Waiver of the state property tax revenue limit for the Pueblo City-County Library District

If 6A passes, the Pueblo City-County Library District would no longer be held to the state's limit on property tax revenue, which allows 5.25% growth for each year of the reassessment cycle over a base year and is set out in section 29-1-1702 of the Colorado Revised Statutes. The district's boundaries are the same as Pueblo County's, so every county voter decides the question. The waiver would apply "FOR ALL FUTURE PROPERTY TAX YEARS." The state law behind the limit lets a district ask for a waiver for a single year, for a stated number of years or for all future years; the trustees chose the third, so the waiver has no end year. The trustees are scheduled to adopt the 2027 budget and mill levy on December 10, 2026. The ballot question does not name a first property tax year.

The question describes the waiver as "WITHOUT INCREASING TAXES." It does not raise the district's voter-approved rate of 5.85 mills. It asks that the district be allowed "TO REALIZE THE FULL BENEFIT OF ITS CURRENT VOTER AUTHORIZED PROPERTY TAX RATE," which is the revenue that rate produces when the limit no longer caps it. A second clause asks that "ALL DISTRICT REVENUES BE COLLECTED, RETAINED, AND SPENT NOTWITHSTANDING ANY REVENUE LIMITS PROVIDED BY LAW." The question states no dollar amount.

Three other county questions reach some of the same property: 6C, which would waive the same limit for the Pueblo West Metropolitan District to fund its parks and recreation department; 7B, which would add 11.652 mills for the Rye Fire Protection District; and 6D, which would bring more land into the Edison Fire Protection District. None of them changes the library's limit or levy.

On August 27, 2026, the trustees approved by voice vote a resolution supporting the question. The library's attorney, Bart Miller of Collins Cole Winn & Ulmer, presented that resolution at an August 18 work session. The minutes of the session say the Colorado Fair Campaign Practices Act bars the district from spending public money to advocate for the question but lets the board adopt a resolution stating its support and its reasons, which could be posted on the library's website and on an outside campaign website linked from the resolution.

Under the current rule, a library district's "qualified property tax revenue" for a tax year may not grow by more than the limit. The law sets the limit in three steps:

• It starts from the district's counted property tax revenue, the revenue left after the exclusions below, in its highest-revenue year of the previous reassessment cycle.
• It adds a growth allowance of 5.25% multiplied by the number of tax years in the current reassessment cycle. The district's 2026 budget applies this as a 10.5% limit.
• It adds a carryover when the district collected less than it was allowed in the last cycle.

The law leaves several kinds of revenue out of the count, so they can grow without touching the limit: revenue from new construction, from annexed land and from property that was exempt and becomes taxable; revenue freed when a tax increment financing arrangement ends; revenue from producing mines and oil and gas property; taxes abated or refunded; specific ownership tax on vehicles; payments on voter-approved bonds outstanding on November 5, 2024; and revenue from any mill levy increase that voters approve on or after that date.

When the district's revenue would exceed the limit, the trustees must either grant a temporary property tax credit or temporarily lower the mill levy, by as much as it takes to stay under the limit. Neither step changes the underlying levy, and either can be reduced or removed later without a vote. A district that does neither must refund the revenue above the limit. The limit applies to property tax years from 2025 on, and the statute sets no end date for it.

If 6A passes, none of these steps would apply to the library district in any future year. Its revenue would be whatever its certified levy produces on the county's assessed value, with no growth cap, no temporary credit required and no refund owed under this law.

The limit does not apply to school districts, which have a separate statewide limit, or to home-rule cities and towns. Other local governments fall under it only if their voters have freed their property tax revenue from the limits of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), the 1992 constitutional amendment on state and local taxing and spending, and they are not held to the state's older 5.5% limit. The library district's approvals of 1995 and 2019, described below, put it under the limit, and its budget applies it.

The legislature created the revenue limit in Senate Bill 24-233, a bill of the 2024 regular session that the governor signed on May 14, 2024. It allowed 5.5% growth for each year after a base year and was to take effect only if voters rejected two property tax initiatives headed for the November 2024 ballot, one to reduce assessed values and one to require voter approval for keeping property tax revenue above a limit. In an extraordinary session in August, the legislature passed House Bill 24B-1001, signed September 4, 2024, which replaced the limit's 5.5% figure with the current formula and set the law to take effect October 1, 2024, if both initiatives were withdrawn from the ballot. Both came off the ballot, and the limit took effect on October 1, 2024.

House Bill 24B-1001 also lowered the share of a home's value taxed by local governments other than school districts, for 2025 and again from 2026 on; from 2026 the rate applies after the value is reduced by the lesser of 10% of its actual value, $70,000 adjusted for inflation in the first year of each subsequent reassessment cycle, or the amount that leaves an assessed value of $1,000. It also requires any local waiver question placed on the ballot after November 5, 2024, to begin "Shall the (name of the local government) waive the 5.25% property tax limit for," which is how 6A begins.

The district's 2026 budget sets a mill levy of 6.512, built from three parts:

• the 5.85 mills voters approved;
• 0.654 mills added under the 2019 ballot measure to offset revenue lost to lower assessment rates;
• 0.008 mills to recover taxes abated and refunded the year before, expected to raise $19,645.

The budget puts net assessed value at $2,514,876,547, up 9.73% from the prior year, after $159,975,693 in value assigned to tax increment financing is subtracted. It budgets property tax revenue of about $16.3 million, 17.5% more than its December 2025 estimate of 2025 collections, $13,886,131. The district's annual financial report, issued in June 2026, puts 2025 property tax revenue at $14,116,884. The budget credits most of the rise in total general fund revenue to property tax, because 2026 is "an assessment year for Pueblo County."

The budget states that the 2026 levy "adheres to the 10.50% property tax revenue limit established by Colorado House Bill 24B-1001," and its levy worksheet says the mill levy is adjusted both for the lower assessment rates and for the 10.5% revenue cap. The budget leaves open whether the cap lowered the 2026 levy: it prints the adjusted levy and no figure for the levy without the cap. The state's levy table for tax year 2025, which lists this same 6.512-mill levy, shows no temporary tax credit for the library district. Through August 2026 the district had collected $15,793,607 in property tax, 97% of the amount budgeted.

The limit binds in any year when the district's full levy, including the 2019 adjustment for lower assessment rates, would raise more than the limit allows. Without 6A, the trustees must then set the levy low enough, or grant a credit large enough, to stay under the limit for that year. With 6A, the district could levy the full rate its 2019 approval allows and keep what it raises, and property owners would pay the library the amount the credit or lower levy would have taken off their bills.

Sherri Baca, the district's executive director, raised the limit with the Pueblo Library Foundation's board in February. The foundation's minutes say she described the bill as putting "a 10.5% cap on property tax funds," and that the trustees were exploring options "to restore funding to what voters approved in 2019" and would decide later in the year on a ballot question.

The district's annual financial report says voters in 1995 raised its levy from 3.5 to 5.25 mills, effective in 1996, and authorized the district to collect and spend all revenue from any source in that year and every year after. The report places that approval under TABOR.

In November 2019, Ballot Issue 6B asked voters to raise district taxes by $1,143,328 in 2020 by adding 0.6 mills, a rate the question said would offset a tax decrease as Pueblo County retired a 1999 library bond. The question put the increase at no more than $4.29 in 2020 for each $100,000 of residential value. It also made the district's "entire mill levy rate subject to adjustment to offset refunds, abatements and changes to the percentage of actual valuation used to determine assessed valuation," and it again asked that all district revenues be "collected, retained and spent notwithstanding any limits provided by law." The campaign for it, Pueblo Library Proud, told voters that "YES on 6B = NO NEW TAXES" because the 0.6 mills voters had passed 20 years earlier were set to expire, and it said a ratchet in the state constitution, set off by rising property values in metro Denver, was costing Pueblo libraries at least $700,000 a year. The ratchet was the Gallagher Amendment, repealed in 2020, which adjusted the residential assessment rate to hold homes' share of statewide assessed value steady. The county's official results show 6B passing 25,670 to 17,569, with 59.37% voting yes.

The levy has changed every year in the financial report's ten-year table, from 5.255 mills for the 2016 budget year to 5.865 for 2020, 6.634 for 2024 and 6.1972 for 2025. Taxes levied for the district rose from $8,750,818 in 2016 to $15,050,951 in 2024, then fell to $14,201,927 in 2025, when the levy dropped to 6.1972 mills. The report says 2025 was not a revaluation year and attributes lower property tax revenue mainly to the absence of a one-time state backfill payment of $886,156 received in 2024. The audited statements report property tax revenue of $15,884,412 in 2024 and $14,116,884 in 2025, a decline of about 11.13%.

Because voters let the district keep all its revenue in 1995 and again in 2019, 6A's retention clause adds little.

An issue committee named Pueblo's Library registered with the Colorado Secretary of State on August 17, 2026, "TO SUPPORT THE REFERRED MEASURE TO WAIVE THE 5.25% PROPERTY TAX CAP AND RESTORE VOTER-APPROVED FUNDING MEASURES FROM 2019 FOR PUEBLO CITY-COUNTY LIBRARY DISTRICT." At the August 18 work session, the foundation reported a unanimous endorsement of the ballot question by its board, and the minutes say the Pueblo Library Foundation's board and the Friends of the Library's board had approved resolutions like the trustees'. At the February foundation meeting, Nick Potter, who directs the foundation, said it had given seed money to an earlier library campaign for yard signs and an education effort, and that if the foundation campaigned, library employees could help only as volunteers after hours.

The district's budget calendar schedules the proposed 2027 budget for October 13, a public hearing on it for November 19, after the election, and adoption of the levy on December 10. The 2026 budget counts on property tax for 91% of general fund revenue. Each year the district moves money from that fund to a capital fund for buildings, equipment and technology replacement; the 2026 transfer is $2,306,602. At the end of 2025 the district owed $10,555,000 on certificates of participation issued in 2020 and held a TABOR emergency reserve of $481,277. Its 2026 plan lists, as a goal, preparing for "the financial impacts of property tax legislation," with the closure of Comanche 3, a coal-fired unit at the Comanche power plant in Pueblo, among the factors named.

The district's largest taxpayer in 2025 was Public Service Co. of Colorado (Xcel), with $202,722,973 in assessed value, 8.32% of the district's total.