Gallagher spearheading 'de-Brucing' of Springs
The city that gave birth to Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which regulates taxes and revenue and limits spending, may take a shot at loosening some of those restrictions.
Efforts are underway to place a charter amendment on the November ballot asking Colorado Springs voters to “de-Bruce” the city’s TABOR, which was authored by anti-tax crusader Douglas Bruce and passed by voters in 1991.
The proposal would repeal everything in TABOR except voting on taxes.
“All the fine print, the quintessential stuff that makes it Doug Bruce and turns the good idea to crap, it needs to go away,” said Councilman Tom Gallagher, who has agreed to spearhead the effort on the City Council to place the charter amendment on the ballot.
Bruce said proponents don’t have a “good sense” of city voters.
“I think it has zero chance,” he said Tuesday.
In addition to controlling taxation, TABOR limits revenue growth to the sum of population growth and inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index for the Denver-Boulder area.
It is loathed by City Hall because of its so-called ratchet-down effect.
“If all of a sudden your tax revenues drop below the TABOR allowed limits, then the next year the TABOR allowed limits reduce to that new low,” said John Leavitt, a city spokesman.
“But if all of a sudden the very next year we have a boom economy and everybody is spending money and we’ve got all kinds of revenue flowing into the city’s coffers, you have to refund all of that because your new TABOR limit has set below the previous years. You’re in a refund mode,” he said.
John Weiss, publisher of the Colorado Springs Independent, and Jay Patel, the weekly’s vice president of development, came up with the proposal.
“Doug Bruce put two parts to his TABOR proposal,” Weiss said. “The first one you have to vote on taxes, which is a popular measure. The second part is all this very complicated, financial gobbledygook.”
Colorado Springs is subject to both municipal and state TABOR laws. Gallagher did not how that affected the plan to de-Bruce. Neither Weiss nor Patel could be reached for comment late Tuesday.
—
Call the writer at 476-1623
