Of far greater import than TABOR, the Denver Nuggets just won their first NBA title! They defeated the Miami Heat 4 games to 1in the Nuggets home arena in Denver.it may not seem important for non-sports fans, but it will bring in lots of revenue to the team and the city, not to mention other sports teams like the woeful Broncos and Rockies.
I have never liked the Bruce amendment, called TABOR (TAxpayer Bill Of Rights), to Colorado's state Constitution. It is designed to restrict the growth of Colorado's budget to only allow for growth tied to inflation and to not account for growing value of Colorado's property. When values go down, which they did in recessions, the valuations aren't allowed to rise after valuations rise again.
The goal of the state legislator Douglas Bruce who proposed this was to ratchet down the budget of the state and restrict spending. Yes, he was a Republican from Colorado Springs. Well, it has become dogma that this is responsible budgeting but the state winds up returning tax monies to residents instead of being able to use it for state needs, like roads and health care, for example.
The Denver Post (www.denverpost.com/...) has an article today that two Denver metro counties that haven't managed to pass legislation to de-Bruce themselves, Arapahoe and Jefferson, are having a budgetary crisis because of this irresponsible budgeting.
Arapahoe County just fired a fiscal warning shot across the bow.
In a little-noticed news release issued this month, Colorado’s third-largest county painted a dire picture of “critical services at risk” for its 655,000 residents “without modernizing finances.”
A further read shows that what Arapahoe County is in fact doing is teeing up a request for “additional funding” — i.e. a tax hike or permission from voters to keep millions of dollars beyond what the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, allows. It is, in large part, an acknowledgment by the county that fundamental changes to the way it raises revenue are needed if basic governmental functions are to continue at current levels.
“The county has always prized fiscal conservatism and keeping a tight belt,” Commissioner Jessica Campbell-Swanson said minutes after addressing a crowd of hundreds at the Arapahoe County Fairgrounds last week during the State of the County address. “We’ve been able to patch (the budget) with ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) dollars but meanwhile our roads continue to degrade and growth continues to happen.”
I'm afraid the article is for subscribers, but for an article about business, I'm sure you can understand. I have always believed that government should be able to budget according to need without having decades old conservative staightjackets dictating that money collected in taxes must be returned without option.
I'm currently in Boston and this evening I'm going to watch the Colorado Rockies beat the Boston Red Sox at Fenway. I'm still very much interested in what's on your minds, so the floor is yours..