Greeley Tribune just dropped a spicy little nugget about the Greeley City Council contemplating tax increases. Written with all the enthusiasm of a DMV pamphlet, it outlines various balloon-float ideas around slapping more fees on citizens—because apparently inflation isn’t hitting hard enough. Thanks to Colorado’s beautiful invention called TABOR, though, the people will make the final decision, not the policy wonks at city hall.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Greeley council is toying with tax hike ideas because… why not? It’s not their wallets.
- TABOR means voters get the final say—bless that sweet constitutional check.
- They’re debating between funding critical fire services or homelessness initiatives. Because apparently survival is now optional.
- Councilmember Butler thinks fighting homelessness is a higher priority than fighting fires. What could go wrong?
- Meanwhile, taxpayers are caught in another episode of Choose Your Own Financial Screwing.
My Bottom Line
At a time when families are teetering between paying rent and affording beef jerky, Greeley’s tossing around tax hikes like Halloween candy—and I don’t care that I’ve got friends on the council. Friends or not, this smells like the government doing what it does best: asking for more without fixing what’s broken in the first place.
Let me translate this bureaucratic doublespeak: instead of properly funding your fire protection (a.k.a., NOT letting your town burn like some low-rent version of ‘The Hunger Games’), they’re debating if maybe putting those dollars toward homeless housing should come first. Look—I believe helping the homeless matters. But priorities aren’t sexist—they’re just cruelly confined by reality and math. Fire doesn’t wait politely while we sort out housing shortages. If you can’t call 911 and get fire suppression rapidly deployed, guess what? You’re officially part of Colorado’s newest climate change mitigation program: Unintentional Urban Wildfires.
And here comes TABOR—Colorado’s voter-approved buzzkill to bureaucratic overreach—to save our bacon again. Thank God for constitutional speed bumps that force elected officials to ask before they reach into your wallet elbow-deep. Because let’s face it—without TABOR, we’d already be paying tax surcharges for imaginary community gardens and six new diversity managers in each office.
Councilmember Butler might mean well trying to fix homelessness, but if he can’t see how that conversation starts AFTER we’ve made sure people aren’t dying in apartment fires due to underfunded emergency services… then I suggest he spend a week as a volunteer firefighter pulling cats out of HVAC systems while understaffed and underpaid.
One last thought: if you’re going to ask Greeley’s working-class families to scrape together more cash mid-inflation crisis, your plan better be precise, prioritized, and air-tight. We need leaders who know how to balance compassion with common sense—a unicorn combo that shouldn’t feel rarer than Bigfoot riding Nessie through Seeley Lake. I’m pretty sure the City of Greeley has them, but this is a whole lotta talk about taxin’.
