Mindy Leary, Gilpin County. On Thursday, July 9, 2020, Gilpin County hosted an online meeting via Zoom about forming a board and the process of establishing the recreation center as a special district. Commissioners Gail Watson, Linda Isenhart and Ron Engels were in attendance, as were County Manager Abel Montoya, Business Analyst Jamie Tirado and County Attorney Bradford Benning. Montoya hosted the meeting. 

The meeting involved live, online surveys, a new feature, which will be used to understand general public sentiment, not for voting on any issues. The first set of questions received 41 responses.

Montoya said this meeting will decide if the community would like to meet in smaller focus groups and frequency of the future meetings. Ultimately, this meeting was seeking citizen champions who would like to push this cause forward.

The county’s financial crisis caused the closure of the community center and to layoff workforce. Three million in revenue has already been lost, with a possible 48 million dollar loss over the next eight years. Something to consider is that it would take 7-8 years for the county to recover and fund the rec center like it once did.

Jaime Tirado offered his email contact to anyone who would like to be part of the discussion but can’t participate in the surveys which is jtirado@gilpincounty.org. He will be monitoring the website as well and will end the surveys next week.

What the community wants from the center is key in forming a cost allocation plan. Deciding what services should be offered will be a long, complex process with many more meetings to come. Areas of interest that may become focus groups include the gym, fitness classes, after-school care, pottery, senior programs, seasonal events, etc.

Some ideas to fund the community center are creating a parks and rec special district, raising the mill levy and/or adopting a sales tax, non-profit espousal, and volunteer/fee-based system.

Benning stressed that this meeting is about facilitating to the public on how to form a special district which is a government entity with a board of directors separate from the County. Funding is traditionally debt taken on by the organizers who then offset the debt with a mill levy. Required by law, the service plan delineates the services the district will provide, how it will fund those services and the scope of its powers.

It would cost approximately two mills in property taxes, meaning it could meet the budget of two million dollars per year to operate the center. Mill levies are paid by both residential and commercial property owners. Mill levies would not affect school funding.

All protocol emergency operations would continue to occur on the community center campus, regardless of its operation status.

One obstacle to instituting a sales tax is an agreement between Black Hawk and Gilpin County Schools that one million dollars would be given to the schools as long as there’s no sales tax. A 1% sales tax produces about one million dollars per year and more research needs to be done to know how much sales tax would be necessary to fund both the school and the community center.

A mill levy or sales tax question could go on the ballot in November 2021. Commissioner Watson suggested having a mill levy sunset bill based on the creation of a special district because generally property taxes are more stable than sales tax. 

One idea was to effectively contract out the various departments of the community center to special groups that would rent, fund and control those departments. Another idea was setting up a GoFundMe.   

Creative, solution-based questions and ideas were successfully discussed during this initial meeting, setting an optimistic tone for the future of Gilpin County’s Community Center.

Check the county website for upcoming meetings concerning the Gilpin County Community Center at https://stories.opengov.com/gilpincountyco/published/xUOjgcjGk.