As the Cortez City Council prepares to ask voters for an increase in the lodgers’ tax, one member wants to use some of the resulting revenues for water infrastructure.
The proposed ballot measure, if approved, would raise the lodgers’ tax from its current 2 percent to 6 percent.
Montezuma County is also seeking to raise the lodgers’ tax in the unincorporated areas of the county.
Draft language for the Cortez measure says the revenues are “to be used to invest in tourism marketing, attracting and facilitating economic development and investment within the City including walkability, landscaping, and other improvements, and investing in arts and cultural events, programs, and facilities.”
At the July 28 council meeting, council member April Randle spoke about a report the board had just heard during their workshop, given by the engineering firm SGM. The report, which is a 2026 water system master plan, says the city needs to make major investments to deal with its aging water infrastructure.
Randle said there has been “Significant infrastructure neglect that has happened for many years here. We haven’t had funding or resources to keep up with a multitude of our infrastructures.”
She said the problem of water infrastructure was particularly concerning, “because water is life here in the Southwest.”
She said the state allows lodgers’ taxes to be used for public infrastructure.
“I propose we modify our proposed ordinance to have 50 percent go to water infrastructure, 50 percent for the uses outlined in the proposed ordinance,” Randle said.
She said hotels and motels are high-demand water users, with swimming pools, laundry service, and guests taking showers.
Council member Claire West agreed about the need to fix water infrastructure but said the lodgers’ tax would raise just hundreds of thousands of dollars when millions would be needed.
“You wouldn’t put a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound,” West said, “and if your patient needed a liter of blood, you wouldn’t give them two milliliters. I think that the amount of money is a critical aspect of this. It can buy a lot of nice sidewalks but it’s probably not going to replace our failing water systems.”
Mayor Dennis Spruell said the appropriate time to discuss those issues will be at the second reading of the proposed ordinance, on Tuesday, August 11.
Gail Binkly is a career journalist who has worked for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Cortez Journal, and was the editor of the Four Corners Free Press, based in Cortez.