 Hello, everybody. This is Inside the Ballot Box. I am Marcia Martin, and I am very honored to have here with me today Colorado Statehouse Speaker, Casey Becker, and she is here to talk with me and with you about, inside, about Amendment B to repeal the Gallagher Amendment. And I'm going to let Speaker Becker talk about herself for a few minutes, and then I'll start quizzing her. Okay. So thanks, Marcia, for having me. My name is Casey Becker. I'm the Colorado Speaker of the House. I live in Boulder, and I represent the House District 13, which is Western Boulder County, Gilpin, Clear Creek, Grand and Jackson counties. I am term limited. I'm done at the Capitol at the end of this year, and I've had the honor and privilege of representing, you know, Boulder County and other counties for the last seven years at the Capitol, and was honored to be the House Majority Leader for a couple of years, and then the House Speaker for a couple of years. Thank you, Speaker Becker. The Gallagher Amendment has been one of the problematic aspects of the Colorado Constitution for a long time, especially in its unholy interaction with the Tabor Amendment at times. But am I correct in believing that before the hiatus, the pandemic hiatus in the Colorado General Assembly this year, an amendment to repeal Gallagher was not on the table? So to give a little background, the state legislature this past year decided to refer a repeal of the Gallagher Amendment to the ballot. So it's going to be on the ballot this November, and not every measure that's on the ballot came through the legislature, but this one did. It passed with strong bipartisan support. In order to get on the ballot, it had to get at least two thirds out of the Senate, two thirds out of the House, and it did that easily. You know, there were discussions, there had been discussions for several years about whether the legislature would refer putting Gallagher a Gallagher repeal on the ballot, and it hadn't been introduced prior to the pandemic. We went out of session for about 10 weeks, starting on March 14th. When we came back into session, it was the end of May, and we decided that we would in fact move forward with the repeal of the Gallagher Amendment, and we did. And like I mentioned, we got strong bipartisan support for asking voters, should we repeal Gallagher? Do you believe that under different circumstances, less emergency circumstances, you would have had less support from the Republican Party on this measure? I think that there has always been bipartisan support for repeal of Gallagher. I think there are different reasons that folks on different sides of the aisle support the repeal. You know, one of the reasons I support it is even before the pandemic, the state property tax administrator came to the General Assembly and she is responsible for determining the assessment rates that our property taxes are based on every two years. And she told us that in all likelihood, the residential assessment rate would drop from 7.15 where it is currently, to about 5.8. And the budget impact to the state budget, specifically that K-12 education, is about $250 million from that drop. So the way this works is that the Gallagher Amendment controls how property taxes are assessed, what portion of any property you assess taxes on. The Gallagher Amendment was passed in 1982, and when it passed, commercial property was assessed at 29% and residential was at 21%. And specifically after the Tabor passed in 1992, the Gallagher Amendment, which it was initially assumed it would be able to fluctuate, could no longer fluctuate, it could only go down, it could never go up unless there was a specific vote of the people. So the property tax has been dropping and dropping and dropping ever since 1982. And the most recent drop, these are taxes that are collected at the local level by the county, but it is the county's share of K-12 education. And that amount keeps dropping and dropping and dropping and the state has to come in and backfill. And given that we would have to backfill an additional $250 million when we just this past session because of the pandemic, had to cut about $500 million out of K-12 education. And frankly, are probably going to be in really dire straits with K-12 for a while. I do think that there was renewed urgency to put Gallagher on the ballot. I see it that way myself. It seems to me that it's an economic rescue at this point and not a matter of expansion of services. We're just holding the line. Do you agree with that? That's right. So repealing the Gallagher amendment isn't going to increase or decrease your taxes. It's just going to frankly stop the bleeding, leave everything right where it is. The current residential assessment rate, which is 7.15, will stay in statute. It'll stay at 7.15. It's true that down the road, the legislature could do something else. They wouldn't be able to increase the assessment rate. They could decrease it. They could also decrease the assessment rate on commercial properties. And that's one thing I think some Republicans liked it because they think property taxes on commercial properties is way too high. In fact, commercial pays four times what a similarly priced residential would pay. So I think folks felt like this would stop the shift of the burden of property taxes on commercial, which at some point the consumer is paying for. And then it would sort of stop the constant decline of the residential assessment rate on the residential side. At some point, Colorado has the third lowest property taxes per capita in the country. And there's a point at which you can cut too much. And I think personally that's where we are. So this won't increase anyone's property taxes, but it will block things in where they are now and stem the decline. And the reason that's really important is because it's really impacting public service. I mentioned K-12 and the shifting burden of funding all of K-12 out of the state budget and how that creates tension with the other things, the state funds like higher education, human services, Department of Corrections, which is prisons and healthcare. But what's also happening is that because some of those property taxes are funding local services in some cities or counties, that might be a recreation district. It's your fire. In many cases, it's your police departments. It can be your water and sanitation districts. A lot of different entities are funded with these property taxes. And specifically in rural areas, it just keeps cutting any funding of those city or county services just down to the bone. And it's a real problem. As a municipal representative who's currently going through the budgeting process for the city of Longmont, I am all about that. So certainly the repeal of Gallagher would be a rescue for our city here in Longmont. In fact, in the budgeting process, not this last meeting, but the week before, the CFO showed us a slide. How much revenue do we have if Gallagher stays in place? How much revenue do we have if Gallagher is repealed? At this point, we're budgeting as though Gallagher stays in place because we have real conservative budgeting practices. But it would really be a boon to the city in terms of helping the economy recover and helping people who are deeply impacted by the unemployment that we've experienced and the business closures that we've experienced if Gallagher is repealed and that extra revenue comes to us. I found in publishing an explainer about Gallagher in the local paper that despite explaining, this is the role of the Gallagher amendment in assessing property taxes. These are the other factors that impact your property taxes. Despite explaining that in the column, in the comments, everybody says Gallagher is going to make my taxes go up. I'm going to vote no. I bet you're better at explaining the components of property tax and the reason that your voting no on Gallagher is not going to impact what happens with your property taxes. Sure. So if you have, if you're a property owner, the assessment rate is just the amount of the value of your property that you're going to determine how, what percentage of your property to tax. So if you have $100,000 property with a residential assessment rate of 7.15, it's saying we're only going to tax 7.15% of the value of your property. So in this situation, that's $7,150. That's not how much you own taxes. That's the percentage of the property that we're going to tax. And then once you know that percentage, you say how many mills and you multiply the mills times the residential assessment rate to figure out how much you own taxes. The residential assessment rate, like I said, dropped what used to be at 21%. Now it's at 7.15. If Gallagher doesn't pass, it will drop to 5.8%. Some people are saying rising property taxes because their property value is going up. Not the assessment rate. It may not be that the mills are going up, but the property values are increasing. And that's money that you can take to the bank. That's money that's actual value, what your property is worth. Gallagher won't change the assessment rate up or down. So it doesn't increase the value of your property or decrease the value of your property. It just says the percentage that we're going to charge, the percentage of your house that we're actually going to determine for what you owe for properties, that's going to stay stable. So it doesn't increase or decrease, it's just going to stay where it is. If it stays where it is, if your property value goes up, because you have an increase in value and property taxes are determined on your value, your taxes could go up. But your taxes could go up even if the residential assessment rate drops. So it just freezes rates at the third lowest level in the entire country. So it's freezing rates where they are and Colorado literally is the third lowest in the country. What's really important is to just say all this does is take it out of the Constitution. By repealing Gallagher, we're just taking this formula out of the Constitution. It's still in statute. And likely what would happen is down the road the legislature could say we should figure out a residential assessment rate in a more localized way, in a more regional way. Because right now there's one residential assessment rate for the entire state. And what happens is when you have big property tax, property values increasing in the front range, but that's not happening in a lot of rural communities, those rural communities aren't seeing property values increase, they're seeing their assessment rates decrease. And they have no way to increase their taxes. And it basically robs them of being able to fund just basic county services like fire and police, you know, water services, sanitation, rec centers, library districts, all those things. I was speaking with Representative Jonathan Singer earlier in the year and I asked him a little bit about this. And he told me that he felt that there were rural school districts that would actually fail if amendment B did not pass because they were already so near the edge. That's really a staggering thing to think about, isn't it? Given that all some of them are already on four-day school weeks, even before the pandemic. Sure. I think that, you know, what we're likely to see is rural fire districts fail, hospital districts, they're the ones that rely on this money, and each year their revenue is decreasing. So, you know, there's, there are no, they don't have a strong commercial base, they may not be well populated. So it's, you know, it's Gallagher's especially hard on the rural parts of our state. I think that this is a balanced approach. I think it is saying that let's just take Gallagher out of the Constitution and figure out how we could be doing an assessment rate that makes more sense for particular areas of the state. It just stabilizes it. I think it's fair to homeowners and, you know, then it means that there won't be such a huge impact to the public services that these property taxes go to fund. And I think there's another aspect of this that people need to consider, which is that we're very near the bottom of the states in terms of the property tax assessments. But at the same time, since Gallagher passed, the Colorado economy has grown out of proportion to most other states. I mean, you know, we've been a very successful state in the last 40 years. So that means that property taxes have become cheaper with respect to the incomes of the people who live here, at least in the urban areas where people are doing very well, where property is being developed and where property values are increasing. So if we'd like to have more unity of purpose among the different counties in our state, doing something that drives a little more revenue to the rural economies and putting less stress on their public services is one way to have that happen. Do you agree? I agree. You know, I live in Boulder and I represent the city of Boulder, but I also represent several rural counties. And it doesn't seem right that property value increases in the front range are decreasing the amount of revenue that a rural fire district, for instance, in, you know, East Camp, East Graham County, what they collect. It's not, they didn't lower their taxes. They didn't, they need that revenue to fight fires. They're literally, Gallagher's literally bankrupting these fire protection districts, you know, hospital districts, etc. So, so I think that Gallagher probably served a purpose back in 1982. I think it's outlived its useful purpose. I think we need to find a different way to, you know, perhaps on a regional basis, figure out how to assess property values. I think that's a good idea. Do you, do you think that that's going to be a focus of the next two or three general assemblies? It doesn't seem like a small job. So if Gallagher passes, it may be this year, next year, the year after. It probably will take a lot of work to figure out what the right next step is. It'll take looking at other states, a lot of broad stakeholder input. You know, it's going to be, you know, we need input from property owners on the residential side, on the commercial side, rural and urban to come up with a logical system. What we have right now isn't logical. It has, leads to a whole bunch of unintended consequences. And I think we can do better. I hope so. For a front-range person, a Boulder County person, and in this particular instance, I don't think it's a huge, hugely different between Longmont and the city of Boulder, although it certainly is different, as you pointed out, for Netherland and Grand County and some of those places. I confess that I hadn't thought of the fire problem, but someplace like Grand County, they're really at risk in terms of having to deal with a major wildfire, which is not something we, you know, we grouse here about it, the smoky air, but that's the extent to which it tends to affect us. But in for Boulder, for a front-range resident, what do you characterize as the main reasons why it's a rational choice, a self-interested choice to vote to repeal Gallagher? So, you know, eventually we're going to end up cutting out the residential assessment rates so much that we're not, you know, Colorado funds K-12 education lower than almost any state in the country, and it's going to get worse if we don't fix Gallagher. And we're really doing ourselves, our kids, our state, a disservice by continuing to decrease the amount of funding going to K-12 education. It doesn't matter if you have kids in school or not, you're just a weaker state, generally, if you don't have an educated population. Colorado has this paradox where we end up importing a lot of talent, but not doing as good of a job with our own people that grow up and live here. So I think that's the ultimate concern, certainly a concern for the decrease in public services. Boulder County generally has sort of fixed the Gallagher issue by when there's a school district mill levy. We have passed mill levies for Boulder Valley School District, and I'm not quite sure about St. Rain that says even if Gallagher decreases, we are going to adjust mills up in that situation so that we can always meet our bond payments. So not every other school district has done that. So in many respects, Gallagher won't affect one way or the other. The property taxes, at least that you're paying on for schools, because we've already said that the mills are going to go up if Gallagher goes down. So that may be one reason why people aren't seeing a difference here, because we've got to meet those bond payments, and that's the way we've adjusted here in Boulder County. So it's something to think about. That is not an approach that I'll pass in all the rest of the state, and it certainly doesn't apply to all of our property taxes here in Colorado or here in Boulder. It's something that we've done as sort of a fix to the issue, but again it's not available to the rest of the state, because it's just a harder thing to pass. But I think ultimately this self-interest is if you care about the K-12 system or you care about other public services in Colorado, then you can see how Gallagher is creating a real problem and that we need to come up with a better approach. Absolutely, and of course the school district fix does not apply to other human services that counties and municipalities fund. It doesn't apply to early childhood education, pre-kindergarten education, and because the pandemic in particular puts so much stress on the early childhood and childcare systems, municipalities are having to spend more and more on that. Certainly Longmont is. There's been a big increase in Longmont's budget about that, and there's not much increasing in city budgets this year. So that's a big deal, and it's a big deal for businesses because their employees can't work if they don't have childcare. So there are just so many unintended consequences to what sounds at first like a good deal, which is that your property taxes tend to have downward pressure on them. But I have always said that the economy of scale that you get by paying taxes for essential services is one of the best bargains in local government. So yeah, okay. I'm glad you agree, Speaker Becker, because this is your show. And since I am an interested party on this one, I'm tending to talk too much. But I mean, I'm glad you're interested. Gallagher is one of the more complicated ballot measures. It's on the ballot this year. There are 11 total ballot measures, so there's a lot to parse through. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about Gallagher. This is one that's really in our best interest, I think, to pass. So it's complicated, right? You vote yes to repeal, which is easy to get backwards, but vote yes on Amendment B. And do you have a vote the whole ballot pitch that you'd like to give? You know, gosh, there are a lot that I could spend time talking about. You know, I'm a strong proponent of the nicotine tax. That's going to help us with funding K-12 and early childhood education. We had to cut so much out of K-12 this year, and we'll probably have to cut again next year, that it's really going to help stop the bleeding. And as having a kid in middle school, I'm really concerned that there's a lot of vaping in our middle schools. Vaping is not taxed the same way as cigarettes. This will fix that. I think if you make vaping more expensive, you're going to have fewer preteens and teens starting to smoke. And that's going to yield results down the road because, you know, smokers are an impact to the health care system in Colorado. So one thing I'd really like to urge is just a yes vote on Prop EE. Thank you, Speaker Becker, for saying that, especially since that's one inside the ballot box didn't get to. So I'm very glad that you said that. I do want to thank you very much for joining me today. The people of Longmont will appreciate it. Next week, people, you should be receiving, or this week by the time you see this, your ballot should be appearing in your mailbox. And I would like to ask you to please vote the whole ballot, even though it seems long and it is long. And even though a lot of things down at the bottom are boring, they matter a lot to your state, to your city, and to democracy. So vote the whole ballot, please. Thank you, Marcia, for having me. It's been fun. Great. I'm glad you enjoyed it as much as I did because it has been great. And goodbye. Thank you for being here and maybe we'll do it again sometime. Sounds great. All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.