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It is customary to begin any speech with some humor. The problem with speaking to a group of county assessors is that I don't know any good assessor jokes. To be honest, I don't know any clean assessor jokes, either.
I tried. I talked to Bob Ewegen at the Denver Post
yesterday. Bob's the assistant editorial page editor, and
the man who said something I repeat often: Journalism is
the art of relentless oversimplification.
Bob is also the only other member of CARP -- Colorado Association of Red-bearded Pundits. We've kept the name even though our beards aren't exactly red any more. We need to because our patron saint was a red-bearded fellow, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman is famous for his 1864 march through Georgia in the Civil War, but that's not why he's our patron saint. Sherman was an excellent writer whose orders were clear and whose memoirs were more than readable, but more than that, he got to do something that every editor has wanted to do. On two occasions, he issued orders that a reporter be taken out and shot. I'm sure some of you feel the same twinge of jealousy, but I have to warn you that the membership requirements for CARP are pretty strict.
But I'm digressing here. Bob mentioned Sherman during
our conversation because he didn't know any assessor jokes
either, and he was trying to change the subject. I pushed
and pushed, and he finally said Just tell 'em you're
against Amendment 21, and they'll love you, no matter what
else you say.
Okay, I'm against Amendment 21, for many reasons, some of which I'll get to later. And despite my best efforts, I still don't have an assessor joke, so we'll have to settle for a commissioner joke:
Q. How do you spot a level-headed county commissioner?
A. The tobacco juice drools out of both sides of his mouth.
Over the years, I've endured many county elections, and often there's a contest for assessor. Now, it may have made sense to elect assessors back in 1876, when Colorado adopted its constitution. I wasn't around then, so I don't know.
But I often wonder why we elect assessors now, when there are thousands of regulations about how to appraise property and an immense amount of state supervision. It seems like more of an administrative job than a policy job.
And it really seems strange to conduct partisan elections for the assessor's office.
Face it, everyone who's running, no matter what party, promises to be fair, competent, and efficient. Nobody promises to be unfair, say by appraising speculative development land at agricultural rates. Nobody promises to be incompetent, say by losing records. Nobody promises to put a bunch of deadbeat shirt-tail relatives on the payroll, thereby putting traditional political family values ahead of efficiency.
Nope, you all run for office with promises of being fair, competetent and efficient. And those aren't really partisan issues.
It isn't like a Republican assessor could unilaterally raise all the appraisals on places where Democrats live -- converted chicken coops, shotgun houses, mobile homes, camper shells, that sort of thing -- in the hope of driving them out of the county and replacing them with a better class of people who can be trusted to vote the right way.
Similarly, a Democratic assessor couldn't exactly triple all valuations on trophy homes with acreage in gated developments, or declare country-club memberships valuable personal property, and tax them accordingly.
So perhaps we're fortunate that the assessor election, while technically partisan, isn't really partisan.
Try to imagine a Libertarian Assessor -- it's one of
those phrases, like jouranlistic integrity
that just
doesn't work.
But then again, think of the fun a Green Party assessor could have -- knock the value, and thus the taxes, down if there's an environmentally correct clothesline, and jack it way up if there's an electric drier that consumes power from a coal-burning polluting fossil-fuel plant somewhere.
Those three-car garages would get appraised like they had tile roofs and marble floors. Furnace and refrigerator efficiency would get checked by the appraiser, and the more they consumed, the higher the appraisal. If the house sat within walking distance of most commercial needs, it would be real cheap, and if it required a lot of driving, the assessor could value it into the stratosphere. It might not be a fair appraisal of its value, but if its taxes went up high enough, that might reflect the burden that such estates place on the rest of us taxpayers.
Alas, that's not how it works. You've got to go by the property that's actually there on the ground, not by how much it will cost us to accomodate those new arrivals who want round-the-clock sheriff's patrols and the roads plowed immediately after a snowstorm.
There might be some ways to reform this, but there are some other reforms that Colorado counties need to consider first.
The first problem with Colorado counties is their boundaries. Colorado changed a lot in the 20th century, but county boundaries really didn't. Since the City and County of Broomfield isn't in business yet, we have to go back to 1913 and the creation of Alamosa County for the last change in county boundaries.
Contrast that to the 19th century, when county boundaries were frequently adjusted to fit changing times.
A silver rush to the Wet Mountains means a lot of population a long way from the courthouse in Cañon City? Then in 1873 chop off a piece of Frmont County and call it Custer County.
The railroad arrives and makes Grand Junction into a trade center that deserves county seathood? Create Mesa County from the huge Gunnison County of 1883.
A politically powerful Otto Mears wants his own county government to run with his political machine? No problem -- take some of Costilla and Lake counties in 1867 and create Saguache County. It had eight registered voters, and seven of them held office that paid from the public treasury -- which had been the whole idea, according to Mears's partner, John Lawrence.
Saguache is one of those counties that doesn't make much sense on the map -- a goodly part of it is on the Western Slope. Residents of Sargents, for instance, are only 33 miles relatively level miles from Gunnison. However, their courthouse is about 60 miles away, across the Continental Divide, in the town of Saguache.
Gunnison County extends way to the north -- Marble, which is closer to a county seat in Aspen or a county seat in Glenwood Springs, is in Gunnison County, and the courthouse is about a 200-mile drive in the winter.
A Gunnison resident once explained to me that We have
Marble to make up for the parts of Saguache County that
should be in Gunnison County.
Then there's Basalt, which is in Eagle County, even though its residents have to drive through to seat of Garfield County to get to their own county seat.
Is this any way to run a state?
Our county seats were established when railroads and wagons were the dominant means of transportation, when a very different network was in place than exists today.
Further, towns back then really wanted to be the county seat -- in theory, it brought in business, and provided an economic benefit. Towns even went to shooting wars over the county seat, as Grand Lake and Hot Sulphur Springs did in 1881, or slugged it out with theft and elections: in my own Chaffee County, Buena Vista stole the county seat from Granite in 1880, then had Salida take it away in 1928.
But if the public-opiniion surveys are correct, no self-respecting town would want to be a county seat these days. That's not the question they ask on the survey, of course.
Instead, they ask people to list the most despised and mistrusted professions. We are at the head of that list, my friends, journalists and politicians, followed closely by lawyers, bureaucrats and regular old criminals.
Now observe what you see coming and going around a courthouse: journalists, politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, and criminals. Our presence can't be good for a community's reputation, nor for its property values. So I suspect that a lot of county seats really don't want the honor even if they once did, just as many of our county boundaries don't make sense, even if they once did.
So there's one possible reform you could work on --
redrawing our county boundaries and defining new county
seats. I would make the basis something that I'll call a
commutershed
-- zones around our cities where most
people who commute will commute to.
Further, most of the research on this, at least in rural areas, has already been performed by the Wal-Mart company -- just look where they put their super-stores, and you've got your county seats. Then get your secondary retail trade areas, and you've got your county boundaries.
These should be adjusted every decade or so, just like congressional districts. Sure there would be some inconvenience during the changes, but government is here to serve the public, not the other way around, and this would provide better and more convenient service.
That was the idea when these county lines were laid out in the first place, and it's still a good idea. Chaffee County, where I live, has a perfectly good courthouse that could serve people in Howard and Coaldale, just a few miles down the road, but they're supposed to go 40 miles to Cañon City instead of 15 miles to Salida. The good people of Granite, in our county, are 40 miles from Salida and only 15 from the Lake County seat in Leadville. This is absurd.
Adjusting county boundaries also gives us an opportunity to change some county names. We are in an era of sensitivity and political correctness, and our county names do not reflect this. In fact, it's hard to say what they reflect.
I spent several years in Grand County, where the only elected Democrat was the assessor -- and she changed parties before the next election.
Its name once fit because it contained the headwaters of the Grand River at Grand Lake. But in 1922, our legislature decided that the Colorado River should start in Colorado, and decreed that the river that had been known as the Grand since the days of the French fur trappers should henceforth be the Colorado.
That left us with some rather irrelevant place names -- Grand Junction, Grand Valley, Grand Lake, and Grand County.
As for political correctness, we get the pressure from
both sides of the aisle. The conservatives gave us
Official English,
and we all know what language they
were trying to eliminate. And yet many of our county names
are Spanish, and would sound pretty stupid if we translated
them into English: Table, Rib, Rabbits, The Silver, Big
River, and Luggage Rack.
Others honor politicians long departed, like Lucius L. Weld, first territorial secretary, or Samuel Hitt Elbert, a territorial governor who already has his name on Colorado's highest mountain -- indeed, the highest summit in all 3,000 miles of Rocky Mountains.
And I imagine that if I surveyed even this roomful of county experts, not one in 20 could tell me that Adams County was named for Gov. Billy Adams rather than John Adams, second president of the United States.
Pitkin County was named for Frederick Pitkin, second
governor of the state of Colorado -- and also man who
campaigned on the promise the Utes must go.
While
we must concede that he did a good job of keeping that
promise, it's also a name that many Native Americans would
find as offensive as Chivington, which is only a town -- or
as offensive as Custer, which is a county.
And Republicans might take offense at Teller County, named for Henry Moore Teller, who pulled a reverse Ben Campbell. He was elected as a Republican, but left the party in 1896 and then served as a Democrat. When the GOP catches on, I am certain there will be demands to delete this turncoat's name from our map.
Women have been voting in Colorado for more than a century -- we were the first state to vote for female suffrage (Wyoming was the first state where women could vote, but suffrage was enacted there by the legislature, not by the public at large) -- and in 1900, Denver was the largest city in the world where women could vote.
But you wouldn't know this to look at our 63 counties. Only one has a woman's name -- Dolores County, from one of the honorifics applied to the Virgin Mary -- and that one could be in trouble if certain anti-religious zealots ever noticed it.
The people who sue over manger scenes or Christmas decorations at the courthouse are the same people who will someday notice that we have counties named after St. John and St. Michael.
A further complication of our current system is that some towns aren't in the proper county. Let me illustrate by first pointing to some that are. Gunnison is the seat of Gunnison County. Ouray is the seat of Ouray County. Likewise with Saguache and Eagle.
But Garfield is not in Garfield County; it's in Chaffee County. Lake City is in Hinsdale County, not Lake County. The ghost town of Teller City is in Jackson County, not Teller County. Kiowa is in Elbert County, not Kiowa County. Dolores is in Montezuma County, not Dolores County. Las Animas County is the largest one in the state, with 4,798 square miles, but even it is not big enough to comprise the town of Las Animas, which is the seat of Bent County.
Add all this up -- the inappropriate names for this era, the boundaries that don't fit modern transportation and communication patterns, the fact that many modern Coloradans would prefer not to have their community serve as a magnet for journalists, politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats and other undesirable types -- and the solution is obvious. I hope that Colorado's county assessors will see the need for change, and lead the effort to make Colorado's counties suitable for the 21st century, rather than relics of the 19th century.
Besides that, think of the money you could get for naming rights.
The next reform I propose relates to land use, which takes up a goodly amount of time at every county meeting I've ever attended: sketch plans, plats, subdivisions, roads, septic systems, wells. Often this is routine and boring, but sometimes it can get pretty lively.
It's a contentious issue because it's where two powerful forces collide.
One powerful force is the desire for lower taxes. The other powerful force is the right of a property owner to do as he will with his land.
Let somebody develop his remote ranch into a subdivision, and you've jacked up local taxes to pay for plowing those roads, running school buses up and down them, providing the sheriff's patrols that the people who live in those upscale subdivisions want, and so forth. Plus it costs to extend utilities, and that is reflected in the rates your citizens must pay.
Some counties have discovered -- Custer, I know, is one that commissioned a cost-of-services study -- that these demanding new rural residents cost more in services than they bring in taxes, and further, the new residents are likely to whine about the manure pile next door and demand that the county commissioners take immediate action to eliminate or at least regulate this affront to their dignity.
To counter this, certain county governments have issued
a Code of the West
which explains the facts of life
to potential upscale rural residents. I heard that this
started in Larimer County; the copy I saw, and enjoyed
reading, was from Montrose County. My spy there said the
county government was ready to adopt it until the local
board of Realtors saw it, and then it vanished. For some
reason, that usually happens to anything that the board of
Realtors doesn't like.
While these Codes, assuming that counties had the cojones to adopt them, might help solve the problems associated with the growth we're getting, they still involve regulations, and as a Coloradan in good standing, I hate regulations.
For instance, they almost always involve zoning, and as far as I'm concerned, zoning is yet another government subsidy to the wealthy. How?
Let us assume that some amenity-driven migrant California equity refugee purchases his 35 acres on a site with a commanding view -- a view that is, alas, marred by a trailer park where there are clotheslines, old pickups on blocks, and brats throwing mud at each other. This ruins the glorious 360-degree vista from the spacious redwood deck.
Now, if we didn't have zoning, the upscale resident would have to buy the trailer park land, and then he could do whatever he wanted with it. Let's say that would cost $750,000.
But with zoning, he merely needs to hire an attorney, who will then approach the county about important changes that should be made in the county zoning laws, and the trailer park gets eliminated -- at a cost of perhaps $10,000.
Zoning means that we've just saved this Rich Bastard -- excuse me, I need to be politically correct here -- this Person of Money about $740,000. Maybe it's just my attitude problem, but I don't see any reason to save these people money.
However, I would like to propose a form of zoning that would accommodate both the desire to save on government costs and the rights inherent in private property: the Stupid Zones.
Each county should consult with geologists, foresters, wildlife biologists, hydrologists, and other experts.
Then it would draw a map declaring Stupid Zones -- that is, places where it is stupid for people to build houses.
The zone might be stupid because the last person to
drill a well there went down 1,500 feet before filing for
Chapter 11 protection. Or because it's prime mule-deer
habitat, which means it's prime mountain-lion habitat where
children might disappear and cause major expenses for the
local search-and-rescue group, not to mention the bad
publicity after Paula Woodward shows up with Nine wants
to know what happened to the joggers in Backwater
County.
It could be within a 100-year floodplain. Or where snowslides, rockslides, or mudslides from above are likely. Or where soils can swell from bentonite. Or where there's an abundance of old mine tunnels to make foundations collapse as the earth settles. Or where the surrounding forest, after a century or so of fire suppression, is just waiting for a dry fall and a spark.
Perhaps the site itself is acceptable, but the county treasury would be more than strained by the cost of maintaining the access road for the benefit of school buses and sheriff's patrols, and the local utility monopolies despair at extending telephone and electric service.
There are about a zillion things that can go wrong with rural property in Colorado, and so I could continue this list indefinitely, but the point should be clear by now -- most counties have Stupid Zones, and the scientific expertise is available to identify and delineate those zones.
So, first you declare the Stupid Zones in your county -- and that's something asssessors should be able to do, since you've visited every privae parcel in the county. Then you persuade the county commissioners to adopt a policy for them. The policy is quite simple -- you can build whatever you damn well please on your property in a Stupid Zone, but you are entitled to absolutely no county services, other than those required by law.
As nearly as I know, there are very few services that any county is required to provide. Of course the assessor needs to come by and the treasurer needs to collect taxes. Also, the sheriff must deliver writs, subpoenas, and the like to these people.
The county, along with other local governments like school districts, is not required to plow their roads, patrol their property, search for their missing children or pets, operate school buses, protect the purity of their water supply, or any of the thousands of other things that People of Money demand from government while whining about Welfare Mothers.
With Stupid Zones, people would be able to do as they wished with their own property. And the rest of us wouldn't have to subsidize them.
For several years, I have been talking up this Stupid Zone concept, and I've yet to find any takers. But now, perhaps, I'm in front of the right audience, and I encourage some county to try it. I think most of your constituents would support it -- after all, you're trying to save them money while protecting their rights. And I can promise you that at least one columnist for Colorado's only statewide daily newspaper would praise and celebrate your responsible and far-sighted approach to local government.
With those two reforms for county government in general in place, Colorado would be a better place. But there would still be challenges, especially for assessors.
One major challenge is that the property tax is under assault. It's a burden on some senior citizens (they're the wealthiest group in the country, but the ones we hear about are those eaing dog food who can't afford prescription drugs -- if there's anything I've learned watching the presidential debates, it's that old people vote.)'
The property tax is not based on anyone's ability to pay, and it when property is valued at its highest and best use, then you can't run a hardware store in a casino town -- you're more or less forced to try slot machines, and if the result is a town that no one can actually live in, well, that's tough.
All these criticisms are valid. And yet, tax-hater that I am, I find some reasons to like the property tax:
1) It is locally collected and administered. That means local governments don't have to beg for resources from Denver or Washington. We can decide to tax ourselves for a library or a swimming pool, and go right ahead and do it -- that's American small-town democracy at its finest, with bodies that are close to the people.
And there's my major problem with Amendment 21. It would cut each levy by $25 a year, every year. Doug Bruce says the state legislature would have to make up the missing money, but there's no specific requirement in the amendment. He just says the legislature would feel political pressure to make sure the fire districts stayed in business.
But if the legislature is doling out the money, it will
necessarily make requirements to insure that the money is
spent properly. And its idea of properly
might not
be my idea -- the last thing I want is for some right-wing
wannabe Ayatollah in the legislature like Marilyn Musgrave
to be setting policies for my local library.
Or, if Bruce is right, here's another scenario. My neighors and I decided we'd like a swimming pool. We form a special district, assess ourselves enough to make the first year's bond payment, then repeal our taxes -- hey, Doug Bruce says the state is obligated to cover the difference.
2) To move on, another reason, a related one, to support
the property tax is that is that it is, by and large, a tax
that is paid by local residents, and there's a saying that
he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Granted, there are absentee property owners. But my experience indicates that most owners live on their property, or nearby.
The trend in Colorado has been to move away from
property taxes and toward sales taxes. Up in Salida, where
I live, the argument for the sales tax is that tourists
will pay most of it.
That's fine, to get other people to subsidize your governmental services, if you can get away with it. But it usually isn't that simple.
For instance, a lot of people live upstairs in those charming brick buildings in Historic Downtown Salida. They need places to park.
But they're just locals. It's the tourists shopping downstairs that pay the bills, because the city and county governments are mostly funded by sales taxes from those tourists.
And so, locals get parking tickets, and they get a government that's not in any hurry to help them with their parking problems. Tourists get courtesy warnings, since they're the cash cow, and we want them to come back and get milked again, and again, and again.
The consequence is that we have a government that is elected by one group of people, people that vote in Salida, but this government is trying to serve a different group -- people who spend a lot of money in Salida.
More reliance on the property tax, and less reliance on the sales tax, would push governments to be more responsive to their own citizens -- that is, the people they're supposed to be serving.
I can't fault local government for trying to maximize
its income and minimize its costs, since we're in an era
when you're supposed to run government like a
business.
But if we relied more on the property tax, we
could make local government more aware of who its customers
really are, and they shouldn't be those people in town for
just a day or two.
3) The third argument in favor of increasing our reliance on the property tax is that Doug Bruce hates it.
Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. The thing is, it's possible to evade or minimize other taxes. You can shop out of town, or over the internet, and get around some sales taxes. Minimizing income taxes is a national industry that involves everything from computer software to purchasing U.S. senators.
But there's no real way around the property tax. The property to be taxed is quite visible, and it has an owner of record, and if the owner doesn't pay the taxes, the county finds someone who will.
And I think that's why Doug Bruce hates the property tax. No matter how many accountants you hire, you can't evade it. It's one tax that is fair because everybody who owns property has to pay it.
Thus, there are some good arguments for local governments to continue to rely on property taxes.
However, as we're often reminded, we're moving into a new economic era -- the Information Age.
Back in the 1880s, there was a fellow named Henry George who traveled the U.S. and started a movement known as the Single Taxers. In George's theory, land was the source of all wealth, and so a single tax on land owned by rich people, as opposed to excise taxes on the whiskey swilled by poor people, was the fairest and most sensible system of taxation.
Maybe Henry George made some sense then, but his system certainly doesn't match modern reality. Property taxes are based on matters of substance, and much of our economy deals with things that have no substance.
For instance, a 1954 Chevy sold new for about $1,500. And of that, about 60% of the cost was directly derived from raw materials that came out of the ground: iron, copper, glass, etc.
Go buy a computer today for $1,500, and how much of that price relates to the raw materials -- silicon, copper, petroleum feedstocks for plastics -- that came out of the ground? The best estimate I've seen puts it at about $10. The other $1,490, the vast majority of the value in a computer, goes to costs like marketing and engineering.
Yet our property taxation system in many ways considers the $10 more significant than the $1,490. We know how to deal with mines and wells and factories, but those are a shrinking portion of the economy.
Yet if people keep wanting governmental services -- and no matter how virtual your enterprise, you still need streets to be repaired and plowed so at least the UPS truck can get there and the phone company can repair the lines, and you still want some law enforcement protection, and you still want courts operating to enforce contracts -- then there's got to be a way to fund those services.
Unfortunately, I'm at a loss here for an answer. I
tried to think of something analagous in the Old
Economy,
and thought of a water right. Now there's
something that's strictly a social construction -- at least
90% of the world somehow manages without water rights. A
CFS and a UFO have certain features in common, in that
there are a lot of people who think they're important, but
we don't have a solid documented sighting of either.
A water right, in one aspect, is just a piece of paper.
Some information. So if I could figure out how Colorado
has taxed that form of intellectual property,
I
might be able to propose a system to accomodate the economy
of the future.
Alas, Colorado doesn't tax water rights. We tax personal property used in the production of income, and a water right certainly qualifies there, but it's a peculiar form of property in that it's not assessed or taxed.
And maybe that's the right precedent. Think for a moment about the complications of taxing information.
You know how to evaluate real property by square footage, location, type of construction, etc. Are you going to be able to appraise water-cooler gossip? Or rumors flying around the Internet?
Or there's one of my friends, a professional programmer who's self-employed. Sure, he has a house and a few computers. But his real commercial assets are his knowledge and skills, and how do you tax those assets, or even determine what they are? Shoot him up with Sodium Pentothol and hypnotize him, so that you know he's conversant with the assembler mnemonics for a hot now RISC processor, and that's as valuable to him as a mining company buying a new jaw crusher?
Will he be able to depreciate this knowledge, assuming
you could appraise it: Gee, you know a lot about the
Mostek 6502, and that was worth $1.2 million in 1984, but
now that the chip is worse than obsolete, and that
knowledge is taking up neurons that could be used for
something relevant in today's environment, so we'll make it
a negative $800,000, sort of like a shack on a lot in Vail
that would be worth more if the shack were torn
down.
This sort of speculation could go on indefinitely, but I think you've got the idea now. We have a taxation system which assumes wealth is produced by real assets, things like mines and mills that you can see and measure, and we're moving into an economy where most of the value is in things that you can't see and measure, that no one really knows how to appraise.
For proof, look at Wall Street, where supposedly the most sophisticated analysts operate. Two years ago, any old dot-com was a hot item. Lat year, it was B2B, Business to Business, that drew investment. This year, they're both in the tank. And if they can't figure out where the value is these days, what hope is there for a few county assessors in Colorado?
So it's probably just as well that there isn't an Information Property Tax in Coloado, even if that's where the money is these days. It would be really difficult to assess and administor, but on the other hand, if there were a tax on Intellectual Property, we probably wouldn't have to worry about opposition or meddling from Doug Bruce. He seems to fight only those taxes that affect him, and somehow, I don't think he'd be assessed at much if we taxed intellect in Colorado.
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