If you live in Boulder County, including the cities of Boulder, Erie, Jamestown, Lafayette, Longmont, Louisville, Lyons, Nederland, Superior and Ward, you have probably heard about the attacks on the Boulder County commissioners over the funding of rural subdivision roads. Here are some facts for you to consider.
Urban residents — those who live within one of the cities in Boulder County — pay more than 83 percent of the property taxes collected by the county. Those taxes from urban residents subsidize the cost of providing police, fire, transportation and other services to rural residents, because the taxes paid by rural property owners are not enough, without the urban subsidy, to provide those services to dispersed rural developments. Because city residents are already paying a lot to support services for the rural lifestyle, is it really fair that 11,000 residents of rural subdivisions (3.8 percent of the county’s total population) want the other 290,000 people in Boulder to pay for rural streets as well as for their own?
Urban residents pay for the cost of rebuilding roads that serve their own urban neighborhoods. They do this not only through their own property taxes and sales taxes dedicated to transportation, but by paying special assessments to pay a large portion of the cost to rebuild their own urban neighborhood streets as well. When Norwood Avenue in the city of Boulder, for example, was rebuilt between Broadway and 26th Street, property fronting Norwood was assessed $5,000, while properties one and two houses away were assessed $2,500 and $1,250, respectively. Adjusted for inflation, these assessments were far more than rural residents are being asked to pay now for rebuilding their own neighborhood streets.
The Local Improvement District (LID) was the fallback position: the way in which, if the Public Improvement District (PID) failed to pass, rural subdivision roads would be repaired once. Voters in rural subdivisions failed to pass the PID in November, which would have permanently addressed the issue of fixing their streets and keeping them in good condition. It is unfortunate that the PID did not pass, as it would have provided a long term, less expensive, tax-deductible means of paying for good streets in these rural PID’s. Regrettably, the fallback is not permanent, is not tax-deductible, will take longer and will probably be more expensive. All of these facts were explained at numerous public hearings and in county information sheets before the election.
It is false to say that the imposition of the LID is a naked exercise of the commissioners’ power — that they are doing this “because they can.” No one — not even the opponents of the PID — wants the continued deterioration of the streets. Voters in the district — whether it would be a PID or an LID — knew that if the PID failed, it left only the LID to pay for the repair of their streets, and that the LID would include a lien on all the district properties to eliminate the possibility of free riders.
The opponents of the PID were banking on their ability to persuade the commissioners to impose the cost of their neighborhood streets on everybody else in Boulder County. The commissioners deserve credit for holding firm in the face of a storm of protest that has gotten increasingly loud, unreasonable and personal. The commissioners cannot do what opponents demand without hurting every other highly regarded service available to all county residents — urban and rural alike.
We are all in this together, which is why urban residents subsidize services to rural areas now. That is also why urban residents don’t object to the commissioners’ offer to pay for 20 percent of the cost of rebuilding streets in rural neighborhoods. But rural residents who are unwilling to pay for most of the cost of their own streets need to know that a majority of county residents support the commissioners on this issue.
The rural street issue has been resolved in a process with extensive public input, including a vote by the rural subdivisions in the past election. The government can’t pay for everything, and so people do not always get what they want. One can’t blame rural subdivision residents for trying to reconstruct their streets with Other People’s Money. But it is good that the commissioners have refused to cut other programs for the 3.8 percent of the population who demand a 100 percent subsidy.
Macon Cowles serves on the Boulder City Council.
