The Only Certain Thing

This morning, reading the news, I was bemused to see a headline: “Tax Measure Would Fund Police, Fire Staffing, in Longmont”. I was bemused not because there’s anything wrong with that headline in and of itself, but because it niggled a part of my brain. Didn’t we just do this? Well, it turns out, sort of. What I was being reminded of by my subconscious was that I’d sat in a Longmont Chamber public policy meeting back in 2017 and watched as a member of the Longmont Police Department explained their ask for a sales tax to help fund additional law enforcement officer staffing. I remember being particularly sold on the measure at the time because, answering a question from the audience, the department representative explained that most calls being answered by the Longmont Police Department were being handled solo, and that concerned me, because officers are at greater risk when handling a call by themselves and in turn, are more likely to have to use more significant measures to handle dangerous suspects or problems.

That ballot measure passed (Ballot Issue 2H in 2017), raising the City of Longmont sales tax from 3.275% to 3.53%, which was estimated to bring in $6.2 million in the first year and then to adjust accordingly going forward. The measure at the time was stated as explicitly going to fund additional officers for traffic enforcement and sexual assaults, emergency dispatchers, firefighters, and other personnel roles. In other words, $6.2 million and then some for the purpose of increasing public safety staffing. Fair enough! And the argument at the time went on to point out that since the preceding public safety tax passed in 2006, the population had grown by about 5,000 in the following decade, but funding for law enforcement had not increased at pace.

So here is where I find myself scratching my head, and why I bring it to my reader’s attention. In 2006, a sales tax was passed. Sales taxes generally reflect the underlying cost of goods, meaning that revenue from the sales tax increases commensurate with inflation for goods subject to sales taxes. This means that the tax would have expanded with the goods-buying population (e.g., everyone living in and visiting Longmont) from 2006 up to 2017 when the next sales tax was proposed. Naturally, some of that inflation-adjusted sales tax goes to fund the inflation-adjusted wages of the people working within the department of public safety, and fair enough! I’m the son of two law enforcement officers, and I have no quarrel or issue with seeing hard-working public servants being paid a market rate and having their wages increase as the cost of living increases.

But when the sales tax was then proposed in 2017, the idea was to “catch up” the difference in the demand in calls for service (“calls to 911”) covered by the 2006 sales tax measure, and I voted for it accordingly. Yet, over the ensuing seven years, sales and use taxes have collectively increased from $67.4 million in 2018 to $106 million in 2025, a growth of 57.27%, during which inflation has only increased by 31.22% cumulatively. In the meantime, per the city’s own crime index, the crime rate per 1,000 people in Longmont is down to twenty-nine per thousand from thirty-two per thousand five years ago. All of which is to say that after two ballot measures in the past two decades, taxes have increased on the premise of a growing population, the population has increased, the staff count in public safety has also increased, the tax revenue taken in by the city has outpaced inflation, and crime is down.

So why is the city once again looking at increasing the public safety tax by an additional 0.24% sales tax and an additional 4.06 mill levy on property? By all available metrics, revenue to fund public safety has outpaced the general costs of doing so when measured by inflation, and public safety has improved on a per capita basis. Yet the proposal that has just gone through city council suggests that the city will need an additional $96.62 million dollars over the next decade, above and beyond what it will already receive from existing public safety taxes.

I raise this as an example. Not because I have any objection to the proposed sales tax on its own, nor what it’s used for, nor for the more detailed and nuanced arguments being made for it, should you decide to go read them. I raise this as an example without objection to the specifics of the example, but to point at an observation I’ve long held in my time serving in a public policy role in the Longmont community: taxes, unlike gravity, go up but do not come down, in Boulder County. Every new tax proposed is brought to the table with an expiration date as part of the sales pitch, and every tax that comes up for expiration is proposed to be replaced with a new tax to take its place; after all, it “won’t cost us any more than we’re already paying.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of living in Boulder County is already 40% higher than the national average. That datapoint combines factors like sales tax, property tax, cost of real estate, and everything else that goes into living in a beautiful place like Longmont. It’s noteworthy, then, that, but for the privilege of living 33 miles west of Longs Peak in the home of Lefthand Brewing Company and Abbott & Wallace Distilling, you have to spend 40 cents more on every dollar you earn to be here than someone does in a place like Dallas, Phoenix, or Charlotte.

But as noted, I raised this as an example. Also on the ballot at the state and local level is a proposal to increase the state income tax and to make it a graduated tax, an upcoming proposal to implement a sales and/or property tax to fund early childhood education, and a variety of other proposals to increase or otherwise implement sales and/or property taxes. Any one of these proposals in isolation is probably valid and looks to fund needs of genuine consideration. However, there comes a point at which skepticism becomes a bit healthier when it comes to the argument for any tax measure in isolation. Each tax unto itself is a marginal and nominal cost; they are always shown as being a mere few cents on the hundred dollars spent, or a mere few dollars on the thousand dollars of property value.

There’s an old saying: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” I would like to append a notion to that expression: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes, except that taxes shall not die.” But there’s an additional thought to that: …the taxes we vote for. It’s noteworthy that there are many state issues that need funding. Colorado has experienced a billion-dollar deficit in highway funding for well over a decade at this point. More than twenty years after passing a sales tax to fund a light rail train from Denver to Longmont, Longmont has no train, but now has the glimmer of hope that a completely unrelated commuter rail project will suddenly run through Longmont and provide the passage originally intended.

And there is the point.

Each individual gets to determine for themselves what their needs are, and which can be provided for by their own means and for which they might need help. We can’t watch for fires and burglars at all hours of the day, so we outsource our general fire safety and law enforcement security to fire departments and police departments. We cannot work full time and teach our children full time, so we send them to public schools, which we pay for through property taxes. We cannot maintain the roads individually, nor do we want to pay a toll every time we roll out of our driveways, so we append a sales tax to gas and utilities in order to fund our streets and highways.

Some benefits are individualized. Those with less receive more, those with more receive less. This is the way of a progressive tax system and a social safety net. But voters reviewing tax measures must often ask a question: how much of this problem is solved by money? There’s a real-world example that states like Kansas have run themselves into the ground effectively by reducing taxes by too much and leaving critical program funding lacking, but there’s the inverse example that societies that have increased taxes to the maximum extent possible (e.g., the total removal of private property and income altogether) have figuratively buried an estimated 20-100 million people alive in the last century. Neither is desirable.

You can vote to fund an additional sales tax on top of the first two for public safety or against it. You can vote for early childhood education, a graduated sales tax, or any number of other measures that might make their way through the ballot box this year and in future years. You have every right and reason to express your beliefs and preferences as you see fit. I felt it only interesting and bemusing that today, I experienced tax déjà vu in reading the local paper. I’m not decided on whether I’ll vote for or against that measure this time or next time, or any other for that matter. But today, it felt worth thinking about: do we get what we already pay for? Do we need to pay more for what we already have?

Food for thought, perhaps.