunded to districts that we're doing based on amendment 23 and it doesn't solve the fact that we have an economic downturn so what i don't understand in you know i've known you for almost 20 years and you and i are usually on the same side of things and so the fact that we're beating on each other tonight aside i know where you come from and i know that you also understand that colorado's tax problem isn't just gallagher it's gallagher it's tabor it's of amendment 23. what i don't understand is that if you're going to go to a statewide referendum to change the tax code why didn't you change the tax code to get over the problem that these three things together do why did you of all the things you could have gone after of these three why'd you go after the one that affects homeowners why are you doing that to homeowners right you know the answer to that and it's it's we've got this other constitutional provision that you didn't mention of a single subject we can only do one subject in one amendment um but you didn't do that on this one this one is more than two subjects no that's the lawsuit because it simply strikes language that exists in the constitution okay that's clearly established as one subject right uh josh tell us if this passes how will it affect larimer county what are the commissioners thinking about here so if you'd like to show that uh chart that i shared with you um this could be a good time okay i think we can do that can we show the chart now yeah um our our commissioners um you know we we have one who will be here on next year we have two who are term limited and so they're going to be replaced with a new uh board of county commissioners they are very cognizant of the challenges that that we may face um should this amendment fail um and we we generally plan our our forecasts and our finances as if it will um and so that's the the genesis of the chart i i don't know if you're sharing it or not so um this is a forecast we did over the summer showing the impact possibly of gallagher amendment on our general fund property tax revenue uh the general fund receives i want to say 90 95 of the property tax revenue that goes to the county it funds those sort of core functions that the county is charged with such as law enforcement the office of the sheriff the office of the district attorney the office of the coroner and then our assessor our clerk and recorder and then some general uh functions such as uh human resources finance um the budget and the county commissioners um what we see is in 2021 uh we're actually projecting an increase of property tax revenues um mainly because our board of county commissioners provided a one-time credit in 2020 of about three and a half million dollars and so that will will go away next year and then there will be a slight amount of growth in property values as new construction is assessed in general in the odd number of years we see anywhere from a one to a one and a half percent increase uh there's also because this is one fund of the county there's a couple of million dollars that were shifting from our road bridge fund back over to the general fund and then see in 2022 is an assumption if the residential assessment rate does drop from 7.15 down to 5.88 a couple of other assumptions in there um for what happens in 2022 um this was also done you know back in may and june when covid was you know still really fairly scary we didn't know exactly what was going to happen with the economy uh he had projected that our commercial values would drop by about ten percent i think the states uh joanne groff's estimate assumed that it dropped by 20 percent statewide we didn't we didn't want to assume that they would drop that badly i guess um there's also the assumption that residential values i think dropped just a little bit larimer county also has some oil and gas not nearly as much as our neighbors to the east but we do have some that generates um say between five and six million dollars of property tax revenue at the time it was done you know oil prices had just crashed and so we were thinking that we should assume that that would drop very significantly complicated math together and we basically assumed that the general fund would lose on 22 about 14.1 million dollars of property tax revenue that receive our general county mill bridge our human services department and then our public health department lose probably about another 2 million dollars from from this impact and so you can see then what we sort of projected as maybe uh worst case in the near term but a best case in the long term is that there would be a recession and values would stay relatively flat in 23 and then in 2024 for the budget those values would start to rise again in general has done pretty well especially coming out of recessions even decline in the residential assessment rate the um the actual or i'm sorry the assessed values have actually increased anywhere from 10 to 20 percent even dropping the residential assessment rate so we're one of those counties that can be you know when that drops as long as values continue to go up and growth continues that can be okay revenue wise um and so you see that that revenues start to increase out in 26 and 28 and then um not really apparent on this graph is a couple of large tax increment financing districts that would uh expire out in 2030 and so that's one reason you see a big jump in revenues out far so um that in in the short term really is uh largely the impact to the county the general fund is those sort of basic that you know it's not it's not the ranch it's not natural resources the open spaces those are funded with sales tax absolutely not impacted by this but it could be services such as alternative sentencing of the share of the clerk and recorder and things like that okay very good so now we have a bit of a local uh perspective on that i think that uh maybe we've talked this out do you have any particular points you would like to bring forward that we've missed i think we've talked about the the divide of the rural and urban i think that we have some idea about the impact of this if it passes or fails and i'm not sure whether um in larimer county how that would make a huge difference one way or another um i can see that for their tax rate it's going down significantly if this were to pass but i don't know if we're sure that it has to do with the 5.88 or if it has to do with the pandemic recession i don't know if that's a fair assessment or not you're free to you're free to correct me go ahead barbara um you know some of this is driven by the pandemic um the way that the assessments work um is seeing some really odd things that maybe is making this adjustment um worse than it would otherwise be but it is what it is and um the impacts of gallagher um are real um and i i would just like to close by saying you know i've worked on a lot of projects as clay has but i've never worked on one before where the national federation of independent businesses has endorsed it and the afl cio you know you don't normally see that we've got the cea which is the largest teachers union and we've got the colorado association of school boards uh nearly every chamber that has looked at this has endorsed it ranging from the denver chamber to the aurora chamber to the grand junction chamber and all three of the regional organizations club 20 action 15 and progressive 22. um the colorado concern business group has endorsed this and colorado children's campaign feels very strongly that this is one of the most important things that we can do to protect the financial integrity of the state we've got 3 200 special districts out there that depend on property taxes for their day-to-day work and we cannot let them see the type of cuts that would come next year if we don't get referendum p passed so i'd ask everyone that's watching this to support the passage of referendum b and i would thank the league of women voters and fort collins for giving us this platform to try to explain it a terribly difficult complex subject and i then by saying you know at the end of the day why in the world do we put things like this in our constitution we don't need to put formulas in our constitution this is the worst let's get it out of there okay that was one thing we didn't cover is why is it in the constitution but anyway it is and play go ahead and i'll i'll start by answering that one question why is it in the constitution because 76 percent of the voters in the state in 1982 thought that protecting the values and how much they would have to pay in property taxes on their homes necessitated doing that the three things you need to understand about amendment b are number one it's an effective tax increase for homeowners number two it's an effective tax increases on renters and number three it's an effective tax break for big businesses corporations and oil and gas interests and that's the one i really want to talk about in closing here we've i've talked to you about the 450.5 million dollars which you'll pay extra homeowners across the state will pay extra if this passes but the thing that we haven't talked about is that this give you amendment b locks in how what the top rate that you can pay if you're a business at the 29 what it doesn't take into account is that given the decreased valuations that initially came out this could be a billion dollar tax cut for businesses next year and that may come back up as as the pandemic eases in the in the economic crisis eases but the one thing we know for sure is that big business and corporations have tremendous sway at the legislature 256 pages of lobbyists where i got out the secretary of state's website this uh today when i printed it up those are all people who are out there not working for homeowners they're working for big business interests bernie started this off by saying that this is going to affect you know that that it's the small mom-and-pop businesses that get killed on on these higher rates my family has been in commercial real estate my entire life we do small strip centers and so i see the effects of this that this these taxes have on my tenants and have on on my family directly and one thing i know for sure is that if there's a tax break to be done it's not going to happen for mom and pop businesses it's going to be for the big corporations that don't pay their taxes bearing on their sales tax and anyway those are the people who are going to see the big decreases in their tax burden okay representatives because we have we have a time limit um josh would you like to add anything oh just thank you for for having me and hopefully i helped contribute to the understanding of the issue and uh yes we we appreciate the local the local perspective that was very good i didn't know that we could go for an hour on this but we did and i thank you all very much we thank you all the panelists and the audience we hope you will encourage others to watch this and other cross currents programs we also have a program on a proposition 114 the reintroduction and management of gray wolves that is also on the ballot we did that one way back in february they are both available at the league of women voters website and at f c t z channels 14 and 8.81 they are also available on youtube search for fcgov.com fctv thanks again for tuning in and please make sure you vote thank you thank you thank you thank you i appreciate it you

Channel: City of Fort Collins

Views: 1,651

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: bgYdfSPn-9s

Length: 56min 4sec (3364 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020