The Montezuma County Hospital District is asking voters to approve a sales and use tax to help pay for a new wing and renovations to Southwest Memorial Hospital. The tax measure will only pay part of the cost; other funding components are included in the plan.
The rationale behind a sales tax is that visitors to the area contribute. That makes sense, because visitors use health services. MCHD has mitigated the primary argument against such a funding mechanism – that sales and use taxes disproportionately burden lower-income consumers – by excluding most grocery items, prescriptions, residential utilities and some farm equipment. The tax increase also is designed to sunset when the project is paid off.
New patient rooms would be constructed to include modern technology and amenities. Better facilities for ambulances and emergency crews would be added, and other hospital departments would be relocated and upgraded. Southwest Health System clinics currently dispersed throughout the community would be consolidated at the hospital location.
Those are valuable improvements, well worth four cents on a $10 purchase.
Approval of this ballot issue does not create a blank check, and it should not. Many are willing to pay for modern health care facilities – and more should be. They want professionals to have attractive, functional work space. They are not so willing to pay for soaring foyers and other architectural frills.
Mostly, though, they want effective, affordable health care to be available locally, even if, paradoxically, they seek care elsewhere when they have time to travel. Montezuma County residents want to keep their hospital, and for that to happen, Southwest Memorial needs to be competitive.
Now that Cortez once again has physicians who will deliver babies and see pediatric patients, an upgraded birthing center is an amenity the community will appreciate and, we hope, utilize.
Moving clinics to the hospital campus, so that patients can see their personal physician, receive diagnostic services, have physical therapy, and be admitted for inpatient care, all in the same place, is an attractive idea. It benefits not only senior citizens and patients with limited mobility, but parents of young children and people who just are not feeling well.
All in all, this is a well-planned set of improvements, and they deserve the public’s support.
Vote yes on Proposition BB
Colorado voters have seen it before — should marijuana be available and taxed — and they responded by saying “yes” both times.
The answer to BB should be the very same “yes.”
BB is on the ballot because the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights requires that at the time of the election, two estimates be made in conjunction with establishing a new tax: how much that tax will generate in its first year and what the state’s total tax revenues will be. No low-balling is allowed.
State economists got one right – the marijuana taxes generated $66.1 million instead of the estimated $67 million – and one wrong. Actual overall state revenues subject to the spending limit exceeded the estimate, $12.35 billion rather than $12.08 billion.
Thus voters are required to confirm that yes, they want the state to retain the revenues from the first year of the new tax.
Voters like to know where their taxes are going, and that was mostly true for the marijuana taxes. $40 million of the $66 million raised will go to school construction, and another $12 million will be spent on programs to discourage marijuana abuse, for treatment programs and to benefit at-risk students. That includes drop-out and anti-bullying grants, substance-abuse treatments and for related 4-H and FFA programs at the State Fair.
The balance does go to the state’s general fund to be allocated by the Legislature.
We believe that when Coloradans so decisively approved the cultivation and sale of marijuana they were looking forward to having the associated tax revenues used as promised, providing for school construction and for programs combating drug-abuse and for aid to at-risk students. Voters did not vote in favor of marijuana in order to personally receive a few dollars in return.