Gov asks for tax review

Hickenlooper wants the Colorado Supreme Court to look at amendments that are squeezing fire districts.

Coloradans’ property tax bills could change significantly if the state’s Supreme Court decides to answer three questions from Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Hickenlooper, who is set to leave office in a few weeks, announced Tuesday that he asked the court whether two different constitutional amendments about how taxes are calculated can coexist and, if they can’t, whether one of those amendments needs to be removed.

The request comes days after a Denver Post report on the dire financial straits the situation has created for fire, library and school districts across the state.

“While local governments previously absorbed their remaining losses, many have reached a point where they are no longer able to do so and still provide essential services,” according to the legal documents — called interrogatories — that Hickenlooper submitted to the court. “This situation has come to a head, and this court’s timely intervention is needed what the Colorado Constitution requires.”

The two amendments, both passed by Colorado voters, are called Gallagher and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. They were both intended to protect taxpayers, but TABOR changed the way Gallagher works, and Hickenlooper contends those changes created an “irreconcilable conflict in Col-

orado’s Constitution.”

“Superimposing the TABOR system on the system the Gallagher Amendment created has caused the system to collapse …,” according to Hickenlooper’s request of the court. “The effects have become so severe that they have started to cripple the ability of local government to provide essential services.”

The governor’s words echo what local fire, school and library districts have been telling anyone who would listen for years.

Gallagher guarantees residential property owners pay 45 percent of all property taxes collected in the state and commercial owners pay 55 percent. To maintain that split, the amendment created a formula that lets the residential assessment rate, or how much of your house is taxable, float up and down to maintain that ratio.

TABOR requires all tax increases be approved by voters, which means that formula can’t float up anymore without voter approval. And the kicker is that the statewide ratio for how much residential property taxes every county and local district can collect has been dropping for the last couple of years because of skyrocketing home prices on the Front Range.

“Local jurisdictions are at risk of receiving less and less funding when decreases in the RAR outpace local residential property value increases absent expensive TABOR elections,” Hickenlooper wrote.

The request to ask the state Supreme Court to decide whether TABOR controls Gallagher and whether that would mean Gallagher needs to be taken out of the constitution was sought by the Colorado State Fire Chiefs and the Special District Association of Colorado, which wrote sample interrogatories and gave them to the governor in mid-2017.

“We’re happy that the governor kept his promise to submit them,” said Ann Terry, executive director for the districts’ association. “These are important legal questions that need an answer.”

But not everyone was happy with Hickenlooper’s decision.

Dennis Gallagher, the former state lawmaker behind the Gallagher amendment, wrote a letter with other former lawmakers to the governor to reject the “radical” request to “wade into matters that should be determined by Colorado voters.”

One of the questions Hickenlooper is asking the court is where lawmakers should set the residential assessment rate if Gallagher were no longer the law of the land. That means the court could essentially let the state raise property taxes without asking voters.

“That to us is radical and an action that would send Colorado into a property tax revolt,” according to the letter.

The Colorado Supreme Court could also decide not to answer any of Hickenlooper’s questions. It has the discretion on whether or not to accept interrogatories from the governor.

If the court accepts the request, it will set a schedule for people to submit briefs and possibly even a time for oral arguments before reaching a decision, court spokesman Rob McCallum said. That process, if it happens, will almost certainly take longer than the few weeks Hickenlooper has left in office.