Vote ‘ yes’ to keep high taxes from killing small businesses
The bipartisan effort to repeal the Gallagher Amendment is a flicker of bipartisanship in an election season dark with rancor.
How in the world could so many folks with such different political worldviews agree on something as big as repealing the state’s notorious Gallagher Amendment?
It’s because Colorado’s bizarre and complicated 1982 property tax law is that badly broken and hurting so many.
Gallagher is a sledgehammer on small businesses, forcing 20% of Colorado’s property owners to pay 55% of Colorado’s property taxes. It imposes higher taxes on small businesses and ranchers, and it is squeezing local funding for firefighting and sheriff departments, for local schools and for local safety net services for the developmentally disabled.
Republicans back repeal of the Gallagher Amendment because the convoluted amendment destroys good paying jobs.
Gallagher, whose namesake is Denver Democrat Dennis Gallagher, and whose most ardent supporter is former Boulder Speaker of the House Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, has always been a none- toosubtle way of taxing the pants off Colorado’s entrepreneurs and businesses.
Because of Gallagher, your neighborhood restaurant and auto shop pays a property tax rate 400% higher than all the rest of us. If Gallagher isn’t repealed, next year the state’s businesses will pay a rate 500% higher.
The Gallagher Amendment’s dirty little secret is that it eviscerates local control, by forcing counties, school districts, and local fire districts to impose an uber- punitive rate of taxation for any local property tax increase it seeks. If a local community wants to increase a mill levy to pay for a new fire station or school, Gallagher mandates that the community tax business, manufacturing, and ag property at a rate four times higher than everyone else. A
town can either penalize business with higher tax rates or not add that wing on to the school. Gallagher is at war with local control.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether we should pay higher taxes, but the Gallagher punishes small businesses, ranchers, and manufacturers in a punitive and mean- spirted way.
In a world where thousands of small businesses are on the economic ropes due to COVID- 19, the head of the National Federation of Independent Business, Tony Gagliardi, says Gallagher will cause bankruptcies.
“With everything going on in the world, Gallagher will be the end of a lot of small businesses,” Gagliardi said. “There’s just no doubt: if it’s not repealed, we lose more shops, restaurants and small businesses.”
Leading Democrats, for their part, are rallying to the cause of repealing Gallagher because they see its attacks on small business — especially first- time business owners in lower income neighborhoods. They are also rallying to the cause of Gallagher’s repeal because of the irrational shifts and cuts it will impose on local schools, local firefighters, and local hospitals.
The worst par — the Gallagher Amendment pits Coloradans against one another. Gallagher’s impacts are felt most painfully in rural Colorado, where the combination of slow- growing residential values, lack of largescale commercial properties, and a mismatch of rural economies to Gallagher’s Denver- centric formulas are forcing higher taxes on job providers and dislocating funding for basic local services — fire, sheriffs, schools.
But as State Senator Chris Hansen, a Democrat and key author of Gallagher repeal, points out, these challenges extend beyond rural Colorado. “Gallagher is particularly damaging to poorer communities, no matter where they are. Gallagher traps them in a cycle of malicious taxes on small businesses and declining local services.”
Should a daycare operator in Denver or a restaurant owner in Aurora be forced to carry more and more of the state’s property tax burden while a second home owner from California and New York get a tax cut on their vacation property in Aspen or Vail?
These are the indefensible irrationalities of Gallagher. No matter your political party, they powerfully argue for its repeal.
With repeal, the many irrationalities of Gallagher are gone, and thanks to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, property tax rates for homeowners and for business will stay at their current rates. The legislature or governor cannot increase these rates. Only the voters can. This vital safeguard makes Amendment B a win- win- win. Repealing Gallagher protects homeowners by ending punitive state and local taxes hammering small business, and forestalls impending cuts to vital local services.
Please join me in voting ‘ yes’ on Amendment B.