A collection of Colorado conservation groups want voters to de-Bruce sales tax collected on outdoor sports equipment across the state and direct the money — an estimated $130 million each year that would otherwise be refunded to taxpayers — toward open space protection and wildfire mitigation.
The proposal by Conservation Colorado, The Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land and Western Resource Advocates was submitted to the Colorado Legislative Council on Dec. 23. The proposal needs vetting by Legislative Council staff and the Colorado Title Board before advocates can begin collecting signatures from Colorado voters. They need more than 124,000 voters to sign their petition before it reaches the November 2026 ballot.
Backers say that exempting taxes collected on the sales of sporting goods from the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights would protect watersheds, conserve landscapes, open recreational access and reduce the threat of wildfire as federal funding ebbs.
“While the state has done a lot … to invest in the outdoors, we’re just recognizing the mounting risks and headwinds facing us,” said Tarn Udall, a senior attorney with Western Resource Advocates. “We need to act now and do more to protect our communities and continue to preserve the things we all love about living in this state.”
So-called de-Brucing proposals — it refers to Douglas Bruce, the author of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, which voters approved in 1992 — allow governments to keep and spend tax revenues that typically would be returned to taxpayers under the measure. But the conservation proposal is more complicated than most. The state doesn’t track how much sales taxes are collected on specific goods, so legislative staff would have to estimate it each year.
The proposal would not impact the state’s budget and it would not increase or create new taxes, the conservation advocates said. It would not raise the cost of making or selling hunting, fishing, camping, golfing, cycling, boating, snowmobiling and other outdoor sports equipment.
The proposal would funnel the expected $130 million a year into existing grant and partnership programs deployed by Great Outdoors Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Colorado State Forest Service. The proposal would direct 47.5% toward a fund to protect communities and water sources from wildfire. Another 47.5% would go to GOCO land and water conservation.
CPW’s Outdoor Equity Grant Program would get 2.5% of the sales taxes collected. And the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office would get 2.5%, which amounts to an estimated $3.25 million annually in taxes retained from selling outdoor gear. That marks a significant increase in annual funding for the equity program and the outdoor recreation office.
The money would support regional partnerships used by the nascent Colorado Outdoors Strategy, which unifies a network of statewide efforts with goals of climate resilient conservation, sustainable outdoor recreation and coordinated planning and funding.
“Colorado has always been a leader. We created GOCO in 1992 and we have incentives and funding programs that are the envy of many other states,” said Aaron Citron, the head of Colorado policy for The Nature Conservancy. “We were able to be successful because we’ve leveraged a lot of federal money and that, as we all know, is being called into question. So Colorado wants to continue to be able to take this on and lead as a state where this is such a high priority.”
The funding would exponentially increase support for forest health and wildfire mitigation as federal dollars ebb. The scale of that problem, particularly for Front Range homes close to forests withering in an increasingly dry climate, “is so massive and we are only scratching the surface” with existing state wildfire mitigation funding, said Jim Petterson, the Colorado and Southwest region director for the Trust for Public Land.
“Now we have pine beetles getting into ponderosa systems right on the edge of the Front Range and that’s only going to grow exponentially in the next ‘X’ number of years,” Petterson said. “If we don’t have a response to that, the Marshall fire is going to look like a small problem.”
The Trust for Public Land has a lot of momentum when it comes to conservation ballot measures. The group has worked on 67 successful ballot questions in Colorado that increased funding for land protection. Nationally, the group has supported 650 successful ballot measures that delivered $112 million for conservation across the U.S. over the last 25 years. More than 85% of the ballot measures backed by the Trust for Public Land win voter approval.
A primary motive for the ballot measure is protecting the state’s watersheds from the threat of wildfire, which can clog complex collection systems.
“These forested watersheds are the source of drinking water for everyone in the state,” Petterson said. “Whether that’s Coal Creek for Crested Butte or the South Platte for Denver or Mountain Creek for Colorado Springs. If we are not figuring this out, we are going to have a catastrophic failure of our water systems.”
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