The Aurora Transportation Maintenance Fee is all washed up!
On March 27, 2008 the City Council Management & Finance Policy Committee sent a 15 million dollar tax increase forward to the Aurora City Council for consideration. This tax is disguised as a "Transportation Maintenance Fee," and will be another line item on your monthly Aurora water bill. This is just a small 6 dollars per month, so never mind that it follows on the heels of your 30% water rate increase to pay for the 800 million dollar Prairie Waters Project.
You might wonder how such a large tax increase is possible without a vote by Aurora citizens. State judges have ruled that elected leaders can call this 15 million dollar tax a "fee" and a fee does not require a TABOR tax vote. The water bill was chosen as the vehicle for this tax because no additional postage would be needed to take 15 million dollars from Aurora citizens. Homeowner associations will not be immune from this "fee", so expect to pay more if City Council adopts this plan.
If you think this fee sounds OK, imagine where City Council could go with this concept, considering the court rulings - all added to your water bill as fees: street lighting, snow removal, fire service, tree trimming, code enforcement, neighborhood services, and on and on - who knows where it would stop.
Let me acknowledge that transportation maintenance funding is sorely needed. The Aurora City Council has been cutting department budgets for several years due to the economic downturn, and street maintenance and repairs have been deferred to the point where streets will soon be irreparably deteriorated.
Councilmember Broom has initiated this plan out of frustration as he observes our streets falling apart while the budget cuts continue.
This is the latest effort at back door solutions to fix the budget shortfall caused by the 2 per 1000 police hiring mandate and the economic downturn. Two years ago Aurora voters rejected a tax increase that would have backfilleddepartment budgets that were cut to support 2 per 1000 hiring. Your elected leaders have been increasing fees ever since, but never before have they considered a fee of this magnitude. It is up to every Aurora resident to call your City Council member and tell him or her to reject this "fee" and find another way to solve the budget shortfall.
The City Council of 1993 knew that the 2 per 1000 tax was too small to fund the mandated police staffing into the future, but with the help of federal grants it did - for a while. With the disappearance of those federal grants, and the increasing population of Aurora, the budget shortfall expanded. The City Council of 2008 must now engage the entire community in a discussion on how to solve this funding shortfall. The discussion must include all of the facts on how the 2 per 1000 mandate came to exist, and how that affects the overall city budget. Elected leaders, community leaders, business leaders, the Aurora Police Association, and the Aurora Fraternal Order of Police must all be actively engaged in crafting a funding solution that is acceptable to Aurora citizens. Let's not choke Aurora citizens with greater and greater fee assessments where a much more thoughtful solution is required.