Some tired of paying for private fire department

After buying his house in 2003, Nick Kokot couldn’t understand why his property tax bill included about $350 a year for special fire protection.

Kokot lives in the Spires Broadmoor neighborhood, on the southwest edge of Colorado Springs, and he pays city taxes. Why, he wondered, were he and 163 of his neighbors paying the Broadmoor Fire Protection District while 200 others were not?

“It seemed ridiculous to me for people inside the city limits to pay extra for a private fire department,” Kokot said.

His puzzlement turned to anger when he and his neighbors had to organize, with the help of the neighborhood developer, circulate petitions and ultimately file a lawsuit to try to escape the tax.

Now, the neighborhood may be getting out.

Kokot said the Broadmoor fire and rescue crew is a luxury — a department created by the old Broadmoor Improvement Society when the area was outside city limits. The tax district was incorporated in 1949 and later expanded.

Today, it generates about $500,000 a year to fund the station behind The Broadmoor hotel and resort that is staffed by six full-time employees and others around the clock.

Kokot said Broadmoor fire and rescue crews must drive right past the city’s Fire Station 16 to reach the Spires. He and his neighbors don’t want it, he said, or need it.

Neither does the Colorado Springs Fire Department, which has three nearby stations — No. 16 on the south, No. 13 on Cresta Road just north of The Broadmoor and No. 14 on Southgate Road to the east.

“I’m not going to turn down the extra help,” Springs Fire Chief Manuel Navarro. “It’s free to me. But if I had to pay for it . . . ”

Nearly three years ago, Michelle Grove-Reiland, vice president of the Spires development, took up the neighborhood cause.

She was troubled that half the neighborhood was taxed by the district even though the area had been part of the city since 1981. Somehow, half the neighborhood was removed during a review of the district’s boundaries several years ago.

“It’s really not clear how that happened,” she said.

She learned there are three ways for a neighborhood to opt out of a fire tax district.

If “cause” exists — such as another fire station next-door — a neighborhood can withdraw from a fire district if all residents agree. Or the district board can drop a neighborhood if another district will provide protection. The third option requires a lawsuit and a petition with a simple majority of residents’ signatures.

“We didn’t really have a problem with them leaving,” said Dan Butler, a member of the Broadmoor fire district board. “In fact, originally we tried to vote them out.”

Butler said state law doesn’t let a fire district turn a neighborhood over to a municipality for protection. Only to another fire district.

So the neighborhood sued and hopes to be free of the fire district in a few months.

The fire district has not opposed the Spires in its lawsuit. Still, the board wonders why the Spires wants to give up the service, such as stopping by the station for free blood pressure checks and quick response to medical calls.

“I think it’s well worth a couple hundred bucks a year for the special service we get,” Butler said. “But if they want out, we don’t want to stop them.”

Tell me about your neighborhood: 636-0193 or bill.vogrin@gazette.com