Letter published 7/26/09
in the Boulder Daily Camera

LET THE STATE STATUTES WORK

Does the Town of Superior need home rule? Here are a few things that voters there might consider:

There's nothing under the statutory system that keeps people from participating in their local government, neither is there anything that prevents a municipality from determining its own destiny.

Getting out from under the protection of the state statutes is not always good for the ordinary citizen-taxpayer. For example, the state specifies a debt limit that home-rule municipalities can simply ignore.

Home rule opens the door to proposing many new taxes on the people, such as occupational taxes and privilege taxes that cannot even be considered in a statutory municipality.

Home rule tends to transfer power away from elected officials who can be held accountable directly by the voters into the hands of bureaucrats who, of course, are not elected.

One of the supposed virtues of home rule is that it allows a municipality to collect sales taxes directly instead of through the Colorado Department of Revenue. What is not mentioned, however, is the offsetting cost to local taxpayers of hiring additional personnel in city hall to take on this extra burden of collection and enforcement already performed by the state for free. To say the state makes mistakes but town halls do not, is being disingenuous.

As more people in towns across Colorado find out more about home rule, they are saying "no" and sticking with the state statutes. Recent examples: Erie, population 13,441, soundly rejected home rule not once but twice; Frederick, population 7,370, said no to home rule in 2005; Estes Park, population 5,921, is the latest community to reject home rule. And they all seem to be functioning quite nicely without it.

I have no dog in this fight. My only interest here is in good government.

P,