County commissioner Douglas Bruce held his last town hall meeting at the Falcon fire station Dec. 8.Bruce, who will be sworn in as representative for Colorado House District 15 on Jan. 14, said he plans to continue to hold town hall meetings as a state representative. “I will still be looking out for the best interests of all of the people of the state,” Bruce said.Bruce said he plans to introduce a bill to require statewide distribution of a printed copy of the U.S. Constitution to graduating seniors.He then talked about the county’s finances and said that the budget crisis is a ploy to get voters to increase taxes. “Governments always use crises to take more power. Then when the crisis is over, they never give back the power,” Bruce said.”Shutting down county buildings one day a week is a TV photo op to convince voters to vote for tax increases. I voted against the shutdown. We are here to be public servants, not to manipulate voters into voting for a tax increase.Sales tax revenue failed to meet projections starting in February, but the county didn’t revise its spending until October. “If they had told us in June, the spending cuts would have been much less painful when spread over six months instead of one,” Bruce said. He also said the projections were “unrealistic to begin with.”Bruce also cited three programs the county should cut back on or cut out: the Colorado State University Extension program – the program receives $150,000 from the county (cut back from $300,000), the 4-H program contributions and $209,000 to the county detoxification center.County assessor Mark LowdermanCounty assessor Mark Lowderman addressed the audience as well.Lowderman said the state requires each county to reappraise all real property every odd year. For El Paso County, that’s 260,000 properties.”We measure the effect of time on real estate,” Lowderman said. “We do it by creating a database of all sales in the county since the previous reappraisal. Usually, that’s about 16,000 to 17,000 sales. Then we stratify the database by neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods that have similar characteristics and find the median sales price. We let the data tell us what to do.”This type of mass appraisal doesn’t work for all properties, Lowderman said. A property may have water damage or deferred maintenance, or it may back up on a busy street.”There is no way in the state of Colorado to appeal a property tax. Your only recourse is to challenge the valuation of the property,” he said.His office also factors building permits into their reappraisals, he said. “If you take out a permit for a detached garage, we’ll probably send out a letter asking about the size,” Lowderman said.The assessor’s office has recently experienced a 16 percent reduction in staff, and the remaining staff is “using the construction slow down to catch up on a backlog of alterations,” he said.Bruce asked Lowderman if there is any risk of a property being appraised at a higher value when the reappraisal is questioned by a property owner. Lowderman said that rarely happens.”My office has one appraiser for the rural areas of the county. It takes that appraiser five years to canvas the entire area,” he said. “If we find something that was built years before, we do not back tax it. We don’t have the staff to drive around looking for things.”Adding square footage of living area is what really adds value to a house. A $5,000 deck would only add $20 per year to a tax bill.”One audience member asked about the housing outlook. “There are 3,000 houses in foreclosure in the county, and they are still building. What is this going to do to property values?” he asked.Lowderman said the current situation is not even close to the situation in the early 1990s. “Back then, the builders kept building because they had a deal with the banks where the banks bought whatever the builders built,” Lowderman said. “We have slowed way down.”Bruce said that anyone who buys a house for less than the assessed value should ask the assessor to take that into account when calculating the assessed value.Bruce brought up the subject of the business personal property tax. “Everything that is portable that a business owns is subject to the business property tax,” Bruce said.TABOR business tax credits have reduced the number of El Paso county businesses subject to the business personal property tax to about 27,000 accounts, Bruce said. “We have huge irrational business taxes that discourage companies from coming here.””The state requires the county to audit a certain percentage of businesses each year,” Lowderman said. “It costs the state $75 to process a business tax return in order to collect $3 in taxes. It should be repealed.”Lowderman said before it closed down its operations in Colorado Springs, Intel’s business personal property tax far exceeded their real estate property tax and may have been a reason for their departure.He also touched on the senior homestead exemption and the disabled veteran homestead exemption.”I think it is unprincipled to pick off people for special tax treatment. It is all part of a strategy to peel off opposition to tax increases,” Bruce said.Candidates speakAt Douglas Bruce’s town hall meeting on Dec. 8, Ken Bull, Republican candidate for Bruce’s soon-to-be-vacant county commissioner seat, talked about why he is a candidate.”I know a lot of the games they play. They let the roads go in order to get the PPRTA (Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority) tax,” Bull said.”I will never vote to put a tax increase to a vote [of the people]. Elections cost money. The government grows far too fast, faster than the economy. You deserve the right to spend the money you earned,” Bull said.A long-time resident of Calhan, Bull opposes eminent domain, the toll road and zoning changes that take away people’s property rights.Bull said Highway 24 is the most used two-lane highway in the state. “Truckers use it as a short cut. We have had a lot of fatal accidents on it,” he said. If elected, Bull said he would work to improve Highway 24.Peyton resident and Republican Michael Burton also is vying for Bruce’s seat. “The government is not efficient with the money they already have. I will never agree to raise taxes and will never vote to put a tax increase on the ballot,” Burton said.Burton said he worked for Raytheon as a consultant on a government project in Alaska. “When I finished the project early and under budget, I was told never to do that again,” Burton said.
