A proposal now on the table in Douglas County attempts to find a balance between two perennial public-policy priorities: law enforcement and transportation. Freshman County Commissioner Lora Thomas wants to ask burgeoning DougCo’s voters to shift some county revenue from the former to the latter.

Her pragmatic solution, up for consideration by the commission on Tuesday: Reconfigure a long-standing county sales tax that has funded wide-ranging law-enforcement upgrades so that it can help widen I-25 south of Castle Rock and improve other county roads.

The solution answers one question that has daunted policy makers in the legislature and across the state – how to raise more highway dollars without raising taxes? – while posing another: Can a community sometimes spend too much on law enforcement amid underfunded, competing needs?

It’s a politically ticklish point, but then Thomas arguably has the cred to bring it up: She is a former county coroner and a retired major with the Colorado State Patrol after 26 years of service. No squish on public safety.

However, she has watched the stretch of I-25 through her county grow more congested year after year even as the county sheriff’s budget and infrastructure have benefited steadily from the revenue-churning, 0.43 percent Douglas County Justice Center Sales and Use Tax, approved by voters in 1995.

Thomas points out in a fact sheet on the issue:

Since 1996, the Justice Center tax has raised over $360 million; over $26 million was raised in 2016 alone.  It has financed the Justice Center to include courtrooms, jail cells, a dispatch center and a state-of-the art coroner’s facility, the Highlands Ranch Sub-station, a jail infirmary, an employee parking garage, a driving track, a regional crime lab, an evidence warehouse, radios, radio towers, body cameras and cameras throughout the facility.  In fact, the last two courtrooms at the Justice Center were just finished but remain unused.  The mission of the Justice Center Sales Tax Fund has been accomplished.

As Thomas told Denver Channel 4 News’s Brian Maass:

“Somehow related facilities has morphed into a driving track and a crime lab and I don’t think that’s what citizens thought they were voting for when (the 1995 ballot issue) said ‘Justice Center.'”

Earmark a tax for any public agency, of course, and it’ll find needs to spend it on. And by all indicators, the sales tax has generated way more money than voters likely could have imagined over 20 years ago.  Booming DougCo’s thriving retail economy has seen to that.

Thomas wants to take a little over half of that generous revenue stream and shift it to roads.

Ask motorists who routinely thread the needle along I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs, and they’ll tell you Colorado should be spending more on highway expansion and other upgrades. Ask about hiking taxes to pay for it, and they get squeamish, as polls show.

So, how would they feel about taking it from an existing tax, instead? We’ll find out if Thomas’s proposal makes it onto the ballot.

She needs at least one of her two fellow commissioners to agree with her in order to put the measure to voters in November. Will her peers go along? One, David Weaver, is a former Douglas County sheriff, and the current sheriff, Tony Spurlock, has come out against Thomas’s proposal.

As is so often the case, law enforcement seems to have a built-in lobby to safeguard its turf. Will Thomas’ own extensive law-enforcement credentials be enough to carry the day?