For county voters, 1A is $8.5 million question | News

Pitkin County ballot question 1A asks voters to approve a new property tax to fund affordable housing initiatives from the county. While some voters are enthusiastic about funding prospects throughout the county, others are skeptical of what they call broad language in the Nov. 5 ballot items.

Residents of Pitkin County identified affordable housing efforts as the highest priority for the county in a recent biannual survey.

Now that there’s a choice to approve a new property tax to fund such initiatives, voters are juggling their desire to see the county up its contributions to affordable housing projects versus the prospect of an increased tax bill after record-setting property valuations.

Ballot question 1A asks voters to approve a mill levy of 1.5 mills, which would yield about $8.5 million annually in property tax revenue, based on current valuations. The Pitkin Board of County Commissioners put the question on the ballot after numerous planning discussions at board retreats, narrowing the scope in an effort to make the new tax palatable to voters.

For taxpayers, it would mean a $121 annual increase on their bill per $1 million of an assessed value for a homeowner, and a $435 annual increase on their bill per $1 million of value for a commercial property owner.

Kelly McNicholas Kury, a volunteer with the issue committee Yes on 1A!, said the Taxpayer Bill of Rights prohibits counties from levying real estate transfer taxes. She also is a Pitkin County commissioner and said she was not speaking about 1A in her capacity as an elected official.

“We can’t tailor a property tax to only non-resident owners… A sales tax or a property tax are essentially the ways that we can raise money,” she said. “Because the real estate market made the problems of housing exponentially worse in our community, creating a property tax more directly links the solution to the problem and helps spread the benefits of a booming real estate market more equitably throughout the community by creating housing for a workforce.”

The commissioners approved ballot language they said is broad enough to allow for flexibility of use but narrow enough to give voters confidence how the funding will be spent.

The ballot question enumerates uses for the funding, including: attracting and retaining essential workers for community services, partnering with other entities to generate affordable rentals or ownership units, buying deed restrictions on free-market units, creating a capital reserve maintenance fund, developing services like transitional housing to serve homeless populations and prioritizing such efforts in appropriate ways to protect rural character.

The ballot question limits the county to using revenue from this potential tax to just the expressed uses.

For Bill Guth, an Aspen City Council member who voted against endorsing 1A, the ballot question is too broad and some of the goals, like Pitkin County contributing to buydown in a market where the average home price is in the millions, is a moonshot.

“This broad spectrum of every possible housing initiative you could possibly conceptualize with only $8.5 million a year, to me, it raises more questions and creates more problems than it solves,” he said.

He said he’d prefer the county identify a specific project and plan, raise funds for it specifically, and then sunset the tax. He pointed to the city’s 0.5% RETT, which benefits the Wheeler Opera House and, since 2021, the Red Brick Building arts programming and maintenance.

The city struggles to identify appropriate expenditures for the fund, he said, and acknowledged that view conflicted with his point against too broad of a tax. Still, he said he does not want to see a future expansion on the county property tax, which would be similar to the 2021 voter-approved expansion of the Wheeler RETT.

“It opens up sort of a path to an even bigger tax for the future,” he said. “Good housing initiatives benefit our community at large. Limiting the near-term housing initiatives is not a good thing for Aspen. That being said, my feelings on the broad, unstructured, undefined nature of this outweigh the negative impacts.”

Guth stressed that he supports “good housing initiatives” but struggles with the broad nature of the ask.

McNicholas Kury said the county has identified some potential projects for the money. Pitkin has first right of refusal with Eagle County for a US Forest Service-owned parcel midvalley, the county plans to invest in the infrastructure and construct new units at Phillips Mobile Home Park, and the town of Snowmass Village has invited the county to participate in unit buildouts like Snowmass Center, she said.

“We’re not asking for a blank check. “We have specified that any projects we do will be in areas where services and jobs already exist,” she said. “There is detail in this ballot measure, and there are bounds to it on how we would apply the funding.”

Some taxpayers balked at the county’s ask to increase property taxes after 2023 valuations averaged a 54% increase in property value (after a lengthy appeals process) and tax bills averaged a 27% increase, but some homeowners saw their bills go much higher.

For Tony Rizzo, who owns a home in the Old Snowmass Little Elk Creek neighborhood and serves as their homeowners association president, voting down 1A had more to do with a lack of project specificity than financial impact.

“My confidence in them being able to spend the money properly is very low, because they have way too many things on the laundry list that they could spend the money on,” he said of 1A. “I would rather have them say, ‘OK, we’re going to look for an investment opportunity to buy property to build X number of units.’”

Rizzo liked the ballot question to a recent raising of dues in the neighborhood’s HOA, which will pay for a new filtration system in a pump house. With a specific project in mind, raising fees – or taxes – is justifiable for him.

Rob Goodwin is a Crystal River Valley resident of Pitkin County. He voted yes on 1A because in his job as fire chief of Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District, he sees firsthand how difficult it is to get paid and volunteer firefighters into housing near their jurisdiction. (Goodwin, like McNicholas Kury, spoke on his own behalf.)

He said the criticism of a broad ballot question is a valid concern, but he trusts Pitkin County to execute affordable housing initiatives well.

“Half of our people are either housing insecure or don’t live in our fire district,” he said. “Voters here get to determine the level of fire and EMS services that they want right through their vote.”

At the Oct. 22 work session, DJ Hughes, road and bridge manager for the county, said that just one out of 10 road and bridge employees live within the county, some commuting from as far as Parachute to maintain county infrastructure.

Pitkin County partnered with Aspen Valley Hospital to expand its property tax relief program this year from just eligible seniors to households who earn up to 500% of the federal poverty level, or $156,000 for a household of four. Participation was much lower than expected.

McNicholas Kury said the county is committed to finding a relief program that works for the local tax base, whether through an expansion of the new program or some other county mechanism like transferable development rights for deed restrictions.

“The last thing we want to see happen is our longtime locals have to sell their properties and move out of the community because they can’t afford to live here any longer,” she said.