Opinion: It’s all about the money


The City of Boulder is working on a wish list of projects that it may ask the taxpayers to fund in an upcoming election. What is also needed is an equivalent effort to look at alternatives to general tax increases as a way to fund public infrastructure.
For example, the suggested $43.2 million for street improvements could be funded by imposing parking fees in all employment areas. Boulder has something like 60,000 in-commuters. And we are on the edge of having a very serious traffic congestion problem, caused to a significant extent by this in-commuting. Parking fees would raise needed funds, and at the same time encourage car-pooling and buses. The city could charge private lots a fee on a per space basis, which would be reduced if parking charges were put in place. Such fees, together with an Adequate Public Facilities ordinance like Fort Collins has, that requires new development to pay to maintain transportation levels of service, could eliminate the need for future tax increases on the general citizenry.
Other projects on the list include $8 million for parks and almost $10 million for libraries. These services have inadequate impact fees because some years ago city staff accepted bad advice from a consultant. Both this and the transportation funding issues would be good topics for the January council retreat.
The public school system in Colorado is on the ropes with regard to money. The preliminary court ruling in the Lobato lawsuit said that school funding in Colorado is inadequate. But the legislature seems incapable of lifting their own prohibition on school impact fees, even though impact fees could raise nearly $1 billion a year over time. I have had a number of recent conversations with legislators, and the results have been depressingly uniform — I send them information on impact fees but get no response.
The legislature is also dealing with the proliferation of enterprise zones — areas where companies get special tax credits, supposedly for creating new jobs, and which now cover 70 percent of Colorado. According to the Denver Post, the 2010 cost in tax credits to create each new job was nearly $133,000! Our own Rep. Dickey Lee Hullinghorst is working to reform this system, but if I had my say, I’d eliminate it. Tax breaks are a crude tool, and inevitably much harder to end than to start. It would be better to just make specific annual grants to winners of a performance-based competition to create jobs.
Xcel is once again pushing to get its last pound of flesh out of SmartGridCity. Per a Dec. 15 article at IntelligentUtility.com, Xcel just applied to the Public Utilities Commission to get the final $16.6 million of their $44.5 million total investment in SGC. No surprise of course — Xcel already demonstrated a high level of chutzpah in going to the PUC to get the initial $27.9 million cost recovery in the first place. Remember, Xcel never got approval for the SGC project up front, it is 10 to 20 times bigger than what is needed for an experiment, and because of the design and equipment used, it would be difficult and costly to re-equip to be a real smart grid, i.e. a comprehensive tool to integrate demand with variable renewable energy resources.

To add insult to injury, Xcel is also asking (in their recent rate request) to increase their allowed rate of return from 10.50 percent to 10.75 percent. As Bill Levis, director of the Office of Consumer Counsel (that is supposed to protect small ratepayers) understated, “I don’t know if anyone in this economy can expect a 10.75 percent rate of return.” It’s nice to see that somebody is waking up to Xcel’s excessive returns, but the point should be made more strongly — if a regulated investor-owned monopoly utility is going to be given 100 cents on the dollar for whatever investments it makes, good or bad, smart or dumb, it should only get a rate of return commensurate with its risk-free treatment — like the 2-3 percent yield on long term Treasury bonds. This would be a huge savings for Colorado ratepayers. 
Happy Holidays!


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