Ed Bircham
A group that wants to phase out property taxes in Colorado Springs soon will be able to start collecting signatures to place a proposed initiative on the November ballot.
The city’s Initiative Title Setting Review Board cleared the language Thursday that will appear on petitions that the group plans to circulate before an Aug. 8 deadline.
“The title board is not to either approve or disapprove of the initiative,” City Attorney Chris Melcher said during the title board hearing.
“We don’t express any opinion as to the subject matter of the initiative but whether or not it simply meets the requirements to move forward,” he said. “I think it does meet the requirements to move forward.”
The group must collect 27,215 valid voter signatures, City Clerk Sarah Johnson said.
The group, led by 70-year-old Roger McCarville, who moved to Colorado Springs about 16 months ago, was represented at the hearing by retired businessman Ed Bircham, a member of the petitioner’s committee.
“I think this would stimulate the economy,” Bircham said. “It would help small business.”
City officials disagree, saying the proposed charter change would have devastating consequences and force the city to cut various services.
The city, which is grappling with an infrastructure backlog estimated at more than $1 billion, has a general fund budget of about $223 million. Property tax revenue is expected to bring in about $19.7 million this year.
Under the proposed ballot measure, property taxes would phase out in five years.
Bircham said he doesn’t believe the initiative would hurt the city.
“I think it would bring business and would help senior citizens, so that’s why I got involved with it,” he said.
Video from today’s title board hearing:
Colorado Springs has a new city clerk.
The mayor’s Communications Office issued the following press release today:
After a comprehensive two-month recruitment and interview process with over 97 applicants, Mayor Steve Bach is pleased to announce the hiring of a new City Clerk. Sarah Johnson will be joining the City of Colorado Springs effective Monday, June 4, 2012, following Council confirmation on May 22.
Ms. Johnson brings 18 years of elections experience with state government. Most recently she served seven years as the Executive Director for the Kentucky State Board of Elections. While in Kentucky, she successfully implemented enhanced transparency in the statewide voting process by improving the voting tools and resources for all Kentucky citizens. She considers herself a change agent whose core competencies are interpreting and implementing federal, state, and local laws; ensuring regulatory compliance; elections; record-keeping; and communicating and administrating policies and programs.
“We are excited to have Sarah join our team. She has an excellent background in government elections as well as superior credentials, I have great confidence in what Sarah will do for our city,” said Mayor Steve Bach.
Ms. Johnson has her Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and her Masters of Public Administration from University of Kentucky, Martin School of Public Policy and Administration. She has served as Secretary, Treasurer, and Vice President for the National Association of State Election Directors. She has also served as Secretary and Chair of the executive board of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) Standards Board. She will be paid a salary of $115,000 a year.
Former City Clerk Kathryn Young
The city of Colorado Springs has landed on a list of “Top Ethical Failures” in Colorado in 2011 because of its embarrassing confusion about campaign finance laws.
“Colorado Springs’ first municipal election under its new “strong mayor” system revealed a city incapable of enforcing, or sometimes even understanding, its own election laws,” Colorado Ethics Watch wrote in its fourth annual report of what it describes as ethical blunders.
“In fact, Colorado Springs government actively fought against transparency when it refused to enforce its own newly adopted rules,” the group said.
The group’s report, called Ethics Roundup: Top Ethical Failures of 2011, highlights “Colorado’s public officials, agencies and municipalities who have either committed ethics violations or shown significant lack of judgment that places their behavior in the top tier of ethical failures in the state in the past year,” the group said.
“Only by paying attention to the actions of our government agencies and officials, identifying ethical lapses, and shining a light on them will we be assured to have what Colorado voters have demanded – transparent and accountable public leaders,” said Luis Toro, director of Colorado Ethics Watch, said in a news release.
Ethics Watch said it “honed in on the largest controversies” to come up with the report.
“The most egregious of ethical failures took place in Adams County, in the Secretary of State’s Office, and in Colorado Springs, where multiple examples demonstrate a consistent lack of regard for ethics rules, laws and values,” the group said.
The read the full report, click here.
Colorado Springs collected $268,400 in application fees from medical marijuana businesses, according to the City Clerk’s Office.
If all the applications are approved, the city is poised to pocket $477,000 more in license fees.
Here’s the mathematical breakdown:
The city received 122 applications. That’s $2,200 a pop.
The applications covered 265 license types. That’s $1,800 a pop.
The license fees will not be due to the city until both the city and the state approve the applications, according to Lee McRae, a license enforcement officer in the clerk’s office.
He said the city is estimating that it will take between three and five months to vet all the applications.
Mayor Steve Bach says Colorado Springs will be in a world of trouble in a few years if sales and use taxes don’t increase substantially or the city doesn’t rein in expenses.
“Our expenses will exceed revenue, our reserves will be depleted or worse, we’ll have substantial negative cash flow, and we’ll be faced with further reductions in services and/or painful HR decisions,” Bach said in an email sent from his personal account.
The subject line of the Aug. 10 email was: “Update to Steve Bach’s Friends.”
Here is the full text of the email:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is to share with you an early personal observation of great importance to our City.
If over the next few years our sales and use tax collections do not grow substantially based on a resurging economy and/or we do not reign (sic) in our expenses for general City government (police, fire, planning, engineering, city attorney, city clerk, finance, budget, human resources, other general staff), our expenses will exceed revenue, our reserves will be depleted or worse we’ll have substantial negative cash flow, and we’ll be faced with further reductions in services and/or painful HR decisions.
The City budgeting process focuses on a plan for one year. Using this very near term horizon means that the City usually arrives at a solution for next year, one year at a time. What we must do going forward is to look at the longer term – the risks and opportunities before us – and shape our operating plan to be fiscally sustainable while delivering consistent, quality core functions and retaining valued employees. In other words, we must change the culture of City government, transform it to be smarter and leaner, all with a proactive, customer-focused orientation.
Below is a link to three current forecasts for our general City government revenue and expenses (excluding enterprises such as CSU, MHS, the Airport) over the next eight years if our current revenue and expense trends continue. The first forecast is by City staff, the second by Kurt Kofford, CPA, and the third by The City Committee. The forecasts are similar with this message: Our expenses will soon exceed our revenue.
These forecasts assume no increase in personnel or additional services in the future, do not take into account the $50+/- million per year we must spend over the next 20 years on deferred infrastructure replacements, increased cost of defined benefit (guaranteed) pensions if the retirement plans’ projection of 8% annual growth in their assets proves wrong or a range of external downside influences impact our finances (e.g., the Federal government downsizing of military budgets here or a next recession in perhaps 2014 or sooner).
We all want our City to be successful. That depends greatly on responsible fiscal leadership by our elected leaders. Now is the time for us to move to priorities-based budgeting and over the horizon planning to help achieve our full potential as a community. Please pass along this email to your colleagues and friends, and invite them to send me their email addresses for a direct copy of future emails. I’ll be in touch with you again soon.
The mayor’s race smashed previous fundraising records for a city race, with Steve Bach and Richard Skorman collecting more than $866,000 in campaign contributions between them through May 12.
Expect that number to increase, possibly reaching the $1 million mark, after the two candidates file their final campaign reports with the City Clerk’s Office June 16.
So, where did Bach and Skorman spend their money?
Voters who watch TV and listen to the radio know the answer. The two candidates clogged the airwaves with campaign commercials that started as early as March, but they also spent big bucks on consultants and other staffing costs.
Bach raised nearly $382,000 through May 12, according to his latest statement of contributions and expenditures.
Highlights from Bach’s campaign filings.
Most of Bach’s campaign war chest went toward TV and radio spots, though his campaign statements don’t specify how much he spent at individual TV or radio stations. Bach paid Rock Chalk Media, based in Grand Junction, $228,480 for multiple media buys.
Bach employed eight consultants at a total cost of $67,020.
The top earner was Littleton-based Starboard Group, a strategic management and development consulting firm that was paid more than $18,000. Bach’s chief of staff, Laura Carno, earned nearly $17,000, and Springs-based Chuck Broerman Consulting pocketed $14,250.
Bach, who blanketed the city with campaign signs, invested more than $20,000 in signs and materials to post them up. Bach placed five separate orders for signs from the Victory Store in Iowa at a cost of nearly $14,000.
Skorman reported nearly $485,000 in contributions in his most recent campaign filing, but expect Skorman to break the $500,000 mark when all is said and done.
Highlights from Skorman’s campaign filings:
The local television market cashed in on the mayoral race.
Skorman aired his TV ads on several stations, spending nearly $43,000 with Comcast; $38,000 with KOAA; $32,000 with KKTV; $21,300 with KRDO; and $19,500 with Citadel Broadcasting. Skorman spent the least amount of money – $8,300 – with KXRM, which is the local Fox affiliate.
Skorman spent at least $10,300 on newspaper advertising, including $8,921 with the Independent newspaper. Indy Publisher John Weiss took a leave of absence from the weekly’s news and editorial departments to work on Skorman’s campaign.
Skorman forked over about $33,500 on wages for campaign workers, with Alex Cobell leading the pack with nearly $16,000 in earnings since January.
Consultants played a big role in Skorman’s campaign.
Blakely + Co., a Springs-based marketing and public relations firm, received about $43,852 through May 6. Bob Schaeffer pocketed $25,498, and Denver-based 3PG Consulting LLC, which helps candidates fundraise, earned about $15,500 for its work.
Skorman also spent a big chunk of money to gauge voter opinions. Springs-based Luce Research received more than $35,000 for polling and other research.
City Clerk Kathryn Young sent election workers home for the night last month without completing the count.
City Clerk Kathryn Young said Colorado Springs voters started off “gung-ho,” returning 10,300 ballots after the first weekend that they had been mailed out.
The next two days generated big numbers, too, including a high of 16,553 returned ballots May 3.
But since then, voters have gone from gung-ho to ho-hum.
While voter turnout has climbed to 43 percent with 65,042 ballots returned so far, the number of returned ballots has decreased in recent days.
“Mondays have never been slow for us. Today was very slow,” Young said Monday.
It’s not unusual for there to be a spike in returned ballots at the beginning of an all-mail election and then at the very end.
But for Young, the slower pace is a concern because of what happened in the April 5 election.
Last month, voters flooded her office with an estimated 27,000 ballots on Election Day, which delayed the final count until the next day after Young sent all her election workers home for the night.
Young is encouraging voters not to wait until the last minute to return their ballots as part of a bigger plan to get all the ballots in the race between Steve Bach and Richard Skorman completed on May 17.
Here’s a breakdown of returned ballots:
May 2: 10,300
May 3: 16,553
May 4: 15,478
May 5: 6,279
May 6: 4,930
May 9: 6,217
May 10: 5,285
Mayoral candidate Richard Skorman has collected nearly a half-million dollars in campaign contributions, out raising opponent Steve Bach by more than $100,000, according to reports filed Monday with the City Clerk’s Office.
Skorman raised $472,406 through May 5 while Bach raised $368,261 through May 8.
Bach raised $83,948 in this last reporting period.
Skorman wasn’t too far behind with $78,832 in contributions.
Skorman has spent $369,000 total, including $75,600 in the last reporting period. TV ads, polling and staffing were among Skorman’s biggest expenses.
Bach has spent about $332,000 total, including nearly $73,000 in the last reporting period. The bulk of Bach’s expenses were TV ads and consulting services.
It’s difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison of the two candidates’ contributions and expenditures because they’ve been following different reporting deadlines.
In April, The Gazette asked Deputy City Clerk Cindy Conway whether the candidates had to file their reports five days before the deadline as Skorman has been doing or on the date stated under the city clerk’s election calendar, which is what the Bach campaign has been doing.
“The five days prior to filing deadline is appropriate,” Conway said in an email.
Conway provided the following citation from the Campaign Finance Act:
| CRS 1-45-108 (IV)(e) – Campaign Finance Act |
| (e) The reporting period for all reports required to be filed with the municipal clerk and such reports required to be filed pursuant to section 1-45-109 (1) (a) (II) and (1) (c) shall close five calendar days prior to the effective date of filing. |
Turnout in the city’s all-mail runoff election between Steve Bach and Richard Skorman, who are battling it out to become Colorado Springs’ first strong mayor, has climbed to 35.45 percent.
Of the 154,778 ballots that were mailed out to voters, 53,540 have been returned and scanned as of Friday, the City Clerk’s Office reported today.
In the April 5 election — when eight candidates were in the race for mayor — 88,960 ballots were cast.
The most ballots — 17,899 — have come from City Council District 1, the northwest quadrant of the city.
The least number of ballots — 9,519 — have come from District 4, the southeast quadrant of the city.
Voters in District 2, the northeast quadrant of the city, and in District3, the southwest part of Colorado Springs, have both turned in 13,108 ballots and 13,014 ballots, respectively.
