Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Sunday, June 28, 2009

Sales Tax Woes In Denver

The Denver Post

Denver officials scrambling to close a projected $70 million budget deficit are considering moves such as creating a fee for trash collection, releasing nonviolent offenders from jail and delaying street repairs.

But a review of sales-tax revenue collected in the first four months of this year shows matters may get even worse.

"We'd have to improve our revenue significantly to keep on pace," said Stephanie Adams, the manager of performance initiatives in the city's budget and management office. "It's very likely we'll have to revise our revenue projections downward again."

The current projected $70 million budget gap covers the next 18 months and is based on a scenario that sees the city collecting 6 percent less in sales-tax revenue this year than it did last year.

The deficit figure also anticipates sales-tax collections stabilizing next year and remaining roughly even with what the city anticipates it will collect this year.

Through the first four months of this year, sales-tax collections actually generated 13 percent less in revenue than they did last year.

That means the pace of consumer spending in the city would have to roughly quadruple through the rest of this year or increase next year instead of remaining flat to meet the current projections.

And the trend so far has not been encouraging.

Sales-tax collections have declined further than expected each month this year, leaving the city on pace to collect the same amount from the sales tax as it did four years ago.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ritter and his cronys need to wake up and reform the department of correction. 1st by doing away with mandatory parole,2nd by releasing all non violent offenders, cutting corretions numbers proportionately to public lay off's. 3rd cutting all state employee's salarys by at least 10 percent.The worst hasnt arrived yet. djw