When Jim Gibbons calls his special session, I hope our legislators take notice of this. 
A cautionary tale from Colorado Springs (H/T David Sirota)
This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
I live downstream from Colorado Springs in Pueblo. I say downstream because another decision made by their residents in a recent election was to abandon funding to fulfill their promise to clean up Fountain Creek and the nasty storm water and wastewater effluent the send down to the Arkansas River.
Pueblo County and ElPaso County had an agreement that in exchange for the Springs being allowed to build a tunnel brining clean water from Pueblo Reservoir to the Springs, they would clean up what they dumped on us. Now they are reneging on that agreement, so Pueblo is under no obligation to allow that pipeline to be built. This is going to turn into a huge battle, because those bible thumpers in the Springs always want eberything given to them and they never feel any obligation to live up to their own promises to downstream users. Same thing with their lights. They want no taxes, they get no services.
Doug Bruce has been a cockraoch feeding off state for decades.Now he is destroying his home town after ruining the rest of the state. TABOR is why we are going broke.
I have no doubt that TABOR would have been our lot if our version of it, TASC, had made it to the ballot.
I had the misfortune to live in Colorado Springs for much of the ’90s. I quite vividly recall when the Gazette-Telegraph published an editorial cartoon accusing Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich of being Marxists.
I also recall when one member of the city’s Human Relations Commission proclaimed that he could not work with one of the other members because she was Jewish and was therefore damned.
The city really *is* that batshit crazy.