A majority of Aurora city lawmakers are suffering a serious misunderstanding about what constitutes important.
Last weekend, during a special study session, all but two city lawmakers at the confab agreed not only to raise fees for residents to use city pools and recreation centers, but they agreed to push toward rocketing user fees upward of 30 percent over three years.
The logic behind the misguided strategy is faulty at the foundation and the follow-through both.
Every year, Aurora, and just about every government in the nation, struggles with how to spend your tax dollars. Regularly, there are far more needs than dollars to fund them.
Aurora is facing a funding shortfall, just like most area governments, as costs increase and revenues fail to keep pace.
Some of the predicted shortfall is unwisely self-inflicted. Aurora lawmakers are considering ending the city’s long-standing “head tax,” a nominal $2 a month fee on anyone who has a job inside city limits. Behaving as if ending this nuisance would enrich every business in Aurora, city lawmakers have simply shrugged off warnings from city staff and critics that the $6 million a year in lost revenue would simply mean cuts in city services.
Lo and behold.
The attitude over the weekend among city lawmakers took a peculiar turn as council conservatives made clear they see city swimming pools, recreation centers and sports fields as mere perks, hardly being core services.
At one point, some lawmakers began to infer that Aurora should strive to ensure these services become “enterprise” funds, like the city’s water department.
Those programs, in theory, “pay their own way” from “user fees.”
City recreation programs serve far more important functions than just providing leisure-time fun.
These facilities are critical centers for a wide range of Aurora residents who depend on them for their health and the health of the community.
Thousands of Aurora’s older and elderly residents, far from flush or wealthy, depend on these centers for their mental health, social health, physical health and more. Any member of the city council who believes Social Security retirees won’t notice a 30% hike in senior center fees needs to consult with an Aurora Social Security retiree.
Tens of thousands of Aurora families depend on these centers for children to spend time immersed in culture, art, exercise and healthy socialization. Besides the very real benefits to individuals to have access to these facilities, there’s a very real benefit to the entire community.
Urban and suburban communities that provide community center services see a substantive reduction in crime.
“Recreational activities are one of the cheapest and most effective ways of reducing and preventing crime,” a 2015 study published in The Journal of Recreation and Sport reports after analyzing several studies.
The sound and proven logic is what stands behind related organizations, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs, the YMCA and an entire industry built around giving children positive, healthful activities to fill their lives.
The city council’s misguided logic sees senior center, rec center and swimming pool services less critical than providing parks and trails or maintaining plants on medians, which do not collect revenue from fees.
And even the city’s manager pointed out that raising fees may not result in raising net revenues nor reducing city “subsidy” for these programs.
“This is not on autopilot,” City Manager Jason Batchelor said during the April 27 workshop, according to a Sentinel story. “We’re going to monitor the impact on our foot traffic. Are we seeing that fall-off from the sticker shock? If folks aren’t coming through the door, we’re not getting the cost recovery we want.”
While the city might benefit greatly by making most of these services free for Aurora residents, most of the community expects to pay some small amount for a day at the pool or for a senior pottery class. But in a world where the poor and middle class residents are already financially stressed to the point of breaking, gouging them to cover city budget losses elsewhere is a bad move.
This is the kind of logic that insists that the government should be run like a business. Government is not a business. It is not created to serve its board of directors, sole proprietor nor shareholders. Aurora’s government was created to serve residents’ needs as a community, without regard for profit or margins.
For crying out loud, the city’s funding shortfall has very little to do with the head tax. Sales tax is the city’s primary source of revenue and on that, the volume of taxable retail transactions per capita lags the Average of Colorado cities by 14% and that of Denver by 59%. Objectively, that scores a failing grade. Eliminating the head tax is trivial by comparison.
By not even having a strategy to attain Average in retail, dining and entertainment, city council is leaving about $40 million per year in additional tax receipts on the table. It has options but when they refuse to even acknowledge that Aurora’s retail tax base is an abject failure, its hard to make meaningful progress. Instead we get band-aid solutions like higher fees such as this or Council selling off future lease receipts at a discount to address the backlog of road maintenance. Hey, why not just call a loan shark?
Financially, the City of Aurora is not well. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
I agree with this opinion! At the current rate, most activities at the ACAA are out of my husbands and my reach.
I agree with this Editorial. The pandemic hurt the Rec Centers and pools. The Central Rec center was a ghost town during the day during the week. Group classes fell way off. Children and teens were not in the afterschool programs. The wealthy go to private clubs. So raising the fees 30% at the public clubs where lower income people attend, is another example of hurting that population in Aurora, taking away after-school programs for their children and teens (the teen programs so important at the Rec Centers), making needed exercise locales for older people out of reach. The Aurora Council has become cruel and uncaring in their policies, as well as incompetent.
Don’t disagree with you.
But, where does the money come from for all this??
Thank you for the thoughtful editorial! And I also support the comments made by Debra.
We have lived in Southeast Aurora since its inception when there were only 25 homes in the vicinity of Hampden Avenue and Chambers Road. We waited for the building of Meadowood recreation center and then more than 30 years before Central recreation was built. Recreation centers are powerful forces for the building of communities but can only be so when they are accessible to all residents regardless of economic status. Recreation centers have become more than a place for physical exercise, but places where different cultures can come together to find their commonalities rather than their differences. And isn’t that the main responsibility of any community— to celebrate the richness of different heritages, To provide social stimulation to prevent loneliness, to foster physical and mental well-being through exercise and learning opportunities? Recreation centers are a vital part of meeting that goal so I urge our city council members to consider that it is their responsibility to see that all community members have access.
Where would the money come from to cover these proposed costs. Increasing taxes should not be on the table. We’re already paying too much in taxes to governments that can’t govern, much less manage financials properly. We become more like California every day, thanks to the infestation of Californians and illegals into our great state. I’m good with moving money away from other city resources if this is the preferred priority.