Taxpayer ledger · Who bills you
Boise funds itself out of your property tax. Parker barely touches it. Both are real municipal models, and they produce completely different relationships between what a household pays and who it can hold responsible.
Property tax as a share of what the city itself collects. This is not a difference of degree.
Denominators differ slightly by what each city publishes and are labelled on every row. The Colorado cities replace property tax with sales tax: Parker 69.7% of general fund revenue, Centennial 60%, Greenwood Village 59.2% of all revenue.
A Colorado suburb is a sales tax entity that also collects a little property tax. An Idaho city is a property tax entity. That single structural fact explains most of what follows: which taxpayers actually fund the city, how exposed it is to a recession, and whether residents can see what they are paying for.
The town on the ballot is not the town on the bill. Each bar is the full overlapping mill levy on a single property.
Parker · 85.123 mills, the common floor every parcel pays
Town of Parker 2.602 mills, 3.1% of the bill. On a $500,000 home the Town collects about $81.
Breckenridge · 58.061 mills total
Town 5.07 mills, 8.7%. The fire district went 9.531 to 14.019 mills in one year, and the whole stack rose from 53.414.
Denver · 79.602 mills total
Denver is the exception, at 26.328 mills, 33.1%, because it is a consolidated city and county with no separate fire district.
Segments are drawn to scale from the certified mill levies. Parker and Breckenridge have no
municipal fire department; their fire districts bill residents directly and appear nowhere in
the town budget.
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 floor every parcel pays. A commonly quoted 90.894
adds Parker Water and Sanitation, which only 47 of the 118 districts levy, so it is a real
total for some homes and not the common one.
In Parker, the entity a resident votes for most attentively is 3.1% of the bill. The fire district is 4.7 times larger, and its voters added 3.000 mills on 4 November 2025 under Ballot Issue 7A, worth about $50.7 million a year against a district appropriation of roughly $303 million. A household can watch its town hold the line on spending and still see its tax bill climb, because the expensive part of local government is a district most people cannot name.
Idaho does not cap what a city spends. It caps how fast the property tax budget can grow: 3% a year, plus whatever new construction and annexation add.
| City | Base increase taken | Plus growth | Plus forgone recovered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boise (FY2027 proposed) | 2.7%, below the 3% cap | new construction | $2,021,390 used in FY2026 |
| Twin Falls (FY2027 proposed) | $984,689 | $473,951 | $342,816 |
| Idaho Falls (FY2027 proposed) | $1,535,561 | new construction | $5,527,161 balance available |
The cap is on the budget, not the rate, which is why an Idaho city’s levy rate can fall while its property tax revenue rises. Boise’s rate dropped and the average bill still went up $9.39.
Idaho also lets districts bank increases they choose not to take and recover them later. That is the "forgone" column, and it is a deferred tax increase sitting on a shelf. Idaho Falls has $5,527,161 of it available.
The two states spend almost the same amount and buy opposite things. Colorado caps its own revenue and refunds the overage to taxpayers, leaving local property tax untouched. Idaho takes state income and sales tax money and uses it to pay down local school property tax.
It is working on its own terms: the School District Facilities Fund went from $97.7m in 2023 to $215.2m in 2025, up 120%, and statewide school property tax actually fell, from $439,394,238 to $404,419,064.
The catch is that this is a transfer, not a saving. Idaho has moved a local, visible, voted-on cost onto the state general fund, where it now competes with Medicaid and corrections. Colorado’s refund is visible to the taxpayer and does nothing about the 90 mills on their house.
Breckenridge funds itself from people who do not live there. A 2.5% town sales tax raises $33,505,000, a 3.4% lodging tax $5,508,000, a 1% real estate transfer tax $6,000,000 and a 4.5% tax on lift tickets $4,535,000, against just $5,367,034 of property tax. Only 30.9% of its 7,364 housing units are occupied year round, and roughly 5,078 permanent residents fund a town sized for a far larger peak population.
That is the most efficient arrangement in this study for the people who live there, and the least durable, because it depends entirely on visitors continuing to arrive.