Taxpayer ledger · Where the money went
At the state level in Colorado it was Medicaid. In Aurora it was police and fire. In Centennial, a city with no pension liability at all, it was a contract. Same shape, three different budgets: a single obligation taking most of what the budget gained.
For a plain city, the general fund is mostly public safety. The spread below is not an efficiency ranking, because the denominators are not the same kind of thing. Read the marks.
† No city fire department. Fire is a separate taxing district
(South Metro Fire Rescue) that bills these residents directly and does not appear in the city
budget at all, so the figure covers police only and understates what the household pays.
‡ Centennial has no police department either. It buys law enforcement
from the Arapahoe County Sheriff. The bar is the contract.
§ Denver is a consolidated city and county. Its general fund
also carries jail, courts, district attorney, human services and public health, which in
Idaho sit with the county on a separate levy. Its denominator is much larger in kind.
On Boise: 50.9% is the city’s own published figure (police 28.0%, fire
22.9%) against its gross departmental base. A widely quotable 54.9% exists but divides by a
net general fund total that has been reduced by a negative $27.1 m intergovernmental cost
allocation, which inflates every department’s share by about 7.8% relative. The gross
basis is the honest one.
Aurora publishes four consecutive comparable years. It is the clearest case in either state, and it is also where the tempting number turns out to be the wrong one.
Police plus fire as a share of Aurora general fund operating spending, before transfers out. Adopted budgets, 2023 actual to 2026 adopted. Interior years are interpolated between the two published endpoints and are shown as approximate.
A correction worth making in public. Measured against total general fund uses, police and fire look like they took 83.9% of the growth and climbed from 45.7% to 49.4% of the fund. That is arithmetically true and materially misleading, because total uses include transfers out to other funds, and those transfers fell $19.0 million as a capital transfer tied to use tax receipts shrank. A falling denominator did much of the work.
On operating spending, the honest picture: police and fire were already about 58% of what Aurora actually spends in 2023, and are about 58.8% now. They took 61.8% of the growth. The share barely moved because it was already high, which is a worse problem than a rising share, not a better one.
Aurora disclosed a 2026 shortfall of roughly $21.2 million and closed part of it with $10,205,516 of cuts.
If unfunded pensions were the whole story, a city with no pension liability should be safe. Centennial is that city, and it is the most squeezed municipality in this study.
Outsourcing the workforce removed the pension liability. It did not stop the cost. Centennial owes nothing to any retirement system and still watched public safety take seven of every ten new dollars.
One precision, because "zero debt" is the city’s own framing and its audit says something narrower: the consolidated statements show $8,184,871 of outstanding debt at 31 December 2025, almost all of it general obligation bonds of three general improvement districts that the audit consolidates into the primary government. Excluding those districts, city-only direct debt is $450,982. The zero pension and zero OPEB liability both hold exactly as stated.
The lesson is not that pensions do not matter. It is that the pension is the tail, and the payroll is the dog. Wages, staffing and the price of a sworn officer drive the budget whether the city employs that officer or rents one.
Denver also carries the worst funded pension in this study. Its own employee plan, DERP, is 59.97% funded with a net liability of $1.62 billion at the 31 December 2024 measurement date, and the city paid in $161,613,000 during 2025.
Both states’ Medicaid budgets are growing faster than their general funds. What separates them is not the growth rate. It is how much of the budget was already committed.
Both sides are now all-bills to all-bills. An earlier version of this page divided a Long-Bill-only Colorado numerator by an all-bills base and got 7.6%, which was not measured the same way as Idaho’s 5.4%. Colorado is also a whole department against Idaho’s single division, which is the closest like-for-like the two states’ structures allow.
An 8.4% rise on 34.5% of the budget and a 5.4% rise on 18.6% are not the same event. The first consumes almost everything a slow-growing general fund produces. In the budget the Colorado Joint Budget Committee recommended, Medicaid’s general fund increase was larger than the entire general fund increase, and thirteen departments were cut to pay for it.
Both states cut provider rates. Idaho cut harder. Idaho’s FY2027 maintenance bill reduced Health and Welfare’s ongoing general fund appropriation 4.5% and the Division of Medicaid imposed a 4% across-the-board provider rate reduction. Colorado adopted a 2% across-the-board provider rate reduction worth $222.0 million, plus $48,759,675 of eligibility and benefit reductions. Neither state did nothing, and saying otherwise would be wrong.
The difference is that Colorado was cutting into a line already claiming a third of the budget, against a medical forecast that still added $1.86 billion. Its own department describes elderly and disabled enrollees, not expansion adults, as what drives the general fund. Idaho was cutting a line claiming under a fifth.
| Employer | Line | From | To | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boise, ID | Health insurance fund | $26,222,700 | $34,256,880 | +30.6% |
| State of Colorado | Employee health, life and dental | $495,691,564 | $596,286,691 | +20.3% |
Boise FY2025 to FY2027 (FY2027 proposed); most of it landed in a single year, +26.5% from FY2025 to FY2026. Colorado FY2025-26 to FY2026-27, a rise of $100,595,127 in one year. Aurora’s budget assumes 5.0% annual health and dental growth through 2030.
Twin Falls is the counter-example, and it is worth naming: its FY2027 proposed budget carries a 0% health insurance premium increase, alongside no general obligation debt at all and a Moody’s Aa2 rating.
The city on the ballot is often a small part of the bill. Parker is the clearest illustration in either state.
| Levying body | Mills | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Town of Parker | 2.602 | 3.1% |
| South Metro Fire Rescue | 12.250 | 14.4% |
| Douglas County, schools and other common districts | 70.271 | 82.6% |
| Common stack every Parker parcel pays | 85.123 | 100% |
The fire district is 4.7 times the town’s own levy and appears nowhere in the town budget. Its voters approved 3.000 additional mills on 4 November 2025 under Ballot Issue 7A, taking the certified levy from a 9.250 base to 12.250 and raising about $50.7 million a year. On a $500,000 Parker home the Town collects roughly $81.
There is no single Parker tax bill. The town contains 118 certified tax districts running from 85.123 to 210.035 mills, because metropolitan districts sit on top in many neighbourhoods. 85.123 is the common floor every parcel inside town limits pays.
So a resident can read that their town has no pension problem, no debt and a falling mill levy, and still watch their property tax bill rise, because the expensive part of local government is a district most people cannot name.
Greenwood Village makes the same point from the other side. Its municipal levy has been 2.932 mills, unchanged every year from 2016 through 2025, roughly $185 per $1 million of home value, and it has no fire department and no defined benefit pension at all.
Breckenridge is the sharpest version. Its fire district, Red, White and Blue, went from 9.531 to 14.019 mills in a single year, a 47% increase, taking the total stack on a Breckenridge property from 53.412 to 58.061 mills. The town’s own levy is 5.07 mills. Nothing the town council did explains the bill.
Every city above is a public safety story. Breckenridge is not, and it is worth ending on, because it shows the squeeze is really about whatever a place cannot avoid buying.
Breckenridge budgets 3.9 times more for workforce housing than for policing. A permanent population of roughly 5,078 funds a town built for a peak population many times larger, out of a 2.5% sales tax, a 3.4% lodging tax, a 1% real estate transfer tax and a 4.5% tax on lift tickets. Only 30.9% of its 7,364 housing units are occupied year round.
Its general fund fell from $34,820,801 to $33,463,168, and its employees are in a defined contribution plan, so there is no pension liability here either. The pressure is simply somewhere else: the cost of housing the people who staff the town.