Voters in Highlands Ranch took an important step to strengthen their growing community last week, voting overwhelmingly to consolidate four separate special district boards into a single seven-member body serving all 184 square miles of the Douglas County development.
The consolidation should benefit residents by ending confusion about district boundaries and representation and by saving up to $60,000 a year in pay, legal fees, insurance and other costs.
The vote doesn’t make Highlands Ranch a city, although the new district will provide such city-like services as streets, landscaping, parks and recreation and storm-drainage facilities. Police, fire, water and sewer services are contracted to other agencies.
But becoming a full-service city might be a logical next step to think about. Highlands Ranch, with 86,000 residents, is almost as populous as Lakewood was when its 92,000 residents formed a city in 1969.
Centennial had 103,000 residents when it was incorporated in 2003.
Colorado law makes it difficult for counties or special districts to supply heavily urbanized areas with the expanded services residents often come to expect.
Larry Kallenberger, executive director of Colorado Counties Inc., says part of the problem is that Colorado law denies counties many of the powers that residents of home-rule cities take for granted. A companion financial problem is that counties and special districts rely heavily on property taxes, and the Gallagher amendment in the state constitution currently taxes business and commercial property about four times as much per dollar of valuation as residential property.
Since such largely residential communities like Highlands Ranch have disproportionately less of the business and commercial property that pays the lion’s share of property taxes, the low overall property tax collections make it difficult to provide a high level of services for such areas.
Converting unincorporated areas into municipalities like Centennial eases the burden on property taxes because cities can impose sales taxes to support public services. As a political bonus, at least part of those sales-tax revenues come from shoppers who live outside of a city.
Regardless of the future status of Highlands Ranch, its new combined board will provide the benefit of being able to administer a consistent service level in a master- planned community that has already achieved a high quality of life on a relatively modest budget of $14.6 million this year.
