In this upcoming April municipal election, Silverthorne residents will see a ballot question asking them to raise the tax on lodging from 6% to 8% to help fund a recreation center expansion and a new police facility.
Last municipal election voters approved hiking the lodging tax by 4 percentage points, taking it from 2% to 6%.
Assistant town manager Mark Leidal said the town sees both of these construction projects as necessities, yet the town does not currently have the funds on hand to complete them.
A report was completed this August for the town’s facilities master plan, it detailed a need for a larger police facility. The report noted the police department’s current space needs are greater than what Town Hall, its current location, can provide.
Town officials said the police department is not operating at the capacity it needs to be and that this is causing the level of service to be inadequate. For an adequate police department, the report calls for a new space that is approximately 25% larger than the current one. It also calls for more employees.
The police department currently serves around 5,000 people. With a growing population, officials say changes need to happen in the next few years to keep up.
Officials said the Town Hall location is not fit for a police department, too. They said it is standard practice to have a secure place to park police vehicles, and town hall does not necessarily provide that with its close proximity to other buildings and its shared parking lot. They emphasized how this is particularly important for transporting evidence and suspects.
Moving police out of town hall would open up a whole wing of that building for the town to expand into, as the facilities needs assessment also highlighted a need for more office space for town operations.
Officials have a preliminary estimated budget of $27 million to build a new police facility. Leidal said the hope is to design a new facility in 2025 and begin building it in 2026.
Similarly, the proposed expansion of the recreation center is also aimed at accommodating a growing population.
“We’re in a growing community, and we have all these new housing (projects) and residents. … We’re finding that the recreation center has been busting at the seams,” Leidal said.
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Officials noted the proposed expansion is largely being propelled by the overwhelming amount of people the center has at its peak times.
If approved, this would expand the square footage of the building which town staff said would allow for more programming. Exact planning for what the expansion would include is up in the air with the exception of one aspect.
“The only thing on the menu right now … is a certain amount of square footage that we could get licensed for school-age care,” recreation and culture director Joanne Cook said.
This expansion project would be significant and is anticipated to cost the town $15 million. Leidal said hopefully planning for this expansion would begin in 2024 with construction starting in 2025.
This lodging tax applies to any lodging businesses that rent to visitors for 30 days or fewer, including hotels, motels and short-term rentals. When voters first approved the tax, they simultaneously approved the fund’s usage, which designated that 85% of the tax revenue would go to parks, trails and open space acquisitions and 15% to town marketing.
Until voters approved the 4% jump last year, the town had not increased this tax since 1998.
Breckenridge, Dillon and Frisco also all have lodging taxes. Breckenridge’s lodging tax, or its accommodations tax, is 3.4%. Frisco’s rate is 2.35% and Dillon’s is 6%.
