Jan
12
Category Archives: Legal Issues
Sep
29
Governor Polis, The Refunds You’re Sending Out Are Due To TABOR!!!
FYI. This was on Twitter yesterday:
BoulderGuyTC@BoulderGuyTC
Replying to @wattystrick @GovofCO and @colorado_tabor
Watty, The reason is they tried to eliminate Tabor (again), and when they found out from the courts they couldn’t Polis decided to do the letter thing. What is truly two-faced , is the Democrats have written into their 2022 platform to eliminate Tabor…
Tool Man – Fear Not! @12Toolman
Replying to @wattystrick @GovofCO and @colorado_tabor
It’s an inconvenient fact that polis chooses to ignore during an election cycle…. Appealing to the uninformed voter..
Sep
19
Menten: A citizen’s guide to weighing in on local TABOR ballot measures
One great, though lesser-known benefit provided in the Colorado Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) is the local ballot issue notice. This guide is sent by mail at least 30-days before the election to all households with one or more registered voters.
The ballot issue notice includes content and details about upcoming local ballot measures that increase taxes, add debt, or suspend TABOR revenue limits. It includes a section where registered voters have the opportunity to submit FOR or AGAINST comments, up to 500 words each.
You should know that there are two types of TABOR ballot issue notices. One notice is for the statewide elections and commonly referred to as the “Blue Book.” The notice discussed here is for elections held by local governments such as a city, town, school district, or special taxing district. You could potentially get more than one of these notices in the mail.
Several years back, it was discovered that out that of some 300 local tax issues throughout the state during a ballot year, only 15 had the taxpayer’s voice printed in a ballot issue notice. That’s only 5 percent! You can make a big difference and amplify your voice by being an author of the next ballot issue notice where you live. Considering that you reach thousands of voters, being able to submit comments in the TABOR notice costs almost nothing and takes relatively little time and energy.
What follows is an explanation of how to participate in the local ballot issue FOR or AGAINST comment process. As in so much of government bureaucracy, instructions must be followed with no room for alteration. The deadline for this year is Friday, September 23 no later than noon to have your comments included in the local TABOR notice.
To continue reading this story at Complete Colorado, please click (HERE):
Sep
09
Colorado Springs Gazette: New ‘affordable housing’ measure misses the mark
Colorado Springs Gazette: New ‘affordable housing’ measure misses the mark
Image courtesy of Van Meter Williams Pollack
While visiting Western Slope resort towns, tourists count on some of Colorado’s most aggrieved workers. Few consider how these employees live.
Recent immigrants, students on summer break and others wait tables, clean hotel rooms, park cars, guide rafting tours, teach ski lessons and provide a large assortment of other services required for tourism.
Visitors typically don’t think about the commutes tourism workers make for jobs in Steamboat Springs, Aspen, Vail, Telluride, Glenwood Springs and other resort towns with exorbitant costs of living.
Sperling’s Best Places finds housing in Aspen costs 707.4% more than the national average. Vail housing costs 397% more than the average; Glenwood Springs, 215.7% more; Steamboat Springs, 257% more; and Telluride 391% more. That’s to be expected in communities that provide second homes for wealthy consumers who fly in and out from around the globe.
As the tourism economy spreads to neighboring towns, workers find themselves commuting farther and farther to find basic shelter. The housing cost in Edwards — 11 miles east of Vail — exceeds the national average by 438.4%.
Low-wage employees in Vail often commute 80 miles round trip, or more, to live in mobile homes in Gypsum and other places far from their jobs. Local affordable housing initiatives have helped a fortunate few but not most.
Colorado needs tourists and the industry needs workers. Yet, economic forces prevent restaurants and hotels from paying the wages required to rent or buy in markets with housing costs beyond the universe of normal. Average tourists simply cannot pay $100 for a cheeseburger or $1,000 a night for a midgrade hotel room.
Given this socioeconomic dilemma, we hoped Initiative 108 might help more Colorado tourism workers live closer to their jobs. Called the Make Colorado Affordable Act, the November ballot measure proposes diverting 0.1% of the general fund into a state affordable housing program.
The state would fund this by dipping into future TABOR refunds, such as the $750 in direct payments each taxpayer received this year by mandate of the Colorado Constitution’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. By 2024, the proposed TABOR retention would generate about $300 million for the fund.
That massive diversion of taxpayer earnings must ease the burdens of tourism workers, or it’s not a good plan. Sadly, it would do no such thing.
To continue reading this editorial, click (HERE) to go to the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Jul
22
It’s Your Money, Not Theirs
#ItsYourMoneyNotTheirs
#ThankGodForTABOR
#VoteOnTaxesAndFees
#FeesAreTaxes
#TABOR
#FollowTheMoney
#FollowTheLaw
Jul
22
Affordable housing program will cut into your TABOR refunds
Affordable housing program will cut into your TABOR refunds
By Natalie Menten
Guest Commentary
The state government has taken more taxes from you than we allow it to have, and it should rebate that over-collection back to you. That money coming back to all taxpayers is now in jeopardy. We should be alarmed at the potential waste.
Colorado voters’ dissatisfaction with government growing beyond its means led to the passage of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR). This constitutional amendment requires voter approval for tax increases and debt. It also limits how fast government can grow. The formula for automatic tax increases is the prior year’s budget plus adjustment for inflation and population growth.
When government collects taxes above the limit, it must refund the surplus. Later this year, each taxpayer will get a $750 TABOR rebate from the state. The economic outlook predicts rebates for the next several years.
Two statewide ballot measures in November claim they don’t raise taxes, but that’s just not true. Funding for new programs comes from our future TABOR rebates. If we don’t get all those rebates back, that’s effectively a higher tax rate and clearly a tax hike.
Click the link below to continue reading this article at the Denver Post.
Opinion: Statewide affordable housing program will cut into your TABOR refunds
May
02
Did TABOR violations occur? Court to hear claim about PAID FAMILY LEAVE
PAID FAMILY LEAVE
Did TABOR violations occur? Court to hear claim
By Shelly Bradbury
The Denver Post
The Colorado Supreme Court next week will consider whether the state’s fledgling family and medical leave program violates the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights amendment to the Colorado Constitution.
The legal challenge, to be argued on Tuesday, focuses on funding for the newly voter-approved program, which will, beginning in 2024, offer up to 12 weeks of paid time off to most Colorado workers who are either sick or caring for their newborns or seriously ill family members.
Also known as Proposition 118, the $1.2 billion program was approved in 2020 by voters in a 57% to 43% vote.
The state will begin funding the program in January 2023 by collecting between 0.45% and 0.9% of employees’ annual pay from employees and their employers, with some exceptions.
That premium could be increased to as much as 1.2% of wages after 2025.
Those premiums are at the center of the legal challenge by Chronos Builders, a Grand Junction homebuilding company, which argues the fees are surcharges on income that violate TABOR, which requires that all income “be taxed at one rate … with no added tax or surcharge.” Continue reading
Apr
09
Conservatives file lawsuit to invalidate Colorado’s new transportation fees. Here’s what it claims.
Senate Bill 260, passed by Democrats in 2021, enacted new fees on gasoline purchases, deliveries and Uber and Lyft rides to raise billions for transportation projects
Colorado’s new transportation fees violate the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and several other state finance laws and should be invalidated, two conservative groups and Republican state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg claim in a long-promised lawsuit filed late Thursday in Denver.
Senate Bill 260, passed by Democrats in the legislature last year, enacted a host of new transportation fees — including on gasoline purchases, deliveries and Uber and Lyft rides — to raise money for road and transit projects across the state.
Democrats celebrated the measure as a partial solution to Colorado’s longstanding transportation funding deficit, but Republicans decried it as an unlawful attempt to get around TABOR’s requirement that voters approve new taxes.
To continue reading this story from the Colorado Sun, please click (HERE):
Apr
07
Kerr vs. Polis Lawsuit Update
There was excellent news last month. It appears the Plaintiffs have decided not to move forward with the existential threat to TABOR, ending the Kerr vs. Polis lawsuit!
The TABOR Foundation has been coordinating a national coalition of 19 freedom organizations that were ready to submit a friend-of-the-court brief to the US Supreme Court. We won’t have to write it after all.
When the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals (sitting en banc) issued its ruling last December that was favorable to our position, you could have bet your bottom dollar that the Plaintiffs would continue the lawsuit. Many left-of-center people and organizations have been pushing this case for over a decade.
The next step in the process would have been for Plaintiffs to petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari asking the Court to take up the case (for a second time). Such a petition had to have been filed by a March 14 deadline, but was not.
The Judgment dismissed the case for failing to state a claim upon which the Court could grant relief for the remaining Plaintiffs, who consisted of a few school districts and other political subdivisions of the State of Colorado. Originally the Plaintiffs also included individual legislators and citizens. The individual legislators had been denied standing to sue because they only alleged institutional injuries to the government and none to themselves as legislators. And the individual citizens did not even allege whether or how TABOR injured them personally.
With respect to the school districts and other political subdivisions, the Court ruled that the US Constitution does not provide political subdivisions with rights against their parent states. Moreover, none of the Plaintiffs identified any other law providing them with a claim for relief to challenge TABOR.
The Court of Appeal’s dismissal was “without prejudice,” so the Plaintiffs could try a new filing. We’ll keep watch just in case.
The heart of the Plaintiffs’ legal theory, that citizens are prohibited from placing restrictions on certain legislative powers, was extremely dangerous to the fundamental principles of limited government.
Friends of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights can breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate, for now.
Feb
07
State Supreme Court to consider whether paid family, medical leave violates TABOR
Justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, 2021
The Colorado Supreme Court will decide whether the paid family and medical leave program that voters enacted in the 2020 election violates the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
The court announced on Monday that it will review a decision from Denver District Court that dismissed a lawsuit over Proposition 118, the Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Program. By a margin of 58% to 42%, voters approved a plan to impose payroll premiums, split between employers and employees, that would entitle workers to up to 12 weeks of paid leave.
Beginning on Jan. 1, 2023, payments into the program will begin. But Grand Junction-based Chronos Builders is claiming that the funding arrangement violates TABOR, the 1992 constitutional amendment that requires tax increases to be put to a vote of the electorate, among other restrictions.
“Any income tax law change,” TABOR reads, “shall also require all taxable net income to be taxed at one rate … with no added tax or surcharge.”
Click (HERE) to continue reading this story at ColoradoPolitics