August 22, 2024 01:49 PM UTC

Here's a Smart Idea for Avoiding Another Round of Dumb Hostage-Taking on Policy Issues

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado lawmakers will return to the State Capitol on Monday for (another) special legislative session focused on property tax rates. It may turn out that the most important discussion from this brief return of legislators could be about a Constitutional amendment that would be a smart issue to tackle in the next regular legislative session in January.

The short-term result of next week’s special session should put to rest concerns about two potential ballot measures — Initiatives 50 and 108 — that would positively crush Colorado’s economy if enacted. We don’t yet know the details of whatever deal that might be reached with bad actors such as Michael Fields (Advance Colorado) and Dave Davia (Colorado Concern) in exchange from withdrawing their ballot measures. Yet as Marianne Goodland wrote earlier this week for the publication formerly known as the Colorado Statesman, another potential solution is being floated:

A proposal for the three-day special session that starts on Aug. 26 would ask voters for a constitutional change to block any further statewide ballot measures that would limit property tax revenue. [Pols emphasis]

The bill, in its draft form, isn’t going over well in some circles, with several sources warning that it could blow up the deal crafted among lawmakers, Gov. Jared Polis, and proponents of two ballot measures that would cut property taxes further than what lawmakers approved earlier this year…

…The idea isn’t new.

Former state Rep. and Secretary of State Bernie Buescher and Ann Terry from the Special District Association floated an idea for a constitutional ballot measure in 2022. Proposition 55 said any voter initiative that affects the property taxes of a local government — whether a city, county, school, or special district — could be decided only in a local election by those entitled to vote in that election. [Pols emphasis]

The measure never reached the petition phase, and proponents eventually withdrew it.

The proposal being floated by State Rep. and soon-to-be State Sen. Mike Weissman is based on the premise of “local control of local government taxation.” It sounds like this idea probably won’t be part of the final deal made next week, but we’d like to see it brought up again in the near future; it is a logical approach to fixing our current problem, in which a handful of bad actors (Fields and Davia) can essentially bankrupt the entire state with a half-assed ballot measure and a blank checkbook from wealthy donors who just want to pay fewer taxes regardless of what harm it might cause elsewhere. Here’s why:

Under Colorado’s current system, which is a wet ball of yarn thanks to TABOR and the (since-repealed) Gallagher Amendment, a STATEWIDE vote is required in order to adjust property tax rates for a local municipality. Since property tax revenue largely funds firefighters, police officers, and public schools at a LOCAL level, a statewide vote doesn’t make a lot of sense. We wouldn’t accept this system in any other election; it would be absurd, for example, to hold a statewide vote in order to select the next mayor of, say, Alamosa. 

Of course we wouldn’t want people who don’t live in Alamosa or have anything to do with Alamosa to be blindly deciding on who should lead a city that they know nothing about. But that, in effect, is what we do with property tax rate changes. This shouldn’t be all that controversial, either; Republicans are always talking about “local control,” which is what this would be about. If voters in Douglas County want to cut off their own legs in order to save a few more dollars in taxes, then so be it. But if voters in nearby Arapahoe or Jefferson counties disagree, why should they suffer the same fate of drastic cuts to important public services?

[Yes, we understand that this would be problematic for calculating the state budget, but that’s a minor issue that can be solved with further discussion].

Regardless of the deal that is ultimately reached in next week’s special session, Fields and friends have inadvertently proven how problematic it is to allow the initiative process in Colorado to be abused by a handful of big money groups whose executives are largely just trying to justify their own professional existence. Democrats will go to the negotiating table because there is a need to have adults in the room who actually care about the outcome of balancing tax cuts with needed revenue for important public services.

But we shouldn’t do this again, and there should be guardrails in place in the future to prevent the same hostage-taking nonsense from groups like Advance Colorado and Colorado Concern.