The 2025 Colorado Ballot

Every year, the government likes us to vote to approve or disapprove of what it’s doing. Take the larger non-Colorado context out of it, and you might think it’s a government of the people for the people or something like that! As we typically do, this week we’re reviewing ballot measures impacting Longmont and Colorado at large, so you can understand the financial benefits and impacts thereof.

State Ballot Issues

The state has a very slim list of issues for public approval this year, and fortunately, all of them revolve around the same core issue: Colorado’s reduced standard deduction for high-income earners. For those in Colorado who earn more than $300,000 (as an individual or as a married couple), Colorado has capped the standard deduction previously in 2022 as part of a measure for funding free and reduced school lunches in K-12 schools in Colorado.

For reference, in 2025, the Federal Standard deduction for an individual is $15,750, or for a married filing jointly couple is $31,500, while heads of household have a standard deduction of $23,625. In 2022, a law was passed that capped the individual deduction at $12,000 and the married filing jointly deduction at $16,000. For those filing a standard return in 2025 with income in excess of $300,000, this already means a $165 increase in state income taxes for individuals and a $682 increase in state income taxes for married filing jointly households. The two ballot measures at the state level this year aim to enhance these figures.

Ballot measure LL is fairly straightforward. Because the program described above raised $12.4 million more than anticipated under Colorado’s TABOR law, the proposed ballot measure permits the state to retain the $12.4 million for school lunches. If the proposition is approved, then the state will retain that extra tax revenue. If not, then it will be refunded to those who paid the excess taxes, and will permit the original law to adjust the standard deductions in Colorado for those individuals affected by the law to reduce the potential overage in future years.

Ballot measure MM increases the existing 2022 law’s impact further. As mentioned above, the standard deduction under the law in Colorado is presently $12,000 for individuals and $16,000 for married couples. Ballot measure MM proposes to reduce those, respectively, to $1,000 and $2,000, which would increase the potential tax revenue from $165 and $682 to $649 and $1,298, respectively. Once again, this is all for the funding of free and reduced school lunches in the State of Colorado.

In the voting guide, Ballot measure MM comes with a helpful table to help illustrate the cumulative tax impacts of the proposal:

While the bill doesn’t affect the vast majority of Colorado taxpayers, it does create an interesting “cliff” that is uncommon in the tax code. Most tax code provisions are “progressive” in tax terms, meaning that they are generally more expensive or burdensome as your income increases, but in gradual proportions. A cliff in a tax code is rare because it creates the uncommon circumstance that there is a donut hole moment in which someone is better off not making the next dollar (e.g., making $299,999.99 is better than making $300,000 under the 2022 law and these proposals), and that loss is only overcome by a several-thousand-dollar increase to income.

Boulder County Colorado Ballot

At the county and city level, there are substantially more ballot measures being proposed. We’ll break them down here.

County Issue 1A proposes to continue an existing open space sales and use tax of 0.15% in perpetuity. It is otherwise set to expire at the end of 2030, so this provides the county with the same ongoing revenue to acquire, improve, manage, and maintain open space lands in Boulder County. In Longmont, the expiration of this sales tax would reduce the Longmont sales tax from 8.715% to 8.565%. This sales tax is one of four that currently fund the open space operations and ownership in Boulder County.

County Issue 1B proposes to instate a new sales tax of 0.15% for the purpose of providing mental health crisis, suicide prevention, mental health, and substance abuse counseling and services at the county level. The tax would last for 3 years, running from 2026-2029, at which time it may again come up for renewal or continuation. It’s notable that, as 1A before and 2A below it suggest, sales tax measures seldom go away. Rather, when they come up for renewal, even if the underlying issue is resolved, they are often either extended or replaced with an equivalent tax measure for another government or social need. While it seems unlikely that mental health issues will be resolved in the next three years in Boulder or the United States, it’s meaningful to consider the adoption of new taxes in the locality, and to think of them as potential costs in perpetuity rather than temporary measures (e.g., the FasTracks lightrail sales tax we’ve paid for for 21 years without a train in sight other than BNSF parking on Martin and Main every day.)

City of Boulder Issue 2A proposes to continue an existing 0.3% sales tax to fund community, culture, resilience, and safety items in the City of Boulder. These include road, bike, and sidewalk improvements, rec center enhancements, police and fire station improvements, and a 10% (0.03% of the sales tax) pool for non-profit funding grants. This tax measure is importantly linked to City of Boulder Issue 2B, which then proposes to use the sales tax to fund an increase in the outstanding debt of the county from $262 million to up to $350 million to fund such programs. Effectively, 2B asks for permission to borrow more money, and 2A grants permission to fund the payments on that debt long-term.

City of Lafayette Issue 2C asks voters for permission to borrow up to $74 million (with a total cost of no more than $120 million after interest is included) to fund renovations and expansions to the Bob Burger recreation center, constructing a new civic center to replace city hall, and repairing parks and local infrastructure. To fund this, it asks the residents of Lafayette to approve no more than $6 million in annual property tax increase through an increase to the mill levy.

In Summary

There’s not too much to vote on at the state or county level, and only in the city level do we see issues for Lafayette and Boulder (so easy enough for us Longmont residents!) The state-level issues are an extension and enhancement to the existing measures that increase taxes on high earners in Colorado, though notably, the threshold doesn’t increase with inflation, so more and more voters will be caught in the original 2022 measure and potentially the Measure LL and MM enhancements. The county-level issues aim to 00ontinue one of the four sales taxes in place to fund open space acquisition and operations, and to create new funding for mental health services. At the city levels in Boulder and Lafayette, it’s just about being able to take on debt and asking taxpayers to agree to the debt payments.

Whether you agree with the principles of any, some, or none of these is up to you. But now you have a bit more information to understand the financial impacts of the measures on the ballot this year.