The Money: Where It Came From, Where It Went, Where It Didn’t.

After Sheriff Roybal’s dispatchers stepped down from the dais (that was 011A), the next item was the Q4 report. Presented by Nikki Simmons, the County’s Chief Financial Officer.

And before we go a sentence further: Nikki Simmons is a fantastic name for a lead accountant. Rockstar name, rockstar job. Her team produces these reports on schedule, audited, public-facing, with footnotes you can actually trace. The whole reason a show like this is even possible — the reason we can sit here and talk about whether the numbers add up — is because someone at the County is doing the underlying math correctly and on time. Thank you, Nikki. Genuinely. The County would be measurably better off with ten more of you.

Sounds boring, is actually pretty good. Revenues came in slightly higher than planned. Not by a lot — just enough to suggest the planning was honest.

Underneath:

Sales tax: $5.25M below projection. Same softening we’ve been tracking. Not a crisis, but a signal.

Interest income: $3.36M over budget. When the federal funds rate stays high, the County’s reserves earn more sitting in the bank. Free money, basically. They didn’t engineer it — they were just positioned to catch it.

Clerk & recorder fees: $2.6M over budget. Clerk fees go up when people refinance, which goes up when interest rates dip even briefly. Two threads, same root cause, both went the County’s way.

On the spending side, the County underspent its general fund by about $53M. Most of that — $42.1M — is projects already in progress that got rolled forward into 2026. Not money saved. Money still committed, just not yet spent. The other $11M went to fund balance: $3M above plan. That’s the real new money.

Now. I have to stop and acknowledge the number.

Forty-two million dollars. Underspent.

For anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that number is supposed to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Douglas Adams set up an elaborate joke about a supercomputer running for seven and a half million years to spit back a single number with no question attached. Forty-two. And here it is, on page whatever of the County’s Q4 unaudited budget report, in roughly the same context — a number that sounds enormous, that means something, but doesn’t quite tell you what.

Any number can mean anything depending on the frame. $42M is a fortune in someone’s living room. It’s also less than 5% of the County’s general fund. The frame matters.

Two things going on. First — that $42M isn’t sitting in a bank account waiting for somebody to spend it. It’s already promised. Committed to projects in motion. Money owed, not money saved.

Second — and this is the bigger one — Colorado Avenue is a city project, not a county project. Different government, different budget, different rules. The County cannot hand money to the City for a City road, any more than your neighbor can pay your mortgage just because they had a good month. The County spends on county things — county roads, the jail, county parks, public health, human services. The City spends on city things — city roads, fire, police, parks inside city limits. They share a tax base. They do not share a checkbook.

Different government, same week. The City leans heavily on sales tax. When sales tax softens, the City feels it harder than the County.

The number the Mayor put out there: $31M. Cumulative savings target going forward. Context: the City has been navigating annual shortfalls. $9M in one recent year. $11M in another. $4M in a third. The $31M is the forward-looking commitment to keep finding savings rather than asking residents for more.

Honest broker note: we are still pulling the underlying numbers. These figures got presented at the briefing without the spreadsheets. We want to verify before saying anything definitive. What I can say is that the man gives an excellent speech. His suits are remarkably well-tailored. His Instagram is worth a follow — Mayor Yemi Mobolade, look him up. The human being doing the talking is doing it with care, conviction, and excellent lapel work. The numbers we’ll keep digging on. The communication style is already a public good.

Public safety stays funded. Period. That’s the floor. Which is why crime trends and response times kept improving even while the budget got tighter. Other departments absorbed the hit so police and fire wouldn’t. No public-safety sales tax ballot this year — polling shows inflation concerns outweigh appetite for new taxes.

Voters specified the money goes to public safety, mental health, and post-traumatic stress support. That’s where it’s landing. A fire academy got funded. $700,000 went to the Downtown Partnership’s Clean & Safe program — which means, circling back to 011A, when Pat Rigdon walks his blocks, part of what funds his work is a tax on a substance that didn’t exist in the City budget five years ago.

If you don’t catch the reference earlier in the episode: Friday, the 1995 movie. Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. If you’d told the writers in 1995 that thirty years later a city in Colorado would be funding fire academies with tax revenue from the substance Smokey was so committed to — they would have written that movie too.

Funding public services with a single dedicated revenue stream is a strategy that’s been tried before. Florida voters approved the Lottery in 1986, specifically to fund education. Since 1988 it’s contributed over $47 billion. Genuinely funded the Bright Futures Scholarship Program — close to a million students.

The catch nobody at the cash register tells you: those $47B are only ~6% of Florida’s total education budget. Researchers at Georgia State have documented that lottery revenue has largely replaced state education funding rather than added to it. Florida ranks bottom third on per-pupil spending.

Not saying that’s right. Not saying that’s wrong. Saying it happens. When a dedicated revenue stream gets attached to a popular cause, the temptation for the general fund to back away from that cause is real, and the public usually doesn’t notice because headlines focus on the dedicated number, not the offset.

So when $700K of marijuana revenue went to Pat Rigdon’s program — that’s good. Genuinely. We just want to make sure the City’s general-fund commitment to homelessness and public safety doesn’t quietly shrink by $700K at the same time. That’s the math worth watching. Not in 011B. Some future budget cycle.

Quick correction from 011A: the town hall announcement was made by Gail Sturdivant, the City Engineer. Councilwoman Williams was there; Sturdivant presented. Credit where it’s due.

Phase 1 — Limit Street to 30th — takes Colorado Avenue from four lanes to three with a center turn lane. Standard road diet. FHWA research documents up to 29% crash reduction on similar restripings.

Phase 2 puts flexible delineators in Old Colorado City to test what a 2022 Midland Trail Corridor Study recommended. Cheap, reversible. They’ll collect data before committing to permanent infrastructure.

Plus traffic calming at Doorndale Park — bump-outs at 23rd and 24th, dynamic speed sign west of 21st. Those signs typically reduce average speeds by 2–6 mph. Doesn’t sound like much. Changes outcomes meaningfully when you’re talking about a kid stepping off a curb.

The funding: federal transportation grant (specific program TBD — we want to verify before naming it) plus PPRTA (Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority — a 1% regional sales tax voters in Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, Green Mountain Falls, and unincorporated EPC approved in 2004). Almost none of this comes out of the City’s general fund. Sales tax you spent on coffee in 2005, that you forgot about, that voters in four jurisdictions approved together — paying for a road diet in 2026.