Trevor Phipps
After months of heated debates, the ongoing fiscal feud between the Woodland Park City Council and RE-2 School District will end up getting decided by official referees.
And in this case, the referees will be the voters of the city. In a move that surprised some government observers, the council has opted to put the question of whether or not an earlier approved sales tax increase for the school district should be repealed onto the November ballot.
As referees of the issue, residents will most likely be throwing their share of penalty flags and may want to make sure they have strong enough whistles to handle the contest.
Several months ago, the issue of the sales tax increase to help the schools, a proposition that was approved by voters in 2016, started to hit center stage when council members began to think that there was not enough transparency for how the money was being spent.
In a recent council meeting, an hour-plus of public comment occurred, allowing citizens to give their opinions during the public hearing. Before the public spoke, Woodland Park Mayor Kellie Case asked that the crowd not to repeat comments made by other speakers at the public hearing.
However, while the residents speaking may not have repeated each other during the public hearing, most of the points brought up had previously been mentioned and rehashed publicly over the past several months.
On one side, the school board supporters contend that removing the sales tax increase could hurt the students of the district. They said that due to the financial state of the district currently, it is a poor time to ask the voters to repeal the tax.
On the other side of the spectrum, many speakers questioned how the school board and district is spending the tax money. Many argued that times have changed now since 2016, and that the voters should be able to decide again whether or not the sales tax should be increased for the schools.
After public comment, Councilman Jeffrey Geer reminded the crowd that the intent of the ordinance is to put the issue to a vote. It doesn’t mean that the tax would automatically be repealed. If the voters decide to keep the tax increase, they (the city and school board) have already signed a new and updated Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) that includes more detailed reported regarding where the money will be spent.
“I’m struck by the certainty (from the public) that the tax will be repealed,” Geer said. “It just makes me wonder that if it is so certain that it will be repealed, it just makes me think, ‘Should it (the sales tax hike) even be there to begin with?’”
During the initial discussion on this issue several weeks ago, every council member voted “yes” for the public hearing request regarding the proposed ordinance except Councilman George Jones and Mayor Case. After the public hearing, Councilwoman Carrol Harvey joined the nay-sayers on this ballot pan, arguing that it should not be put on the Nov. ballot.
In the end, the council voted 4-3 to place the question to repeal the 1.09 percent sales tax increase on the city ballot in November. Case, Harvey and Jones all voted “no.”
This vote is bound to increase tensions between the current school board and the city council. Relations between the two entities have soured in recent months.
School Board President Blasts Council Decision
According to Woodland Park RE-2 School District President Mick Bates, the issue arose in the beginning of the year when the council asked for a work session to examine figures, telling them where the sales tax dollars were being spent. During the special joint work session, the school board furnished a pie chart explaining where funds were allocated, and the city council showed immediate backlash, Bates said.
“They said, ‘That was unacceptable,’ and that we needed to be more transparent,” Bates explained. “In numerous meetings, I reminded them that since 2016 this has been reported via pie charts. We were not trying to pull a fast one, we were just following past reporting. But they were pretty incensed about that, they just thought it was too simple.”
The council then asked for more transparency and detail in the reports, and the school board agreed. But then Bates said he felt that the council just kept raising the bar when they wanted to change the IGA from yearly reporting to quarterly and then monthly reports. But the school board still agreed and signed the amendments.
“If a person stands back and looks at this, there was nothing we were going to do that was going to satisfy them,” Bates said. “I think there are people on the city council that have it out for the school board and it didn’t matter what we did, they were going to run interference.”
Bates said he still believes that some members of the community desire to punish the school board by taking away the city sales tax increase. But, if the sales tax increase gets voted out, the children of the district could suffer.
“What will happen if this gets voted down is we are going to lose about $3.2 million in funding,” Bates said. “People said, ‘You better not let it affect the kids.’ Well, there will have to be some cutting of expenses. People have made noise about saying we just have to cut salaries, but that is the last resort because we have just spent the last three years getting the teachers up to about a 15 percent increase in salaries. To turn around and take some of that back, that is going to affect a lot of morale, and it will have a long-term impact on the kids. There is no way you can take money away from the school and not have it impact the students.”
