School District, RTA sent big election bills

New legislation drove up cost of election

Imagine getting what you thought was $30 in groceries and having the cashier quote you a price of $300. That’s how the RE1J school district and the Rural Transportation Authority felt when the got their bills from the county for the November election.

“It was quite a shock to get a bill from the county for $33,000 for our portion of the election when we were anticipating it would be closer to $3,000,” superintendent Jon Nelson told the school board at a meeting in December.
And $3,000 was all that the district budgeted for the election, even after their cost from the 2004 election was closer to $8,000.
This election was different because of a bill passed by the state legislature last year. That legislation required that counties report the results of the election for every precinct. For each of Gunnison County’s 15 precincts, there was a mail-in ballot, an early voting ballot, a ballot for the polling places on Election Day and provisional ballots.
“If they hadn’t passed that legislation requiring that I had to report by precinct, then I might have had just three styles of ballot. The ballot would have been the same for everybody, but because we had to report every precinct, it drove the cost up,” says county clerk Stella Dominguez.
In each election, the county fronts the cost of printing, mailing and ordering the ballots. Each mailed ballot gets an envelope and a secrecy sleeve. Then there is the cost of election judges ($16,200) and extra help for early voting places, the cost of legal notices for newspapers, and finally the postage to send out the mail-in ballots ($5,200).
In addition, the cost of postage increased this year and due to the size of the double-sided ballot and security sleeve, the cost of mailing each ballot increased by $1.
Dominguez says she took the total cost of the election, which was $67,548, divided it by the number of ballots and then multiplied that by the number of voters that cast a ballot for a certain district.
Because 9,489 county residents cast a ballot for the RTA’s ballot initiative and 9,899 votes were counted for the school’s bond question, they’re paying around $32,000 and $33,000, respectively.
Two other voting districts also shared the cost of the election, however it was a much smaller portion. Residents of Somerset voted on a Delta County school bond, because they send students to school across the county line, and Mt. Crested Butte also contributed, but just over $1,800.
Although the county had items on the ballot related to the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners, the commissioners don’t pay any of the costs outright. Dominguez said the county absorbs the peripheral costs of the election, like the overtime county employees put in during the election, the supplies needed at all of the polling places and the general organizational costs.
“In the intergovernmental agreement [IGA] that every voting district signs with the county, it is listed what each would be paying for,” says Dominguez. “It’s in their IGA and I couldn’t control the expenses if I wanted to and it’s going to be like this from now on.”
RTA director Scott Truex said representatives of the organization would be meeting with Dominguez to discuss the bill and possible payment options.
“No, we had not budgeted for a $32,000 election bill. We have a fund balance that could help us cover the cost, so we do have the money but we were hoping to put that into other things,” says Truex. “The entire RTA board will make the decision about how we handle it.”
If either the RTA or the school district had not put a question on the ballot, the other would have been stuck with a bill of more than $50,000. The school district was also surprised.
“We had budgeted $3,000 for the election and the bill was $33,000. That’s a teacher [salary]. So I called the district’s bond council and they said we do have the right and authority to pay for the election out of bond proceeds,” says Stephanie Juneau, the school district’s business manager.
The voting districts in Gunnison County weren’t the only places caught off-guard by the election costs generated by the new legislation. Dominguez said the issue was addressed at a recent meeting of county clerks from across the state.
She said other counties were willing to absorb some of the cost that the voting districts had accrued and that was one of the options that could be discussed at a meeting between the school district, the RTA and the county on January 27.
“I’ll have to go to the commissioners and see what they will do,” she says.