Town asking for input on sales tax increase to fund parks & rec

May will be the month for meetings

The town of Crested Butte will hold a series of public meetings during May to gauge the public’s opinion on implementing a sales tax increase to raise money to maintain the town parks. The first meeting will be held Thursday, May 8 at 6 p.m. at the town hall.

The Crested Butte Town Council has been discussing for months the best ways to increase funding to the town parks department. The council has drilled down the options and is leaning toward putting a 0.5 percent sales tax increase on the November ballot.
Currently any capital project in Crested Butte is funded through the real estate transfer tax (RETT) that brings in about $450,000 per year. Annual parks maintenance eats up about $370,000 of that. With a 0.5 percent increase in the town’s 4 percent sales tax, approximately $280,000 would be raised. The town is estimating it needs anywhere from an additional $250,000 to $500,000 annually to make up projected shortfalls in the town’s overall capital budget and deferred maintenance over the next several years.
Jake Jones, Parks and Recreation Department director, said earmarking the revenues raised in a new sales tax for parks would bring in a regional element to the equation: Residents, visitors and those living nearby but outside of the town purchase goods and services in Crested Butte.
The first meeting is meant to explain the rationale of the move to the public and get some feedback.
“The parks have grown but the resources to take care of those parks have not grown with them,” Jones said. “We have added parks and we’ve added programs and the programs have grown tremendously. But the money to run those things hasn’t moved at all. So there is a need to increase funding to support our parks, which will help free up money for the town’s overall capital fund, which will then allow us to get to some needed deferred maintenance and address a lot of other issues that are needed town-wide.”
Jones explained that the staff and council went through a series of work sessions to determine the various ways available to address the funding problem. No single idea had unanimous council support but an increase in town sales tax seemed to rise to the top.
“After the work sessions, the option that seemed most viable was some sort of sales tax,” Jones continued. “The $280,000 per year would go a long way toward the ongoing maintenance of our parks and allow us to address some issues that are long outstanding, such as the renovation of the tennis courts and the skate park. They are both near the end of their useable lives. The town simply can’t afford to replace them without grants, and grants are very much at the whim of the grantors.”
The initial public meeting will “be used to create a context of the situation so that the public will better understand why the town is having the conversation at all,” Jones said. “What are the needs? How do we think we can handle them? It’s important for people to understand why we are potentially asking for a tax increase.
Following Thursday’s open-house–style meeting, the town will host focus group meetings to target specific segments of the community. For example, they will talk to business owners, residents living in town and locals who reside outside town. A final open-house meeting will be held at the end of May.
“Then the council can decide whether to craft an ordinance that would draft ballot language that could then potentially be on the November ballot for folks to vote on,” Jones concluded. “Any tax increase must be approved by majority vote of the public. That would be the final step.”
Anyone interested in the subject is welcome to attend the meeting Thursday evening at the Crested Butte Town Hall.