Benefits of Limited States Evident in Gilpin County

October 2001

The report released in October by the Colorado Public Expenditure Council recently demonstrated the benefits of limited stakes gaming in Gilpin County. CTP is a privately sponsored, nonprofit taxpayer organization that gathers and disseminates information to guide business and government decision-makers in the formation of public tax policy.

The report, written and compiled by the Council’s Center for Tax Policy’s Phyllis Resnick Terry, compares assessed valuation and property tax changes from 1999 to 2000. And though the purpose wasn’t to examine the financial health of Colorado’s counties, the various tables allow an observer to determine that, even compared to the rest of rapidly growing Colorado, Gilpin county is doing very well indeed.

For one thing, Gilpin residents benefit from living in a county with the greatest percentage of commercial property in the state. Fully 55 percent of the county’s assessed valuation is from commercial property, primarily the casinos in the gambling cities of Central City, the county seat, and Black Hawk, the only two incorporated cities in the county.

The City and Country of Denver has the next highest proportion of commercial property, at 45.15 percent and the statewide average is just 29.76 percent. That means the tax burden in Gilpin is not borne by individual homeowners, but by the casinos and related business in the county. Not surprisingly, then, the residential property in Gilpin County is just 14-1/4 percent of the county’s total, dramatically below the state’s average of 46.62 percent.

That also means the county’s mill levy burden is one of the lightest. With commercial properties taxed at a higher rate than residences, the Gilpin average mill levy of 36.4 mills is still enough to provide not only basic services, but an increasing level of amenities such as a new library, justice center, school expansions and county fair grounds - all within the last seven years.

That mill levy is less than half of the state average of 75.733; only pricey Pitkin and La Plata counties have lower average levies. Individual homeowners can testify to the decreases in tax bills as compared to the pre-gaming years. But county revenues still increased at 2.35 percent rate, more than double the statewide average of 1 percent, despite the fact that the county was one of only four counties in the state where municipal revenues from property taxes declined. The two towns actually took in nearly 20 percent less in property taxes in 2000 than in 1999, due to the rapid decline in assessed valuation of commercial properties in Central City. The decline was only greater in Delores County, while statewide, municipalities averaged a 20 percent jump in property tax revenues.

But the greatest beneficiaries of the current grown in Gilpin were the school and special districts. The county’s school district boasted a 17.9 percent jump in property tax revenues, with the bulk of that going to the RE-1 district (the Boulder Valley school district, which includes the northern half of the county, had just a 6.3 percent increase,) compared to the statewide average of 13.2 percent. And the special districts, which include several business and metropolitan improvement districts formed by the casinos themselves to facilitate infrastructure upgrades, showed a whopping 117.8 percent increase, over four times the statewide grown rate of 27.8 percent.

Combine the tax figures with the recent unemployment figures, that shown Gilpin with a 2.0 percent rate, less than half the state’s average jobless number of 4.2 percent, and it’s apparent that gaming has been a winner, economically speaking, for the citizens of “the Little Kingdom of Gilpin.”