The haunting of Colorado Springs

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Seems things aren't so great in Colorado Springs these days:

This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops -- dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

"I guess we're going to find out what the tolerance level is for people," said businessman Chuck Fowler, who is helping lead a private task force brainstorming for city budget fixes. "It's a new day."

Uh, yeah. A new day with the social fabric being ripped apart. Like this:

Though officials and citizens put public safety above all in the budget, police and firefighting still lost more than $5.5 million this year. Positions that will go empty range from a domestic violence specialist to a deputy chief to juvenile offender officers. Fire squad 108 loses three firefighters. Putting the helicopters up for sale and eliminating the officers and a mechanic banked $877,000.

But you want some fixes? How about raising taxes? You know, because you have to pay for social services somehow, right?

Or not.

Because, you see, there's a truly moronic little thing called the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), and, as Bill Egnor explains at FDL, "[o]ne of the provisions of TABOR is that tax revenue cannot be increased except by the popular vote of the people, beyond the rate of inflation plus the rate of population growth." And things are worse when things are bad, as they have been of late, because "TABOR is based on the previous year, so if we have a recession like the one we are in, and revenues fall, then the next year the City or the State has to start from that lower limit. They can't stay where they were the previous year and to raise anymore revenue requires a popular vote."

Which is to say, TABOR effectively handcuffs elected officials from doing what they need to do, especially in a time of economic crisis, to raise revenue through taxation.

Which is why, in Colorado Springs, as elsewhere, they have to resort to selling police helicopters and cutting the fire department and shutting museums and doing away with health inspections at day-care facilities.

And if elected officials -- democratically elected officials -- seek to raise taxes, the anti-tax fanatics come out and destroy them.

Good times. Unless you live there, in which case, while your taxes might be low, your city is a nightmare. 

(Oh, and did you know that James Dobson's far-right Christian fundamentalist Focus on the Family is based in Colorado Springs. I'm not sure if there's a connection. I'm just sayin'.)