MOUNTAIN VIEW — The 12-square-block town of Mountain View has survived for 104 years sandwiched between Denver and Wheat Ridge.
But this recession may spell its end.
The town has written a letter to its 500 or so residents telling them, “Our town is in serious trouble and we need your help!” It offers three options: Get some more businesses into town, unincorporate and be absorbed into Jefferson County or let a neighboring community annex the town.
Whether to fight or give in to the tough economy has split residents.
“They don’t deserve to be their own city,” said Tim Watters, a 57-year-old public utility worker. “Mountain View might have been a neat little town 100 years ago, but times move on.”
But the town’s leaders want to fight: “You can call it a pride issue. We want the sense of community, where we know our neighbors,” said Mayor pro tem Jeff Kiddie.
Kiddie, who runs an auto repair shop in Westminster, has lived in Mountain View for all of his 51 years. “We don’t have fancy houses. We have good people, we have honest working people.”
The problem is that not enough of them work in town. Four of Mountain View’s approximately 20 businesses left at the end of last year. The 6 percent drop in sales taxes wasn’t as steep as Denver’s 10 percent drop since last year, but there was no fat or reserves to call on.
Police were paid late three times in two months. The Town Council just added a $162 annual fee to sewer bills for the town’s 272 homes to keep the streetlights on and the police paid. And an SOS from city officials to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs led to a state-paid $30,000 consultant to help get the city’s books in order.
The town has another $176,000 in community-development funds available to it but has not decided how to use the money.
Mountain View isn’t alone in its financial plight — 85 percent of municipalities reported flat or declining revenue in 2008.
In 5,500-resident Sheridan, near Englewood, city officials have been disappointed in sales-tax revenues from the new River Pointe development off South Santa Fe Drive. The City Council just received approval for a $500,000 line of credit to prevent layoffs.
“Our cash flow is to the point where we very much hope things start coming around,” said Sheridan Mayor Mary Carter. “I don’t think anyone’s panicking. We’re just putting things into place so people get their paychecks on time.”
Mountain View certainly isn’t Colorado’s smallest town in terms of population, but measured in square feet, it is the third smallest behind Sawpit in San Miguel County and Montezuma in Summit County.
Sales-tax revenue fell $44,000 in a year — a 6 percent decrease in a budget of $750,000. With Lakeside Center mall gone, traffic thinned on Sheridan Boulevard and on West 44th Avenue. Police didn’t issue as many traffic tickets.
Suddenly Mountain View couldn’t make timely payroll for its city employees because there wasn’t enough money in the city’s coffers.
The town, which hasn’t ever exactly had a boom, has no reserves to plow through a recession. It’s the only city with a state-funded professional manager to help sort out options.
Chuck Reid, the manager from R.S. Wells, has the contract through November to help Mountain View weigh what to do: remain incorporated; annex into another municipality, which would require a vote; or contract out a vast portion of city services. Reid eventually will have meetings with residents to see how they feel.
Residents fed up with the money troubles say the lack of cash has led to disputes and a neighborhood wanting in some basic needs.
Former town Councilman Lawnie Gold says water seeps into his garage after every big snow or rain because Mountain View’s drainage doesn’t work. He resigned from the council in February after a fight with the mayor about letting Wheat Ridge take over.
Watters refuses to drive his motorcycle within town limits because he believes the police cite people when they’re going even two or three miles an hour above the speed limit.
“It sort of feels like a broken leg and they keep on putting Band-Aids on it, and it never heals. It doesn’t work anymore,” Gold said. “There are too many secrets.”
If that is true, it’ll be Reid’s job to uncover them and get the town back on track.
“The great thing about America is that we really get to choose what our communities and societies look like,” said Reid, who recently helped Archuleta County through financial problems. “Sometimes the process isn’t very pretty. But it’s a great process.”
Allison Sherry: 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com
Originally Published: April 14, 2009 at 2:57 PM MDT
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4