Sneak Peek of the Week
Colorado resort towns lining up plans for a tax on vacant homes
205,621
Number of unoccupied homes in Colorado in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau
There are very few short-term rental homes that do not pay special lodging taxes in Colorado. Most communities have limits and regulations governing vacation homes. State lawmakers have considered quadrupling property taxes on the state’s 24,000-plus short-term rental homes.
Across Colorado, dozens of cities, towns and counties are working to slow the explosion of vacation rentals while simultaneously squeezing more tax revenue from them. This year, a coalition of resort communities is planning to lobby lawmakers to help ease the process for taxing vacant homes. The Colorado Association of Ski Towns, or CAST, also hopes to secure legislation enabling local governments to impose a fee on every real estate sale.
There are no communities in Colorado that tax empty homes, but the growing challenge of building affordable housing for workers in mountain communities where real estate prices are soaring and as many as 40% of homes are unoccupied is fueling creative thinking around new revenue sources.
“We are not asking the legislature to make it so. This just clears some potential land mines for communities who might want to do this,” said Jonathan Godes, a councilman in Glenwood Springs and president of CAST, which is promoting the legislation for the coming session.
There are other vacant-home taxes under consideration outside the state as destinations grapple with a housing crisis in areas with large numbers of vacation homes.
In South Lake Tahoe, voters this fall will weigh a tax on homeowners whose properties are empty more than 182 days a year. The tax — $3,000 per unit for the first year of vacancy and $6,000 for subsequent years — would support building more housing for working locals. In Hawaii, lawmakers have spent two years debating legislation that would impose a 3% tax on the assessed value of homes that are vacant for more than 180 days a year. The legislation is meant to deter real estate speculation in a state where investors from afar now spend as much as $5 billion a year on homes, up from $500 million in 2008.
Most vacancy tax proposals point to Vancouver in British Columbia, where a 3% annual tax rate based on the assessed value of empty homes that launched in 2017 has raised $142 million in revenue for affordable housing in the city while reducing the number of vacant homes in the city by 54%.
The proposal from CAST says the vacancy fee legislation would authorize local governments “to disincentivize those vacancies with local taxes.”
>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
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In Their Words
Thousands of dead fish in Sloan’s Lake ignites calls for action at the shallow, warm lake
2,000
Estimated number of fish killed by an algae bloom in Sloan’s Lake last weekend
It’s not uncommon to see dead crappie bobbing along the shores of Sloan’s Lake. Last weekend, there were about 2,000 rotting fish in the lake as temperatures neared 100 degrees for several days in a row.
Park officials blame a toxic algae bloom in Denver’s largest body of water for the fish die-off. Same as they did in 2020. And 2015. And 2007.
Sloan’s may be large, but it’s shallow. So when temperatures get hot, so does the lake water.
Park officials try to cool the lake with water from the Rocky Mountain Ditch, which stretches 19 miles across the metro area from its origins on the banks of Clear Creek below the Coors brewery. That ditch traverses Lakewood and Wheat Ridge and, along with 23 storm drains, it’s filling Sloan’s Lake with sediment. And probably a lot of other stuff as it drains the metro area.
The solution for Sloan’s Lake is digging, says the Sloan’s Lake Park Foundation, a group of citizens working to restore the watery gem in Denver’s park system.
Filling it with irrigation water or water from Rocky Mountain Ditch is “fighting a losing battle,” the foundation’s spokesman Kurt Weaver told Sun reporter Tracy Ross.
“The lake’s demise is imminent if we do not act to dredge it back to a healthy depth and improve the water flow,” Weaver said.
>> Click here to read Tracy’s story
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Breaking Trail
A place to play for everyone
“Something for everyone.” That’s the mission of a growing movement to develop more parks, playgrounds and programs for kids with disabilities.
The National Park and Recreation Association’s theme for its annual monthlong celebration of parks is “Where You Belong” and champions recreation that can foster community.
“A lot don’t feel they do belong,” Kara Kish, the director of parks for Loveland told Sun freelancer Dan England. “But in the last five years, universal access has been the new standard. The primary drive is the commitment to be in service to everyone.”
A new park under construction in Berthoud, for example, will offer a smooth surface, swings, monkey bars and a merry-go-round that will work for Miles Bowling, a 7-year-old with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair. His parents, Lauren and Richard Bowling, helped raise funds to develop Berthoud’s first inclusive playground.
“Miles will be able to play on monkey bars with other boys,” Lauren said.
Denver park builders now infuse inclusive access into all new parks.
“It’s a conversation we are going to have every time a park is in the planning stage,” said Owen Wells, the district park planning supervisor for Denver Parks and Recreation.
It isn’t about a single piece of adaptive playground equipment as much as incorporating inclusive and accessible features across the entirety of the park.
“The idea is we want people to be together,” Wells said. “It doesn’t meet that goal if a kid is playing on a piece of equipment in a section of the park by himself.”
After years of work by parents and advocates, more towns, big and small, are weighing accessibility and inclusivity when developing parks, recreation programs and playgrounds.
“I think we are in a moment where the industry is evolving a little bit,” Wells said.
>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Dan’s story
The Playground
Historic Cozens Meadow is battlefield pitting residents against community developer in Fraser
The sheriff of Central City, Billy Cozens, was ready to settle someplace quiet. The idyllic home he and his new wife, Mary Cozens, built in the late 1800s was among the first homesteads in the Fraser River Valley. It became a popular stagecoach stop and ended up on the National Register of Historic Places.
Now the meadow along Highway 40 that was once the Cozens’ backyard is a battlefield pitting Fraser residents against a developer. That developer, Clark Lipscomb, has plans for homes and hotel rooms there. The residents say a 2003 agreement promised that Cozens Meadows would be forever protected in a conservation easement.
The fiery fight over the historic meadow is headed to a jury trial as Lipscomb pushes proposals for more development in his Grand Park community in Fraser, just outside Winter Park.
When Amanda Erath moved to Grand Park in 2019, she would go cross-country skiing in the winter in Cozens Meadow. In the summer her neighbors play Frisbee golf there.
Now Lipscomb has fenced and gated the area and filled the meadow with grazing cows. The latest proposals for homes and hotels in the meadow pushed Erath — and about two dozen of her neighbors — to publicly plead with town planners to better protect Cozens Meadow.
“He is, piece by piece, destroying one of the most beautiful areas in our community,” Erath said in an interview. “We shouldn’t have this level of development without also thinking about how it will impact the community and addressing that at the same time.”
Trail sabotage near Telluride
It’s been almost three weeks since dirt bikers on Forest Service singletrack near Telluride found two wires strung across Wilson Mesa Trail.
“It’s an irrational act so it’s probably an irrational motivation,” said San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, who bumped a $500 reward for information to $1,000 after dirt bikers reported a second wire.
Masters and Forest Service rangers said dirt bikers reported the wires in different locations on the Wilson Mesa Trail on July 2 and July 10. Deputies closed the trail briefly to search for clues between Forest Service Roads 645 and 623.
The trail is one of the few in eastern San Miguel County that are multiple use, open to hikers, mountain bikers, dirt bikers and horse riders.
“Is it someone who doesn’t like motorcycles? Is it someone who knows someone who rides that trail everyday and the guy ran off with his girlfriend? We don’t know much right now,” said Masters, who has been the sheriff of San Miguel County for 45 years. In social media statements seeking information and warning trail travelers, Masters called the wires “an act of indiscriminate violence” by a “malicious individual.”
Trail sabotage pops up in Colorado every few years. In 2016, mountain bikers found boards with protruding nails on Bureau of Land Management bike trails outside Eagle. That year, mountain bikers also found spike-embedded bricks on mountain bike trails in the Pike National Forest. In 2014, there were spiked boards buried on the Prince Creek trails outside Carbondale.
A British Columbia woman was arrested in 2015 after mountain bikers set up trail cameras to capture the avid hiker dragging tree limbs across trails near her home. In 2013, a 57-year-old Oregon psychiatrist went to jail for booby-trapping mountain bike trails on Forest Service land.
“People get upset with different trail users. Hikers with dogs, ATVs, Jeeps, bikers, people riding their horses and motorcycles. They definitely come into conflict with each other,” Masters said. “Since I moved to Colorado 51 years ago the population has tripled. There are a lot more people out here and we are getting more and more in each other’s way.”
— j
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