Wildfire Tests Police Force in Colorado Anti-Tax Movement’s Home
By Amanda J. Crawford - Jul 2, 2012 11:14 AM ET
As Colorado Springs battles a rash of burglaries after a wildfire that still licks at its boundaries, it does so with fewer police and firefighters.
The city where the Waldo Canyon fire destroyed 346 homes and forced more than 34,000 residents to evacuate turned off one-third of its streetlights two years ago, halted park maintenance and cut services to close a $28 million budget gap after sales-tax revenue plummeted and voters rejected a property-tax increase.
The municipality, at 416,000 the state’s second-largest, auctioned both its police helicopters and shrank public-safety ranks through attrition by about 8 percent; it has 50 fewer police and 39 fewer firefighters than five years ago. More than 180 National Guard troops have been mobilized to secure the city after the state’s most destructive fire. At least 32 evacuated homes were burglarized and dozens of evacuees’ cars were broken into, said Police Chief Pete Carey.
“It has impacted the response,” said Karin White, a 54- year-old accountant, who returned home June 28 to a looted and vandalized house, with a treasured, century-old family heirloom smashed.
“They did above and beyond what they could do with the resources they had,” she said. “If there were more officers, there could have been more manpower in the evacuated areas.”
Taxpayer Revolt
Since the start of the 18-month recession in December 2007, U.S. cities have faced shrinking revenue and diminishing state support, leading to budget cuts and reductions in services and workforces. Cities faced a fifth-straight year of revenue declines in 2011, according to the National League of Cities, which estimated that municipalities would have to fill budget gaps of as much as $83 billion from 2010-2012.
Colorado Springs, which depends on sales tax for about half of its revenue, was hit harder than most. The city -- the birthplace 20 years ago of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which later passed statewide and has been pushed around the country to restrict government spending -- became a high-profile example of cost-cutting. The law restricts government spending to the previous year’s revenue, adjusted only for population growth and inflation.
“People are going to be looking at the aftermath of this disaster to see what is possible,” said Josh Dunn, an associate professor of political science at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “How far can you go in cutting the size of city government?”
Pre-Tea
The city, home of the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family, is known for being conservative and libertarian. It “was the Tea Party before the Tea Party was cool,” Dunn said.
Six of the nine candidates in last year’s nonpartisan mayoral election, including the victor, Mayor Steve Bach, signed the no-tax pledge pushed by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Richard Skorman, one candidate who didn’t, was flooded with angry e-mails after saying in a debate why he opposed such a pledge. What, he asked, if the city got hit by a major wildfire?
“Resources have been very stretched, and we were always worried,” Skorman, a 60-year-old small business owner and former city councilman who lost to Bach in an April 2011 run- off, said in a telephone interview.
On Edge
The costs of rebuilding combined with lost revenue from business closings and tourism could again push the city to the point where it doesn’t have money for essential services, he said.
“It is really going to make it difficult to deal with these things and all the reconstruction and things that are going to have to occur in this community,” Skorman said.
Bach said the city is on the path toward financial implosion anyway because of overly generous pensions and too many parks.
“Forget the fire,” said the mayor, whose office has an easel with a chart depicting Colorado Springs’s financial status, after a briefing on the blaze June 30. “At our current cost curve, we’ll be insolvent in eight years.”
Bach said the financial situation “certainly has affected our ability to take care of other things like parks and keeping the streetlights on.”
It hasn’t affected the handling of the wildfire, he said.
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/wildfire-tests-police-force-in-colorado-anti-tax-movement-s-home.html
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