Last Tuesday afternoon, our three County Commissioners — Ronnie Maez, Steve Wadley and Alvin Schaaf — sat and listened to their Finance Director, Larry Walton, propose a draft 2021 budget.
The presentation was sometimes difficult to understand, watching via ZOOM, even though I’ve spent a bit of effort, in the past, reviewing and writing about government budgets.
But one of Mr. Walton’s numerous charts seemed very easy to read.
As we see in this chart, the BOCC has had a variety of feelings about our county roads over the past decade. In 2014, when many of our roads were in bad shape, the BOCC was allocating 80% of the property tax to the General Fund, and 15% to the Road & Bridge Fund (shown as “R&B” in this chart, not to be confused with “Rhythm & Blues”.)
In 2015, the BOCC came to the intelligent conclusion that our county roads were unlikely to improve unless more tax money were dedicated to Road & Bridge, so they changed the property tax formula and bumped up the road funding to 25% of property tax collections.
Our readers are welcome to consider whether the condition of our roads, in general, were in better shape in 2019 than they were in 2014. I mention the year 2019, because in 2020, the BOCC reduced the amount of property tax dedicated to Road & Bridge from 25% down to 5%.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the draft budget presented this week to the BOCC has reduced the property taxes directed to roads to an even smaller amount. 0%.
The main source of citizen-generated revenue flowing to Archuleta County — and allocated each year by the Board of County Commissioners — is a property tax mill levy. Mr. Walton did not specifically mention the total amount expected for 2021 during his presentation on Tuesday. That amount is shown, however, in the “Budget Detail” posted to the Archuleta County website, and which you can download here.
Here’s the “Budget Detail” for the tax revenues assigned to the General Fund, in this draft budget of 2021. The top line shows, in the far right column, the expected property taxes requested to be spent in the General Fund: $5.8 million. That number was $3.9 million in 2018.
Below that is the total taxes assigned to the General Fund from all tax sources: $9.7 million. That number was $6.9 million in 2018.
Here’s the “Budget Detail” for the tax revenues assigned to Road & Bridge for 2021. As we can see, the BOCC — in its infinite wisdom — dedicated $1.4 million in property taxes to the Road & Bridge Fund in 2018. For this current year, 2020, the BOCC expects to spend (Projected Year End) about $308,000 from our property taxes on Road & Bridge. According to my pocket calculator, that will be about 20% of the amount they actually spent in 2018.
But the requested budget for 2021? Zero dollars in property taxes.
As we see, the total local property taxes spent on our county road system in 2018 was $1.6 million. As we see, the amount of 2021 taxes the BOCC currently plans to spend on our county road system? Slightly less than $33,000. (Road & Bridge will still receive a hefty dose of taxes via sales tax revenues, however.)
Who is to blame for this situation? Well, it’s you and I.
Here’s a quote from BOCC chair Ronnie Maez, explaining on Tuesday why he wants to allocate not a single 2021 property tax dollar to our roads next year, and why the spending within the General Fund is 39% higher than it was in 2018. And why you and I are to blame.
“Yeah, you know, we expressed the concerns that we’re anticipating now, to the public. And we tried to do it with the first ballot measure. That failed, and we explained to the public then, that we would have to go for a COP for the jail. And the best solution was probably the first solution presented to the public, to get them to vote for a one-percent sales tax, because we were facing all these problems.”
Commissioner Maez is here discussing the sales tax increase proposed by the BOCC in 2017, which would have generated somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million over a 15-year period — money which could legally be spent only for courts and jails and Sheriff’s Office capital improvements.
To put $40 million in perspective, we’ve heard estimates over the past decade that all the county roads in Archuleta County could be brought up to a ‘good’ condition, with an expenditure of about $45 million. But the BOCC wanted to spend all the new sales tax money only on “justice center capital improvements.” Many voters perceived the proposed jail as too large for a small town like Pagosa Springs, and as too expensive. The ballot measure was defeated at the polls.
The BOCC decided that they had failed to get across to the voters their excellent reasons for needing $40 million to house criminals and for related facilities, and they went back to the voters in 2018 with essentially the same request. The voters again rejected the tax increase, by a slightly larger margin.
But as Commissioner Maez makes very clear, the BOCC had warned us. If we didn’t approve the sales tax increase, the BOCC was going to build their justice center anyway, using Certificates of Participation — and we would, as a result, have no money to maintain our roads.
And, see… they were right. We now have only $33,000 in 2021 property taxes dedicated to 300 miles of county roads. But we have a fine new jail, and the BOCC is spending millions more on the Sheriff’s Office and on a new courthouse.
Commissioner Maez (who, as you may know, is running for re-election) continued:
“We expressed then, what was going to have to happen, and what anticipations we were looking at in the future. And, now here we are…
“We have to do what we have to do. We’re statutorily obligated to build a courthouse and a jail.”
Apparently, Commissioner Maez doesn’t believe the County is statutorily obligated to maintain our public road system.