The lone Glenwood Springs ballot question, 2A, asks if a half-cent sales tax should be increased to a full-cent for the sake of road maintenance and projects.
The lone Glenwood Springs-centric question on the Nov. 5 ballot asks if sales and use taxes should be increased for the sake of addressing road infrastructure.
More specifically, question 2A asks if a dedicated sales tax will increase from one-half cent to 1-cent per dollar, a measure estimated to generate $5 million in 2025, according to ballot language. For each year following through 2044, the city would collect “whatever amounts are raised annually thereafter.” It would be an extension of a similar question posited in 2005 that set the collection rate at one-half cent, which expires in 2026.
Glenwood city officials believe that an increase in taxes would allow it to tackle virtually all of its road maintenance needs for the next two decades with a tax increase, as Public Works Director Matthew Langhorst said in a Zoom seminar in July, before the question was written.
“We could accomplish the goal, over the next 20 years, of bringing all the city streets up to where they need to be if that half-cent tax that expires in December of 2026 was actually renewed and extended to a three-quarter-cent sales tax,” Langhorst said in the seminar “Make it Make Cents,” reported on by the Aspen Daily News on July 24.
Of note, former Glenwood City Council member Tony Hershey recently filed a complaint to the Secretary of State, claiming that City Manager Steve Boyd, Public Information Officer Bryana Starbuck and Langhorst may have violated state statute by allegedly advocating for the question’s passage in an Oct. 16 article in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent. Hershey claims that “by conducting interviews refuting the opposition as public employees this is a violation.”
Boyd denied the assertion in an Oct. 23 news release.
“City staff take our responsibilities to comply with the Fair Campaigns Practices Act (FCPA) very seriously. City staff reaffirms that we take no public position for or against local ballot issue 2A,” Boyd said in the release.
“In the interview requested by the Post Independent, I believe staff operated with integrity to respond in accordance with FCPA to questions asked about ballot issue 2A. Providing factual information to the voting public is a responsibility of city staff and responding to inquiries is specifically allowable under the FCPA.”
Opponents believe that the city’s sales tax is already too high, and that the city could come up with the needed $3.7 million per year with existing revenue streams. Glenwood residents Gary Vick and Zac Parsons claimed this in a Sept. 27 column in the Post Independent — parts of which were refuted by Boyd, which led to the complaint.