Crushing defeat delivers a message: Shrink government

Rattled by an economic downturn and skeptical of the dire predictions emanating from City Hall, Colorado Springs voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to raise property taxes to stave off myriad cuts in city services next year.

Measure 2C, which would have tripled the city’s property tax rate, went down in flames Tuesday, losing by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, according to unofficial results.

“The message that it sends to me is really that the voters had an opportunity to say to City Council which road they wanted to go down, whether they wanted to continue services or close down services,” said Councilwoman Jan Martin, who sponsored the ballot measure.

“We certainly will listen and move in that direction,” she said.

Had it been approved by voters, the permanent property tax increase would have generated an estimated $27.6 million in additional revenue next year and allowed the government to maintain services at 2009 levels.

Without it, city officials warned of having to close recreational and cultural facilities, slash 63,000 hours of bus service and lay off dozens of employees, including police officers and firefighters, among a host of cuts.

But 2C was doomed to fail because of the bad economy, combined with the city’s “general conservative attitude” and the public’s distrust of city government, including the financial and other problems that arose from the troubled deal with the U.S. Olympic Committee, said Josh Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“The people of Colorado Springs don’t seem to believe the claims that the heavens will fall if the city isn’t allowed to raise these taxes,” he said.

“If people really believed that these dreadful things would occur without this revenue, then they certainly would vote to approve it. I think that’s the first reason (2C was defeated),” he said.

“Second, of course, is that generally this is a very conservative, anti-tax city, and in an economic downturn where people are tightening their own belts, they probably don’t like the idea of government taking more of their money,” he said.

Voters agreed, calling the proposed 2010 budget cuts “scare tactics.”

“I kind of resent the scare tactics,” Michael Hagen said Monday after dropping off his ballot.

“They always go for the things that are the most visible and hurt the most instead of looking deeper for the internal things,” he said. “There’s probably some things there that can be cut without going to the things that they know will hurt people.”

Mayor Lionel Rivera said voters delivered a clear message Tuesday: reduce the size of government.

“We can only do the services that we have revenue to do,” he said. ”Like any other business, if revenues decrease, you have to cut services, you have to lay off employees, and that’s what we’ll be doing.”

—

Call the writer at 476-1623