The one thread that linked the otherwise mixed message from this fall’s election is that the voters did not want to pay more – for just about anything. What that might mean down the road is what to consider next.
The big issue for the city of Durango is the passage – by more than 2-1 – of the bond measure to allow the city to rebuild its sewer plant in Santa Rita Park. Whether that was in response to the city’s scare tactics about how much rates would rise without the bond or indifference to the plant’s location is unclear. Both were probably at work.
What is perfectly clear is that by forgoing this chance to relocate the sewer plant, the city and its voters have guaranteed that the wastewater-treatment plant will stay where it is – right in front of the whitewater park, right across from the Dog Park, right next to where Southwest Colorado’s two major highways come together, and right by the train station – forever. By the time it needs to be replaced again, there will be no alternative. This was a blown opportunity.
The city deserves credit for looking at alternative sites. In response to critics on the Utilities Commission and others in the community, the city ended up putting more energy into that than it likely would have otherwise.
For La Plata County, the rejection of the mill levy increase has to be qualified with “for now.” Barring a return of the gas boom, which nobody foresees, the county will have to ask for more money. The math is straightforward and unavoidable. County government has responsibilities it must fulfill and doing so costs money.
That this measure failed by such a slim margin is encouraging, especially in that the commissioners apparently put little effort into selling it. Another try, with more energetic support, could work out. Next year?
Proposition BB was a no-brainer and the voters saw it as such. Colorado legalized marijuana with the explicit intent of taxing it heavily. The voters approved that tax, both in voting to legalize pot and then again in approving a separate ballot measure specifically about the tax.
The tax, however, ran afoul of a bizarre provision in the so-called Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, and to keep the money, the state needed this vote. It passed with 66 percent of the vote statewide and 72 percent in La Plata County.
Proposition BB does not violate the “voters did not want to pay more” premise for the simple reason that, media attention aside, most Coloradans do not pay the pot tax. For the majority of voters, this is a tax on other people.
And those other people are happy to pay the pot tax because they know that while marijuana may not be addictive, money is. A few years of the state raking in millions of dollars – $66.1 million this year – and it will never be banned again.
