CO Fire Chiefs Fear Tax Law Catastrophe

Oct. 30 -- More than 50 fire districts across Colorado are requesting the same thing from their voters this fall: Give us a legal workaround to a property tax law that’s set to slash our budgets again.

Lives are at stake, they say.

“We’re way past the crisis point,” West Metro Fire Chief Don Lombardi said. “The fire districts have called 911, and no one is answering.”

Lombardi’s district, which covers Lakewood, Edgewater and Wheat Ridge, could lose about $5 million if his ballot measure fails and the property tax rate paid by homeowners drops as predicted in 2020. Wellington Fire Protection District thinks its loss would equal the cost of a fire station. The North-West Fire Protection District in Fairplay predicted a $160,000 cut if voters reject their request.

The budget holes vary, but the fire chiefs all have the same fear: The Gallagher amendment is going to wind up getting someone killed.

The basic idea behind Gallagher, which Colorado voters passed in 1982, was that home owners shouldn’t pay more in property taxes than businesses.

It created a rule that no matter what happens to home values, homeowners can’t pay more than 45 percent of the state’s total property tax bill. It locked business owners into paying property taxes on 29 percent of their building’s value, but the rate for homeowners was supposed to float up and down to keep that 45-55 split.

But then voters passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which meant the rate couldn’t rise without voter approval and home prices exploded on the Front Range.

Those two things together led to a situation where the residential assessment rate in most parts of Colorado is dropping faster than home values are rising — leaving fire, library and other special districts with decreasing revenues even as the populations they serve increase.

Firefighters from 20 Colorado counties want to put a stop that cycle this year. They’re asking voters in different ways to essentially let their mill levies float up and down so they can collect the same amount of money every year.

“I tell people it’s revenue stabilization,” North-West Fire Protection District Chief Kristy Olme said.

When the Weston Pass Fire started burning south of Fairplay on June 28, Olme’s district sent everyone they could to that first call: a single fire engine and three firefighters.

“If we get something big in the summer, we’ve got those three people on duty, and we might get two or three people from neighboring districts,” Olme said.

The district could use a crew of wildland firefighters, but Olme said it’s impossible to think about adding staff and services when Gallagher is set to slash her 2020 budget by $160,000.

“That’s three paid firefighters on my department,” Olme said. “My current full-time staff is nine plus myself; three per shift.”

The North-West Fire Protection District convinced voters to increase its budget in 2017, but the next scheduled drop in residential assessment rates is going to wipe half of that out. Olme is worried she’ll have to cut the free wood chipping and property clearing services her firefighters provide to help people protect their homes, and she doesn’t want to think about what would get cut if the rate dropped again in 2022.

“I think what it tells me, and what I think people need to understand is this well-intentioned Gallagher amendment is actually putting a chokehold on counties across Colorado,” said state Rep. Daneya Esgar, D-Pueblo.

Esgar and five other state lawmakers spent the last half of 2018 trying to come up with a solution to the Gallagher problem. Their committee agreed on three different fixes — some temporary and some permanent — but another interim committee killed all but one proposal.

“We thought we were great. We had unanimous consent, Republicans and Democrats, only to meet a partisan brick wall at the next step to move these forward,” Esgar said. “If that’s not an indicator of how much work we have to do to educate people, I don’t know what is.”

Esgar, Rep. Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, and Sen. Lois Court, D-Denver, all said they plan to put forward the Alternatives to Gallagher Interim Committee bills anyway. One of those bills backfill fire districts that lose a certain amount of money in 2020. It’s a one-time payment designed to buy lawmakers more time to work on repealing and/or replacing the entire constitutional amendment.

“These elections don’t always pass, and they’re expensive to run. People perceive them as a tax increase,” Rankin said. “We don’t want critical local firefighting capability to go away in the meantime.”

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