Summit County’s budget runs on a calendar fiscal year starting January 1. County staff is responsible for presenting a balanced budget to the Board of County Commissioners every year. Budgets are prepared and released in accordance with guidelines from the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.

For the 1/3 that Summit County collects, your property and sales taxes go primarily toward the Summit County General Fund. This fund is the main pool that supports operations and programming for the community, and the staff who make it happen.

Additionally, sales tax and mill levy dollars go toward special funds that you, the voters, chose to support. This includes the Road & Bridge Fund, the Open Space & Trails Fund, the Transit Fund, Safety First mill levy and the Strong Future mill levy. You can learn more about our mill levies here.

Your money is spent on both state-mandated and voter-supported initiatives, including Human Services (Medicaid, SNAP, etc.); public safety; road and bridge maintenance; clerk services (marriage licenses, vehicle titling, etc.), wildfire mitigation, affordable housing and supporting the work of over 500 friends and neighbors who work to make these services happen.

Summit County is a statutory county, which means it is mandated by the state to provide specific services to the community. While the towns benefit from many of the County’s services, like funding the 911 center, registering vehicles and providing for our most vulnerable families, they aren’t required to provide these services and don’t need to spend money on them. Towns can also levy their own sales taxes, while also receiving sales tax revenues from the County.

Additionally, many state-mandated services and programs are unfunded, meaning the County must find funds to pay for these programs. Some of those include body-worn cameras for all law enforcement or remediating public documents for digital accessibility.

TABOR, Colorado legislation passed in the early 1990s, requires that any new taxes or mill levies must be approved by the voters. We’re grateful that Summit County voters have agreed to fund mill levies like Strong Future, which help support mental health programs, wildfire prevention, recycling services, and childcare options to our community!

That said, we don’t get to keep every dollar of revenue. We have to give the towns portions of the County’s sales tax back to them (even though they have their own sales taxes). And even though your property taxes often go up, the state legislature chose to limit how much we can take in every year, which is helpful for many families, from local workers to second home owners.

Currently, the biggest chunk of the General Fund goes toward the Sheriff’s Office budget, at $16.25M for 2025.

The next biggest departments in terms of General Fund spending is Information Systems at $2.5M and the Office of the Assessor at $2.4M.

Other high-dollar departments include Transit and Open Space & Trails; however, those are financed by separate funds, not the General Fund.

Reserves are funds built up from prior year surpluses, and are basically like a savings account - funding to hold you over in a crisis. Basically, this is money to keep the lights on during recessions or large disaster events.

The County’s Reserve Policy is aligned with financial best practices, and requires us to have, at minimum, 25% of the total General Fund expenditures. Additionally, TABOR requires that we save 3% of annual total expenditures as well.

Well… you could, but it’s not smart business to do so. According to our policy (and the majority of reserve policies across industries), we shouldn’t use reserves to cover standard operating budget shortfalls.

Do we occasionally need to do that? Yes, especially when we are in recessionary periods or experience declining revenues not forecast for the year.

Should we be doing that? No - our departments and elected offices should be budgeting within the current realities of our financial situation.

Reserves are meant for true emergencies. It’s not sustainable to tap into reserves every year. Just like you don’t want to tap into your savings every month.