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Arapahoe County Commission Special Meeting: Budget Shortfall Hearing - 11 AM
About this event
The Arapahoe County Commissioners will hear public comments on how to deal with the serious budget shortfall that the county is facing.
The three options are:
Cut services
Initiate the county's first sales tax
De-Bruce (change the income cap imposed by TABOR in Colorado. Most counties have already de-Bruced already to avoid budget problems.
Read the Denver Post article from June 12, 2023 "For Two Colorado Counties That Haven’t 'De-Bruced', the Fiscal Alarm Is Growing Louder",
which examines the financial problem faced by Arapahoe County as one of a dwindling number of counties in Colorado that have not fully debruced.
As the Denver Post article by John Aguilar says:
"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.'
Arapahoe is among a dwindling number of counties in the state that have yet to significantly 'de-Bruce,' a colloquialism used to describe the process by which governments in Colorado — municipalities, counties or the state itself — ask voters if they can set aside TABOR’s revenue limits.
The term derives from TABOR’s main architect, former state lawmaker and anti-tax crusader Douglas Bruce, who helped put it into the Colorado Constitution in 1992.
Read the Denver Post article
here.
This special meeting's agenda is
here.
The Arapahoe County Commissioners meet on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month at 9:30 AM in-person at 5334 S Prince St in Littleton, in the Administration Building’s East Hearing Room, and online. Meetings are open to the public.
Commission study sessions are held on some Mondays and Tuesdays and are open to the public.
View online by live stream from a link on the Arapahoe County calendar
here.
You'll find upcoming meetings and agendas on their calendar webpage
here
Category
Important Community Event
Registration Info
Registration is not Required