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An anticipated plateau in revenue growth in Snowmass Village is contributing to a conservative 2025 budget, Town Manager Clint Kinney told councilmembers on Monday.
After experiencing several years of growth that town staff attributes partially to the growth of Base Village and increased tax monies, the town is anticipating that growth to slow and is reflecting it in the proposed 2025 budget.
“I think one of the fundamental issues for the council to know is that we are expecting growth rates to curtail and revenues to moderate going forward,” Kinney said during a Monday town council meeting. “Over the last several years … we’ve been in a growth phase, revenues between Base Village, RETT have been increasing, and this budget is put together with the idea that that rate of growth will curtail. There’s nothing concerning, but we try and take a very conservative approach to those revenue sources.”
The town typically underestimates revenues during the budget process to ensure it won’t overspend. The budget estimates $159 million in revenues and $169 million in expenditures. Funds that have stacked up in recent years in the town’s general fund reserves will go toward balancing the budget, Kinney said.
One of the largest expenditures in the town’s budget, personnel services, is increasing only 4% in 2025, compared to 7% in 2024. The $23 million personnel services budget accounts for only one new full-time position, though several departments requested new positions for 2025.
“Everything was larger last year, the increases were larger, we added more positions, and I mean, this is kind of that theme of, we understand we’re plateauing, that we can’t grow at the same rate, that we need to be far more conservative in some of these expenditures and so yes, all of this is much less than 2024,” he said.
“I think it’s obvious, but personnel is expensive and so there were a number of requests for a new position this year, and I can say all of them were worthy, and could do good things for the community … but after reviewing all the requests and just understanding the revenue projections, we decided to only add one new full-time position.”
The town is proposing a new full-time police officer to help improve officer safety for the one on-duty officer per day. The $913,000 increase in personnel services also includes raises and increased benefits.
Kinney called the 2025 budget “exceptionally capital intensive.” About $123 million will be spent on capital projects.
“It’s a big number there’s no doubt, but it’s also something I think, as a town government, we should be proud of,” Kinney said. “We are trying to invest in infrastructure, catch up on projects that have not been invested in.”
The largest capital projects include the Draw site affordable housing project ($86 million), land acquisition for affordable housing projects at the Snowmass Center ($12.5 million), the Little Red Schoolhouse redevelopment ($8.5 million), and an Upper Woodbridge Road culvert replacement ($2.75 million).
Funding for the Draw site hinges on voter approval. Snowmass voters will be asked to approve the town’s request to spend $86 million on the 79-unit housing project in November. If approved, the town likely would not spend all $86 million in 2025. It could be reappropriated for future years as construction gets underway.
“We don’t start a project unless we’ve got all the dollars earmarked to begin with,” Kinney said. “So we want to make sure we can get from the beginning to the end, we don’t want to get halfway through and run out (of money).”
The proposed budget includes property tax collections at 100%, but the town’s financial advisory board suggested collecting only 75% of available property tax revenues in 2025. The town council voted to collect 50% of available property tax dollars in the 2024 budget in an attempt to ease the burden on taxpayers.
The town’s Financial Advisory Board encouraged collecting only 75% of property tax revenues as long as the collections would not hamstring revenues for road projects. It was one of the reasons some council members were hesitant to collect only 50% of available property taxes in 2024.
“As you may recall, last year the council agreed they’ll only go 50% of the allowable increase based on what they could increase property taxes to. The [advisory board] thinks another 25% is a good measured increase for the council to consider to use those allowable revenue increases,” said FAB member Shawn Gleason.
“Also, this should not decrease or come away from the expenditures on the roads. One concern that the FAB had was that we didn’t want to curtail the road spending in order to meet this goal of reducing that revenue,” Gleason said.
But the town’s healthy general fund reserve balance could make up the difference, if needed, for work on road projects, Snowmass Finance Director Marianne Rakowski told the town council.
Collecting 100% of available property tax revenues would cost homeowners $446.89 per $1 million of property value and would result in $5.7 million of property tax revenue for the town. Collecting only 75% of available property tax revenues would cost homeowners $407.09 per $1 million of property value.
Council members appeared to agree with updating the budget to reflect only 75% of property tax collection. But they still have several budget presentations to go before approving the budget and the suggested mill levy rates.
“I think it’s something that we should seriously consider,” Mayor Bill Madsen said. “I think our property owners were quite pleased that we didn’t take the entire amount last year, so I think getting another 25% this year and maybe get the full amount next year is a good recommendation.”