To incorporate, or not...

To Incorporate or Not Incorporate That is the Question. Creating a city where there isn’t one can look appealing when you don’t like the level of services and/or the decisions the county is making, or you think your part of world may be a target for an annexation to an existing city. Fulton County in Georgia has seen three incorporations in the last few years and El Paso County has seen two attempts, both of which failed but for very different reasons.

Colorado State law requires the county to continue to provide services for one year after the incorporation, giving the new city time to collect tax revenues and be up and running. After that initial year the city would have the option of contracting for services like road maintenance, snow removal and police protection from the county or any other provider.

The Black Forest incorporation attempt came about as a result of some residents wanting direct control of land use decisions. Black Forest has no significant commercial base, which pays over 3 times the tax rate of residential property and gives a city the opportunity to impose a sales tax. While it was a well organized campaign, the cost of maintaining the roads and providing police protection would have had to be borne by the home owners and was defeated.

Falcon, on the other hand, had the commercial tax base with new retail development and wanted to both control future development and provide better road maintenance. This incorporation attempt chose not to get professional legal help in organizing a new city government, and it came across as somewhat haphazard and was also defeated.

Commissioner District 4 has the largest number of citizens living in unincorporated El Paso County, with Widefield on the south giving way to Security and then the Stratmoor area. A city that included all or even most of that area would be around 50,000 people, the county’s second largest city and 15th in the state. But for what gain? After a year, suddenly the new city would be paying for police protection and road maintenance, and with little commercial we would be in the same situation as the Black Forest residents and looking at a substantial property tax increase.
Standing up a new government is challenging, but with water, sanitation, and fire services already existing and the ability to contract out for everything from technical reviews to road repairs it is certainly not insurmountable. But, that brings us back to the question of what would we gain other than higher property taxes, at least until some of the commercial property in unincorporated  Fountain Valley is developed, which may be may be sooner rather than later.

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