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Daily Pagosa Springs News
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| Subtract One Day? Subtract One School? Add Five Mills? Part Four |
| Glenn Walsh | 3/4/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
Tonight, the boards of our local governing districts will meet again. The intermittent series of sessions to date has featured the Town of Pagosa Springs, Archuleta County and the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District discussing the size and shares of hoped-for development fees (in 2009, PAWSD collected $200,000 of the $7 million in fees forecast by its "master plan"). Discussions about the split of these hoped-fees have heated up as the local home construction market has cooled off into a deep freeze.
During previous sessions the school board has taken no seat at the table. Superintendent Mark DeVoti often attends and takes a seat in the back row of the audience. When invited to contribute, the school superintendent, in his signature warm and friendly style, urges the boards to cooperate and find a win-win formula that addresses all the community’s long-term needs.
To date, that approach has not won the schools much consideration from the other governing boards, who simply do not appear to see excellent, well-funded schools as a critical component of a healthy local economy.
This marginalization of the school district is best seen by examining present plans for imposing fees when and if the local construction market recovers. PAWSD assesses fees which range from $13,448 for a small house within its district to $54,692 for a four-bathroom house constructed outside its present borders. The majority of these fees are intended for the construction of the district’s $371 million Dry Gulch Reservoir project.
 While the County has objected, quite reasonably, to the scale of Dry Gulch — which aims to increase water storage to 1600 percent of present usage — the BoCC has recently published, in conjunction with the Town, a revised version of its own proposed impact fees.
And the County has proposed its own Dry Gulch: a 132,000 square foot administrative campus costing $25 million; for which each new home is expected to contribute nearly $1400. In 2006, the County proposed a 40,000 square foot building with a price tag of $7.6 million and an accompanying $450 per house fee. Apparently local growth over the past three years has enlarged the project by 330 percent.
If you add in the use tax that the Town and County are working hard to promote, total impact fees and new taxes planned for a new home constructed in 2011 will range from approximately $25,000 to $65,000.
Of that total, Archuleta County schools can expect to collect less than $100 per house, a $251 fee assessed only against new subdivisions.
The school district has yet to make a convincing case for the central importance of excellent schools in any healthy, growing and well-balanced local economy. Almost without exception, research shows that school quality is the single most important factor in raising or lowering property values and attracting or repelling new families. I have encountered no research demonstrating that a preposterously oversized and overpriced reservoir or a new government campus makes any similarly positive contribution. I thank any reader who can direct me to such research.
Perhaps the school district will make a better case tonight for two reasons. First, the schools have a seat at the table, and, second, the table is being set at the Junior High School library. The meeting will convene at 5:00pm.
The focus of the meeting will be the school district’s present budget crisis. The district is proposing cuts of $1.2 million for the 2010-2011 school year, and an additional round of similarly severe cuts for the 2011-2012 school year.
Two factors — declining enrollments owing to the exodus of young families from the collapsing local construction economy, and the state of Colorado’s peculiar funding formula — have created the $2.3 million budget shortfall the district is facing over the next three years.
The state formula is inconsistent to the point of incoherence. Twenty-two years ago, the state adopted an equalization program which attempted to fulfill its title: by assessing a nearly uniform tax rate statewide (40 mills in 1988) and distributing an equal per student amount to each of the state’s districts, the program aimed to provide nearly equal operating funds for students from Aspen to Antonito.
The average district mill levy was still 38 mills when TABOR was passed by Colorado voters in 1992. TABOR required that school tax mill levies be decreased as property values increased beyond the rate of inflation and local population growth, unless local voters voted to permit their local district to maintain some portion of that additional revenue.
While the taxpayers bill of rights has been subject to a never ending campaign of misinformation by its opponents, Colorado voters have been very responsive to specific requests by local districts for more money. The majority of bond issue elections have been approved by voters. The vast majority of districts — 175 of 178 — had approved additional funding for specific projects by 2006. Currently, 106 districts assess additional property taxes for operational expenses, most taxes aimed at smaller class sizes, teacher compensation, and expanded student programs.
"Equalization" is still a vague goal: Districts have been subject to a twenty-percent limit on additional funds over and above the state formula for operating expenses. Restrictions on capital spending are less severe and more flexible, however, which is evidenced by the dramatically different campuses you encounter in Aspen and Antonito.
By 2006, the nearly uniform 40 mills of 1998 had become a range from 4 to 38 mills statewide, with many of the poorer rural districts paying the highest percentage. By 2006, the state share of total public K-12 spending in the state had risen from about forty percent to nearly two-thirds.
The state solution in 2007 to its ever-rising share of education costs and the continuing decline in mill levies statewide was to freeze school tax rates without voter approval. The legal rationale for the measure — which aimed to increase local taxes by $1.2 billion over four years — was remarkably dubious. The state claimed that local districts, by approving even a 1 mill increase for a small project — had effectively removed themselves from all TABOR protections.
Whatever your political stance on TABOR or the mill levy freeze, the effect on Archuleta County has been profound. Local school taxes have been raised by $3.5 million per year.
Nearly $2400 per student.
The property tax income of the other districts invited to tonight’s meeting has been raised by 70 percent as well over the past three years. The County’s property tax revenue has risen from $4.5 million to $7.7 million. PAWSD has increased general property taxes by over a half million dollars, or 68 percent. The fire and hospital districts have increased their property tax revenues by $665,000 (56 percent) and $690,000 (74 percent), respectively.
There is one crucial difference the reader should note: Every other district kept every dollar in additional tax revenue collected. The Archuleta County school district was mandated by the state mill levy freeze to send every dollar — $8 million dollars and counting — to Denver.
And in return the Archuleta County School District has received warnings from Denver that state funding may be cut by 10-15 percent over the next two years.
While the average district in Colorado now pays less than forty percent of their share of operating revenue disbursed from Denver, Archuleta County is now funding 90 percent of its share of state “equalization” money.
Read Part Five...
Is this an equitable arrangement? It appears so from Denver. Why?
Because Archuleta County is seen as a wealthy county from the Front Range.
More on this in Part Five... |
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