Election bills reduced

Changes cut RE1J, RTA bills nearly in half

After Gunnison County clerk Stella Dominguez recalculated the cost of November’s election to include the state and county portion, local voting districts saw their election bills cut in half.

 “I was losing sleep over the bills for the school district and the Rural Transportation Authority (RTA), so I started calling around to other counties and asked them to fax their billing records to me. The billing for elections is standardized to a point, but every county does it a little differently,” says Dominguez.
What she found was that other counties were including the state and county ballot questions in their calculations for the cost of the election, while Gunnison County had not. Instead of dividing the cost between just a couple of the voting districts, Dominguez was able to include nearly 10,000 more voters that had voted only on state and county issues.
Dominguez says she took the total cost of the election, which was $67,548, divided it by the number of ballots and that cost was tallied for each voter that cast a ballot for a certain district.
The recalculation reduced the cost per ballot from more than $3 to $1.69. For the school district and the RTA, the savings added up to around $16,000 each.
 “In the future, before we put a question on the ballot for an election we’ll go through what the exact cost of the election will be. But for now we’re very happy that the bill was cut almost in half,” says RE1J superintendent Jon Nelson.
District business manager Stephanie Juneau said she has already put the check in the mail, and was very happy to see it go.
 “I’m just happy to have the bill off my desk,” she says.
Although the RTA has not received the revised invoice from the County, RTA director Scott Truex says, “I think the RTA has reached a fair compromise with the county. The board will get a chance to comment on the invoice, but I’m anticipating that everyone will approve of paying the reduced bill.”