by Ruth Stodghill
TRINIDAD — The Dec. 5 regular meeting of the Trinidad City Council kicked off with a public hearing for consideration of an ordinance appropriating certain sums of money out of the revenues of the City of Trinidad to defray and meet its liabilities for the fiscal year beginning Jan. 1, 2024 and ending Dec. 31, 2024 — in essence, to discuss passing the city’s 2024 budget.
One question that arose during the hearing was whether the $132,000 earmarked for the Noah’s Ark animal shelter would remain in the budget, now that the entity will no longer be managing the shelter. “That $132,000 that we had allocated for Noah’s Ark, I want to leave that in the budget for Animal Services as a general line item to help us with the transition for whatever we need to do to maintain continuity of operations,” said City Manager Steve Ruger.
Finance Director Cheryl Navarette explained that the special legislative session called by the governor will affect the property tax revenue collected by the city, which will in turn impact the city’s budget for 2024, but the size of the impact is unknown at this point.
Due to the special session, the second reading to adopt the budget was delayed. “Hopefully, that’ll buy us a little time so that we can build in an anticipated decrease to property tax revenue for the general fund in 2024,” Navarette said.
Navarette explained the 2024 budget was built taking into account a number of projected decreases in revenue, including a loss of $525,000 in property taxes, $21,000 in licensing and permitting, $278,000 in intergovernmental revenue, and $39,000 in fees and charges for services. “In miscellaneous revenue there’s a little bit of an increase of $144,000 or 3%” said Navarette, “but overall the revenue decrease from 2023 to 2024 is about $857,000 or 5.5%, and that’s just based on the trends of sales tax and marijuana decreases, and things like that.”
Griego talks Noah’s Ark
During council reports, current council member and mayor-elect Karen Griego shared that she recently resigned from her position on the Noah’s Ark Animal Welfare Association (NAAWA) board due to the work she will be undertaking as mayor come the first of the year.
Despite the resignation, Griego took the opportunity to rebut controversy surrounding a hefty investment of city funds into the organization shortly before it was announced that NAAWA would be terminating its management of the shelter. “There’s been a lot of ire against Noah’s Ark about the $150,000 that we took, there’s a timeline. If you talk about ironic, we were here on a Monday asking for money, and it was not only ‘til the end of the year. It was probably going to help us through the biggest part of the first quarter.”
“The next day, PACFA [Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act] came in and did a report and there were violations. Noah’s Ark, instead of fighting it, knowing that we’re requiring a lot more money than we used to, decided to relinquish our contract with the city,” said Griego.
“With us not keeping that contract, we relinquished whatever we had as far as our investment, which at the time when we first built the shelter was $330,000,” Griego said. She went on to state that any of the $150,000 of city funds remaining at the end of the year will be returned to the city.
In other business
The council approved the following items:
A proclamation honoring the work of Bob Herrera, a member of the Philips Broadcasting family, who passed away on Nov. 27, 2023.
• Approval of the Regular Meeting Minutes of Nov. 21, 2023 and Special Meeting
•Minutes of Nov. 13 and Nov. 16, 2023.
• Approval of Bills and Payroll, Nov. 25 through Dec. 8, 2023.
•Extraterritorial 1” water tap request by William and Jocelyn Toupal at 15335 State Highway 12 – The cost for the tap was set at roughly $11,000 and would provide a water tap for a new residence.
• RFP submission for the Purgatoire River Vision Preliminary Design – At just under $600,000, the RFP submission is slightly under the cost the city was anticipating for this phase of the project. The cost for completion of the entire riverwalk redesign program is estimated at $14 million.
City Attorney Les Downs told the council that Trinidad will be advertising for applications from those interested in filling the city council seat left vacant by council member Karen Griego as she moves into the mayor’s position. The deadline to submit an application is Friday, Dec. 22.
The meeting ended with an executive session for discussion of a personnel matter under C.R.S. Section 24-6-402(2)(f) and not involving: any specific employees who have requested discussion of the matter in open session; any member of this body or any elected official; the appointment of any person to fill an office of this body or of an elected official; or personnel policies that do not require the discussion of matters personal to particular employees for a City Attorney performance review.
