The Aurora City Council’s tragic case of buyer’s remorse is being complicated by an even worse case of one bad turn deserving another.
Aurora’s self-inflicted problem last week was created in the fall of 2022.
Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, and now-gone Councilmember Dustin Zvonek, first proposed, then demanded that the city repeal its $2 per employee, per month head tax, created in 1986.
Zvonek resigned from city council Oct. 31.
The levy, similar to those in Denver, Glendale and Greenwood Village, is also called an “occupational privilege tax.” It was created to raise money through employers whose employees and businesses regularly use city streets and public safety services, but don’t pay taxes like residents and visitors do. The logic is certainly debatable.
The tax requires each employee to pay the city $2 a month to work in Aurora, and it requires an employer to pay $2 a month for each employee they hire in the city.
Jurinsky passionately made her case in 2022 that the tax was excessively burdensome on company finances and bookkeeping.
The only real support she got for the measure was from Zvonek.
Sure, most employees would say that $24 a year is $24 a year. And an employer with 10 employees can, also, surely find good use for $240 a year.
The bigger problem is that Jurinsky’s hyperbole about the tax was just that. Ask any small business owner about their wish list of things for city government, or any government, to fix, and the $2 head tax does not make the cut.
The even bigger problem is that the tax raises $5.9 million a year, because this city of 400,000 people also boasts about 200,000 employees working for Aurora businesses.
And, you can guess where this is going, the city needed that $5.9 million in 2022, and it absolutely needs that revenue after Jan. 1, 2025, when the tax was scheduled to be repealed.
In 2022, Jurinsky said that cutting the $2 per employee per month levy would send a message to the free world that Aurora is “business-friendly.” Without the $2 fee, per person, per month to hire a $40,000 or $50,000 a year employee, businesses would come running to set up shop in Aurora, she claimed.
“The path forward here is attracting businesses,” Jurinsky said then. “This is what Aurora is doing. Aurora is leading the way.”
She said the $5.9 million hit taken by the city could be made up if Aurora attracted “a couple” of “fancy steakhouses.” Taxed at the city’s current sales tax rate of 3.75%, it would take about $157.4 million in new sales to make up for the cut. The “couple of fancy steakhouses” would have to sell about 5.25 million $30 steak dinners to make up the lost tax revenue.
The city finance experts, paid with city tax dollars for their expertise in real math, were ignored when trying to explain how much was at risk for so little gain by Jurinsky’s populist plan.
So now, the biggest problem is, short of cash, the northeastern and southeastern parts of the city, places where rapid growth has created large communities far from any fire stations, are in desperate need of two additional fire stations.
Residents there must pay higher house insurance premiums because of the distance, and as council members Curtis Gardner and Francoise Bergan pointed out, it’s a public safety issue.
For $6 million, the city could build those two fire stations, the two city council members proposed a few weeks ago, by not repealing the $2 employee head tax. Also, there would be money going forward to further fund police and fire department services for the entire city.
Jurinsky had a series of public and behind-the-scenes meltdowns over the no-repeal plan, which gained steam fast among the other city council members.
She accused fellow lawmakers in a city council meeting of plotting against her. The Sentinel later obtained a series of obscene and threatening text messages she sent to some council members, excoriating them for working to undo a tax-repeal that made little sense to anyone other than Jurinsky since its inception.
““I fu***** campaigned on that you fu***** pieces of sh**! AND FU** YOU DUSTIN!! And I hear you’re a co sponsor, Francoise. You can definitely go fu** yourself! You’ve never owned a business or a fu***** thing in your life you pretentious bitch!”
Despite the invective blowout, the plan moved forward to keep the $2 head tax, unless Jurinsky could find $6 million in the city budget to cut elsewhere.
It never happened.
Faced with losing the measure by one vote last week, the sponsor of the no-repeal measure, Bergan, tabled the bill, with no comment.
Only Councilmember Stephanie Hancock, who supported Jurinsky’s mission to explode the number of businesses clamoring to open their doors in Aurora after the $2 head tax dissolves, made any comment. She insisted that whether anyone but large, multi-billion companies like FedEx and Raytheon cared about the head tax, it was important for the city council to stay the course and keep its word. No matter the cost.
Less important, apparently, are two critically needed fire stations, clearly not in the neighborhoods these city lawmakers live in.
If Aurora is serious about cutting real taxes on small and large businesses, cut the city’s 3.75% use tax, levied against things like furniture and equipment. That, however, would require even bigger cuts in the city budget.
The biggest boon to Aurora businesses and residents alike would be for this city council to cease its never-ending melodramatics and factless forays onto the council dais and Fox News for what are clearly political attention fixes.
Aurora residents and business owners need six of the 11 members of the City Council to form a caucus to rein in these damaging histrionics and grandstanding. This caucus must ensure the public’s best interests are the priority every Monday, and not petty political gotchas and personal interests.
Keep the tax. Build the fire stations. Put the city back on track to financial and governmental stability.
well put. however, the conservatives aren’t listening and won’t listen. The ones voting for them think the city wastes all those tax dollars. When the cuts start or the roads begin to deteriorate, then they start hollaring….yeah, that the tax dollars are being wasted on what? Well, social services…but then they holler about the homeless as well. Hollering doesn’t work (well, it certainly has, jurinsky has done a lot of it and nastily as well.) A good sound financial basis is what we used to have and need again…..but I guarantee you none of the conservative crowd wants to hear that.
If your business can’t afford $2 a month for an employee, it shouldn’t have employees. It’s a bad business. That’s facts.
Jurinsky’s business failed to pay the tax and she was fined for it – that is why she hates it so much. She’s embarrassed and pissed off that she can’t keep her books, and she hates the tax office for it, and she’s out to get them, and she doesn’t care if she has to cause millions of dollars in damages to get her revenge.
Everything Danielle Jurinsky does is about her own vindictive, attention-seeking, personal gain. She’s a sad little bully whose Daddy gave in to her temper tantrums, and now Coffman and Council give in, too. She will do more damage to this city every Monday night if no one starts standing up to her and stops being afraid of her crazy tirades.
Shame on Bergan for pulling this off the table, and letting another Jurinsky tantrum scare her. Bergan could have stood up to Jurinsky and made a difference, but she was afraid of what – some F bombs by a childish coworker? Threats to “make your life hell” by a bully who lies constantly? Please, Bergan, grow a spine and make the whole Council actually vote – I want to see who else on this Council is a weak, scared crony to Jurinsky’s silly tantrums.
Bergan’s years on the council have taught her how to count votes. At best, she was one vote short of the six needed, as the article pointed out. (Hancock, Sundberg, Lawson, and Zvonek are/were in the tank with Jurinsky. The tiebreaker would have been Coffman, who has supported the tax repeal from the jump.) They are the cowards and Jurinsky enablers. I applaud Bergan and Gardner for trying to support firefighters and police, even if unsuccessfully.
Auroran’s get taxed enough already through high sales taxes. The city needs to look at its bloated operations and start tightening its belts. I guarantee the city is irresponsibly burning up the $5 million+ because everyone knows governments do not promote fiscal responsibility. Get rid of the head tax once and for all, and Aurora can become a desirable city for corporations who want to bring their businesses too.
Aurora seems unable and unwilling to set itself on the right track for any “fancy steakhouses” that will show up to reinvigorate the local economy. A couple things, the businesses that are able to provide the high-end nice atmosphere aren’t interested in building into unstable territory that turn ghetto quickly as we see in this city. This pattern is fairly evident as we see city planning allowing the housing standards to keep falling thus allowing these neighborhoods to turn into the “hoods”. Even the Walmart’s pull up stakes and it’s see-ya as this city shows us they can’t maintain any minimum protection from local crime and the general headache to do business in these areas. You want to keep building four/five story low-income apartments that pop up almost anywhere. Then watch what happens. Maybe a “fancy steakhouse” should go in next to Crown Plazza off North Chambers our newest homeless solution hotel. Something similar to what Denver has done on Quebec Street, look at that calamity over there now. No- I don’t see any fine-dining headed to Aurora soon- cause we don’t deserve them.