Get Ready to Pay. Again.
Lakewood and JeffCo school have a track record of mishandling millions of dollars. Both are might be planning to ask for tax increases.
As you hold back a sob after a sob as you are looking at your grocery bill, your electricity bill, your property taxes, your home insurance, your car insurance, and basically, anything else that involves having a life, rejoice. JeffCo Schools and the City of Lakewood are about to ask for even more taxes. And while hardly anyone would argue that the teachers deserve to get paid better, looking at how JeffCo spends the money and manages the funds they had already received from the taxpayers makes one wonder. And Lakewood… Well, Lakewood never misses a chance to piss away another few million without any benefits to those that actually pay the taxes.
Multi-Decade Commitment Without the Funds to Pay for It
1) Despite the opposition from the neighborhood, Lakewood decided, under potentially false pretenses, to commit to funding the Navigation Center for at least 30 years. “At an annual operating cost of $3,000,000, that’s a $90,000,000 commitment that was not disclosed to the public. That makes the Center severely underfunded, with declining neighborhood support, and may be one reason for the proposed city sales tax hike.”
https://lakewoodinformer.com/lakewood-made-30-year-commitment-on-navigation-center
Rumor has it, the current Lakewood mayor is now doing a dog and pony show as to how and why Lakewood needs to increase the sales tax. Not to be spent on parks, the rec centers, but the initiatives which the community largely opposes and has been receiving detrimental outcomes from.
2) Some years ago, Lakewood illegally collected a few million dollars of taxes from some businesses. “With interest, the amount owed is now about $42,154,189.” That is what Lakewood now has to (per court’s ruling) to pay back to those businesses.
3) It is not uncommon for Lakewood to run a budget deficit:
“2024: Revenues: $259.9 - Expenditures: $291.4 = - $31.5
2025: Revenues: $296.2 - Expenditures: $345.3 = - $49.1
2026: Revenues: $280.5 - Expenditures: $313.4 = - $32.9”
(The numbers are in millions of dollars)
https://ssds18.substack.com/p/know-your-citys-corporate-fascists
Considering that Lakewood has been, seemingly, proactively working NOT to attract any bigger employers to Lakewood (along with JeffCo, NOT attracting anybody akin to Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Google, AWS, etc.), we could venture a guess that economically things are not projected to look up for this here area.
As I gleaned from my conversation with Jeslin Shahrezaei in April (before the election for the infamous zoning changes), who is likely to vie for the next mayor of Lakewood, it is selfish of me to keep insisting that Lakewood and JeffCo and the state should have been working on a train line from Golden to DTC, along 470. You see, according to her logic, that line would only benefit me and not the thousands of people who may want to live in the Foothills, but go to work where the jobs are, without having to drive.
The recent firings at the HQ of 1st Bank of Lakewood are just another blow to the local economy, which, again Lakewood has done less than zero to bolster with attracting a diversified cadre of employment opportunities with better pay. Good luck finding anything that pays $100,000 (which is about $50,000 in 2001 dollars) or more around this area.
Who exactly is going to bear the brunt of the asked-for tax increases?
Lets Look at those Achievements
Which brings us to JeffCo Schools. The outgoing superintendent has been patting herself on the back for this and that achievement. Lets look at the achievements from a parent’s and a taxpayer’s point of view.
1) Handing over a multi-million dollar asset to Lakewood to be used in a manner that further degrades the quality of life for a neighborhood (with several more to, potentially, to come). Contributing further to miss-allocating taxpayer-funded assets to something that might actually be detrimental to a neighborhood that some of the taxpayers live in. Check.
2) Not once even bothering (and this goes for the prior and the current education boards as well) to glean anything from the statistics provided by the OECD. As far as expenditure per student and the education attainment commensurate with that:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html
Or, what other leading countries are doing to have the levels of education achievement much higher than that of the U.S. (and Colorado, and JeffCo) and how do they allocate their education dollars (Euros, Swiss Franks, Singapore Dollars, etc.) per student.
Or that those same leaders are now drastically re-engineering their use of technology in the classrooms. You know, stuff that any “education leader” should be studying for fun, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not check?
3) Not firing more of the district-level admins and concentrating the budget on the teachers and the classrooms.
If, say, you actually targeted Communications, HR, and Strategy specifically, you could likely hit a 15% reduction (roughly $9 million) without touching a single principal or counselor.
Communications: By cutting the PR team, social media managers, and “community engagement” staff, you save on salaries and expensive “brand” consulting fees.
Strategy/Innovation: These offices often manage “long-term initiatives” that many see as red tape. Cutting them stops the “initiative fatigue” teachers often complain about.
HR: While you need someone to process payroll and health insurance, you can cut the “recruitment marketing” and “talent development” layers.
So, instead of making some non-commitment statements about, maybe, reducing the admin staff at the district level to the tune of 8-11%, instead making the hard, but needed cuts where they should be made. Another not-check?
4) “In 2018, Jeffco voters approved a $567 million bond package for district-wide capital improvements. To win broad public support, the district committed to upgrading facilities at every single school across the county.
However, because these promises were tied to specific buildings regardless of enrollment trends, the district continued pouring millions into renovations even as enrollment plummeted. By the time the board voted in late 2022 to shutter the 16 schools due to declining numbers, over $20 million had already been spent on interior renovations, security updates, and facility modernizations at those soon-to-be-vacant sites.”
And then, to add a bit more salt to that wound:
“There is another side to the closure costs. While the district saved roughly $12 million in annual operating expenses by shutting the schools down, they had to spend significantly more to prepare the receiving (”welcoming”) schools to handle the influx of 2,600 displaced students.
The district initially budgeted $32 million for these transitions, but an open records request later revealed that Jeffco spent $45.3 million across 22 welcoming schools.”
https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2023/12/07/jeffco-school-upgrades-cost-following-closures
So, $23,300,000 of taxpayer funds down the drain due to a self-forced mismanagement of the funds (in addition to failing to make the commensurate district-level administration cuts)? Check. The district staff who are involved with this planning fiasco should probably be added to the list to be “synergized” (or whatever terms HR would use to “streamline” and “harmonize” the “human capital”).
5) And now, JeffCo is planning to ask for tens of millions more. Even the teachers have had enough: “Both unions are now withholding endorsement of any 2026 MLO without binding written guarantees that funds will reach frontline educators rather than central administration.”
It also happens to be the sentiment shared by many Jeffco parents and teachers. When the choice is between a “Strategic Communications Specialist” and a 3rd-grade teacher, the classroom wins every time.
Once, the needed cuts in the budget are made, maybe then we could talk about, lets say, a $60-70 million MLO? Which would net about a $1000/student boost. Which then could actually result in several needed benefits:
Competitive Salaries: Stops the “brain drain” of Jeffco teachers moving to Cherry Creek or Boulder for $10k–$15k more per year.
Special Education: Fully funds paras and therapists so schools don’t have to pull from their general budget to meet legal requirements.
Security & Facilities: Addresses the massive backlog of roof repairs and HVAC upgrades in aging schools (like those in Arvada and Wheat Ridge).
Now to be fair, there are some points to consider:
If HR is cut too much, hiring becomes a bottleneck. If a background check takes six weeks instead of six days, you lose a great teacher to another district.
Crisis Comms: In a district the size of Jeffco, someone has to handle emergency alerts (snow days, lockdowns, etc.). If you cut the “Communications” department entirely, that burden often falls onto already overworked principals.
One could venture a guess that taxpayers, who still have a job for another few months, might just suggest that we should just replace HR with AI, just as we are being threatened with in our jobs… Think of a last time that the “Human Resources” was actually helpful to the “humans” within any organization.
Get Those Wallets Ready
Over a decade ago, this fool tried to advocate for more robust economic development by Lakewood, whereby once a critical mass of localized, well-paying jobs was humming along, then some of the tax revenue generated could be spent on subsidizing housing for teachers, nurses, janitors, car mechanics, etc. – you know, people we actually need in our community for it to be healthy and functioning. Driving around now, most of you don’t need a reminder of how successful Lakewood (and JeffCo) have been in doing the opposite.
Wouldn’t that be something – a city cooperating with the school district (and the residents) to create more attractive living conditions for the teachers (and other people who make a community hum along) to improve the quality of education within the city limits?
Alas, we are left with a cadre of political geniuses who have run the county, the city, the state and the school districts in to the ground (and continue to dig deeper). Instead of cutting initiatives and bureaucrats which continue to frivolously waste tens of millions of taxpayer funds, the answer is to ask for even more funds, WITHOUT showing a good faith effort of cutting back on frivolous spending AND redirecting the remaining funds to be used more effectively.
But hey, what’s another few hundred millions dollars spent over the years? It’s not like the government entities, unlike the households, have to make hard choices in how to manage their finances. Just ask for another tax increase.