Town Hall Presentation

[JOE ROWAN]

Commissioners:

Opening a dialogue about current financial status and budgetary constraints going forward is a welcome opening to a complex conversation.  I hope the session last night was viewed as a soft opening, since the material presented was painfully light on detail and context.

As you did, let's start with the priority dots.  I was issued five dots to distribute among five service areas and "additional revenue".  What exactly did you hope to learn from that exercise? Whether I desire undefined new taxes as much as I want clean water? Whether disaster preparation is less important than public safety or family & children services?  

There was scant mention of the fact property tax collections have increased significantly over the past 5 years other than to frame out the throttling effects of SB233, without which property taxes would be even higher.  Inflationary pressures across the board, lower federal support and increasing demand for services were reinforced.  But rather than discuss whether some services were expanded/created utilizing temporary federal stimulus funds, we were simply informed the cost of delivering services exceeds the current budget.  Therefore, we need to increase tax revenue.

Given the challenges the County has faced when seeking new taxes, perhaps the next iteration of this exercise will be a more sober presentation of how our County budget works, how priorities are established and why existing revenue is insufficient to fulfill resident expectations.  

The public has seen tax bills explode, so the perception is the County has plenty of money from which to serve its purpose.  You won't make much progress in your messaging if you continue to focus on one side of the narrative.

Respectfully,

Joe Rowan

Fort Collins

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joero...@gmail.com

970.691.4990

[John Kefalas]

Thank you for your honest feedback, Joe. Happy Independence Day.

John Kefalas (he/him) County Commissioner, District 1

Commissioners' Office 200 W Oak St | 2nd Floor PO Box 1190, Fort Collins, CO 80522-1190 W: (970) 498-7001 Cell:  (720) 254-7598 jkef...@larimer.org | www.larimer.org Public Record Notice: All emails to the Commissioners are subject to CORA. To opt-out of having your message displayed on our public email portal, include "Private," "Confidential," or "Deliberative" in the subject line. This designation excludes the message from the public feed but does not guarantee confidentiality under state law.