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A Pitkin County property tax question on the November ballot is aimed at creating housing with partners in the valley, county officials told the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority during a board meeting on Wednesday.
If approved, the ballot question would institute a new property tax of 1.5 mills for no longer than 25 years, amounting to a $121 increase per $1 million of residential property value. The tax would generate a roughly $8.5 million fund that Ashley Perl, community resiliency director for the county, told the APCHA Board the county could use for partnering on housing projects in the valley, creating deed restrictions, building new affordable housing projects, helping stock existing housing capital reserve funds and more.
APCHA Board Vice Chair John Ward asked Perl and APCHA board member Francie Jacober (who also sits on the Pitkin County board of commissioners, for which she is running for reelection) what the meat of the $8.5 million would go toward, especially with outstanding infrastructure needs at existing properties like the Phillips Mobile Home Park site.
Ward asked if that site was a separate issue that wouldn’t be addressed with the new tax.
Jacober said it’s not necessarily its own issue, but plans for the tax are still to be determined.
“(Phillips) is not entirely a separate issue. We have $7 million right now in our housing fund, more or less, and we’re pretty committed to applying that towards Phillips first,” Jacober said. “It’s not written down in any kind of contractual way, but we’re trying to work with partners … and so I think really this $8 million a year figure is really just to get us a seat at the table to create housing for people.
“It’s not specifically for anything. Really, it’s a lever to get us a seat at the table so that we can work with partners to create housing and continued maintenance of housing in whatever form that might take,” she added.
Ward suggested starting a partnership to fund infrastructure at the mobile home site potentially with some of the tax dollars. Pitkin County purchased the mobile home site six years ago for $6.5 million to prevent displacing employees from their housing at a site that could have been purchased and used to build multi-million dollar homes. The county board agreed to add 35 units to the site and look for construction partners in January, but infrastructure upgrades alone will cost over $10 million, Perl said during the APCHA meeting.
Jacober did not leave the mobile home site out of the conversation as a way to use some of the funds, but emphasized that it was still up in the air where tax dollars would go if voters approved the mill levy, and the county was adamant on primarily using the funds to work with community partners, like APCHA.
APCHA Chair Carson Schmitz said the board would need to be creative in how it used any funds the county might provide the housing authority if the tax increase passed.
“If this passes, and obviously I hope it does, I mean there’s going to be … a tremendous demand for these funds,” Schmitz said. “I think that, on the capital reserve piece, that’s where we have to try and get creative to maximize the efficiency of any dollars that we request.”