Part 2 of Polis' false choice on Prop HH. The interconnection queue problem. And, contact your state senator or rep and tell them to take Senator Pelton up on his offer.
The False Choice on lower property taxes or local government services like libraries, water districts, and heroic firefighters: checking Polis' claim on Prop HH and taxes in general. Part 2 of 2.
Since CPR's Ryan Warner (nor did KOA"s Ross Kaminsky frankly) let it pass by without comment, I'm going to wade in here and do a quick sanity check on Polis' claims re. Prop HH.**
More details are below, but let me quickly summarize the top points of this post for you here:
1. "Slashing" (as Polis claims the state is doing to property tax values) is a misnomer. On a $250,000 home your home's taxable value will go down about 1%.
2. If you do not vote for Prop HH, you are not going to take money out of the hands of your fire district, library, water district, or schools. It is possible to fund local government more than we do now AND keep more money in your wallet.
3. The doesn't have to backfill any revenue because none will be lost. It will just be a smaller increase. If the state did decide to keep local government's happy by increasing their revenues, they always could. It's just that the Democrats running the state don't want to eat into their other policy priorities to do so.
5. The state backfilling local revenues is not always because they're nice. They're required to by law.
Okay. Let's get started.
Before anything else, take a look at screenshots 1 and 2 attached. They are quotes from Polis' interview with CPR's Ryan Warner.
Reading them some themes, some framing, emerges here. Notably, that your rates are being slashed and the state is, since local governments won't provide relief, having to step in. And in doing so, they're going to use historic budget surpluses to make up for lost revenue to local governments. There seems to be no other way to do it.
Let's knock on the door and ask for Ronnie Real.
Take a look at screenshots 3 and 4. I did a quick Excel Worksheet to calculate your home's taxable value if Prop HH passes and if it doesn't pass for a variety of home values. To see yours, take the value closest to your home's current market value and read across.
The last column in screenshot 3 is percent decrease in your home's taxable value (as a percent of your home's market value) for Prop HH. Screenshot 4 is a graph of same for the visual folks.
Some things are notable here:
--Slash is a bit strong. Does your home's taxable value (and thus your property tax) go down if Prop HH passes? Yes. Look at the gap in between the blue and orange points in the graph in screenshot 4, however. That ain't no big jump. Look at the graph that shows the percentage decrease vs. home value in the other graph. The percent decrease is never bigger than 2.5%. Hardly slashing in my book.
--Also, I want you to take note of the fact that those people whose homes are worth more get less of a reduction. Look at the mathematics of the situation: if everybody loses the same $50,000 of taxable value off the top, then those whose homes are worth more get proportionately less relief. This is reflected in the upward sweep of the second graph in screenshot 4: as home values go up, the line starts to curve up toward 0% difference in whether or not HH passes.
Now, let's address the other points. They're somewhat related, so I'll take them (mostly) together.
If you didn't read part 1 go back and read it. The idea that fixing property taxes means necessarily taking money from local governments is not accurate. It is a false choice.
Local governments will soon see record increases in revenue. As I showed in part 1, if we do nothing, local revenues may INCREASE somewhere around 22%. What this means is that if your county took in $100 in 2022, they'll take in $122 in 2023.
This is hardly in keeping with the image of schoolchildren shivering in unheated classrooms trying to learn from raggedy textbooks that have sections missing and that are falling apart.
Now, it may be that some local governments may have more services to provide due to the increases in population that have helped drive spikes in home values, but I bet that the extra homes being built and the value of the existing homes are growing faster than the increased expenditures.
In other words, the money coming in will overwhelm the money going out. It is therefore quite possible to take some increase in local revenue without killing your local government's services or your budget. What would be bad about simply capping the increase? That is, using my simple numbers above, what's wrong if your local government only collected $10 more this year instead of $22 more?
Instead, what the governor presents us is the argument that we'll be taking money out of firefighter's, librarian's, and our children's hands if we try to reduce property taxes any other way than his. This is because the one rule of government is that it must never get smaller. That it must never live within its means or reprioritize as we all have to with our own budgets.
The reality here is that the governor is casting his money shuffling scheme as necessary. Here are the broad strokes:
--He will reduce the increase in your home's taxable value from 22% to about 20%. This will reduce your property tax increase in roughly the same proportion (22% to 20%).
--He will then turn around and, by using money that is rightfully yours, give that missing 2% back to the local government so they won't gripe about his scheme.
There are multiple other ways that we could approach this. Let me toss one out there in keeping with what I wrote above. If local governments really and truly do want to keep more money so they don't gripe, the governor could still act to reduce taxable value in Coloradan's homes and then make up the shortfall by reprioritizing how the government spends the money it takes in. THAT extra money could go to local governments.
For example, maybe the state's new public union could get less of a raise. Maybe we could cut down our state's largesse to other programs to do this.
The point is that we have choices. Choices here that do not mean taking your money to make sure local governments keep as large an increase as they might want.
Oh, and one last thing: the state is not backfilling local revenues out of concern or the kindness of their hearts per se. They are legally required to in some cases. See my video below on how schools are funded for more.
**A note on sourcing Polis' quotes. Both of the attached quotes (screenshots 1 and 2) come from Ryan Warner's interview with Polis which I linked below.
https://www.cpr.org/2023/06/14/jared-polis-property-tax-ballot-measure-interview/
https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023A/bills/fn/2023a_sb303_r5.pdf
The interconnection queue problem: rushing so hard to add renewables, our regulators can't keep up.
Building out renewable energy generation is a big business now. It will be more so as the fat wads of cash from the Feds start to percolate their way down through the various local governments/agencies.
There's a problem, however. That problem is load balancing.
I won't go into tremendous technical detail, but let me attempt to explain the issue. First, let's go back to straightforward, simple ideas.
Energy is conserved. That is, it can never be made or destroyed. This applies as well to electrical as to any other.
I have a toy for my physics class where to took an old battery powered electric drill, pulled the battery and case off, and then put a crank in the chuck. If you turn the crank, you can use what was the drill's motor (and is now a generator) to make electricity.
It's a fun demo when you hook lights up to this hand-cranked generator because you can actually feel that you have to work harder when there are more lights connected to it. In other words, if you're going to try and pull more electrical energy out of the generator, you must put more in to make up for that. Energy is conserved.
The same principle applies to our grid. When people come home from work and turn on lights, TV's, ovens, the demand for power goes up and thus the things that generate that power have to increase their work to match it.
There's a wrinkle with our grid that isn't there for my little hand generator, however. Like all big things, our grid has inertia; it cannot respond quickly to changes in production or demand. Turbines take time to spin up, power might have to be brought in from other locales, etc. This takes time.
Thus, there is a lot of thought and money spent on load matching: trying to measure/predict use so that you can match resources to demand.** I heard it described as similar to air traffic control: you want to move production and excess around to the low spots to fill them.
Okay so far? Now let's talk about the issue we're having right now with connecting renewables to the grid.
Let's say that you got some money together and wanted to build a wind farm. You're busy lining up things, getting the land, the contractor, etc., but you also need to consider that you'll have to have permission to connect your turbines up to the grid.
Because your new generation capacity affects the load balancing, the "air traffic control", you need to have someone look at your project and how it can fit into the grid. They have to assess things like whether or not they can make you fit with the current assets in the grid, but they also have to make sure the equipment between your wind farm and the grid can handle the full output of your generation.
You don't want to accidentally burn out a transformer causing an outage, for example, if suddenly your turbines are being relied on to deliver lots of energy.
These studies and the way we handle the necessary upgrades are causing a problem.
One is that the study needed to assess whether or not you can join the grid is slow, getting slower, and backing up. Years-long backups in the regulatory chain to be precise.
The second is that the person who is adding the capacity is the one who gets the bill for any needed upgrades. Is the high tension line that would carry your power out not big enough? Few transformers need to be replaced? You, the wind farm owner, get to fund that.
Both of these things are causing uncertainty (and thus cost) to renewables. There are plans in the works to try and speed up the interconnection studies, but the problem is right now big and getting bigger (and this likely will continue before any fixes have a chance to catch up).
There are also various schemes to ease the "developer pays" problem. Want to know one way that's been proposed? Have us taxpayers foot the bill. Colorado is doing this to a certain extent with our Power Pathways program (an outgrowth of both legislative efforts and efforts by Xcel).
If you want to know more, I included a couple links below. The first is to a story on the interconnection problem itself (along with some info on proposed regulatory fixes). The second is to Xcel's page on the Power Pathways program.
**There is a pretty lively debate in the renewables community about whether or not we can narrow the gap to getting more renewable energy into the grid by having a tighter match between consumption and production. For example, you can model better and measure things on a more frequent basis to try and shuttle power from areas with lots of sunlight to those without. I think the jury's still out on whether this will be ultimately feasible and whether/how much we can eliminate/reduce baseline power generation with nuclear, coal, or storage.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/energy-transition-interconnection-reform-ferc-qcells/628822/
https://www.coloradospowerpathway.com/
Contact your state Senator and State Rep and tell him or her to take Senator Pelton up on his offer.
Wanting to do something to help the folks along the Front Range understand the challenges and joys of rural life?
Conversely, do you live along the Front Range and want those around you to know the same?
Email or call your State Senator and Rep and tell them that they should take the offer below: go on a two day tour around rural Colorado. Learn something.
https://theprowersjournal.com/2023/06/letter-to-the-editor-he-eastern-plains-are-vital-to-colorado-by-senator-rod-pelton-senate-district-35/?fbclid=IwAR3J4Eg06nrXdVmV6coI6hubeB1ptJX0zuZIOOMgN3Ctj_ayDy0RdjarOAQ