Follow the Money

"$200 million a year on roads. A formula that rewards growth. A council member who said the quiet part out loud. And a pothole that's been there since the previous administration — waiting for someone to drop a pin."

The March 3rd BOCC (Board of County Commissioners) meeting had five items for one road — Highway 105, Lake Woodmoor to Martingale — each representing a different property owner who negotiated with the county and said yes. Five easements, five signatures, years in the making. Jack Ladley and Joshua Palmer from Public Works carried the stack. All five approved. Nobody applauded. Roads don't get applause. They get assembled, parcel by parcel, over years, by people whose names appear once on an agenda and never again.

CFO Nikki Simmons brought a $10.6 million reappropriation — 2025 contracts and projects formally carried into the 2026 budget. Not new spending. Work already underway, being given legal permission to keep existing in the new calendar year. Colorado law requires it every January. Nikki Simmons has done this year after year in ways most residents will never notice. Which is either the highest possible praise for a CFO, or a completely unsolvable marketing problem. Probably both.

The 2026 budget totals $530.6 million — roughly $727 per person across El Paso County's 730,000 residents, most of it spoken for before January 1st. Roads got $40.2 million — about $55 per person per year, $4.58 a month for every road in the county. A new $6.7 million line item was set aside specifically for pay. Whether it closes the gap between what a deputy earns and what it costs to live here is a different conversation. The county acknowledging the math doesn't work — in writing, in a budget document — is at minimum the beginning of one. The first 2026 financial report lands in late April.

And then there's the road question everyone in the south end of this city has been asking for years. The Pikes Peak region spends north of $200 million annually on roads and transportation across four funding streams. The capital projects list tells a geographic story. Academy Boulevard, Beacon Lite, Highway 105, Eastonville. Then Powers, Woodmen, Briargate, Marksheffel. Predominantly northern and northeastern corridors. Growth areas. Newer roads, better maintenance schedules, significant sales tax generation. Not an accident. South Colorado Springs — older neighborhoods, older roads, fewer large retail corridors — sits at the back of a line whose ordering criteria were set by a formula, not a needs assessment. A city council member said it out loud at a PPRTA (Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority) meeting and it went into the record.

El Paso County has the lowest county property tax mill levy of any of the ten largest Colorado counties. A real achievement. Also a choice. Lower taxes mean less revenue. Less revenue means harder trade-offs. Reasonable people disagree strongly about where that balance should sit. But it is the context that makes the road conversation make sense. And the road conversation has a very simple entry point: elpasoco.com/public-works for county roads, coloradosprings.gov/report-a-problem for city streets. Drop a pin. Four minutes. Tell a neighbor. The system is, in a very literal sense, responsive to noise.