Before naming a number, credit is due: Rep. Katie Stewart, D-Durango, and Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, carried HB25-1247 through the Legislature last year, tripling the lodging tax cap counties can put before voters and widening what it can fund to include infrastructure and public safety alongside marketing. That bill is why Montezuma County has a 5% ask on this November’s ballot. Cortez, a home rule city, already had that authority and is using it independently.
Cortez collects about $250,000 a year from its current 2% lodgers tax; at 6%, city officials estimate roughly $750,000. But these are two separate measures on this fall’s ballot. Cortez voters decide whether the city’s rate, unchanged since 1981, increases from 2% to 6%. Montezuma County voters decide whether the county’s rate, charged in unincorporated areas, rises from 2% to 5%, on a county lodgers tax that collects roughly $300,000 a year. The two never stack; a county cannot collect its lodging tax inside a city that levies its own. A guest at a Cortez motel pays the city’s rate; a guest outside it pays the county’s.
What would the money fund?
Cortez’s ballot language directs revenue toward tourism marketing, economic and infrastructure development, and arts and culture. City Manager Drew Sanders called that specific enough to limit the money, but broad enough to adapt it. Councilor April Randle unsuccessfully pushed to commit half to water infrastructure, which city engineers say will cost tens of millions over 20 years. Sanders confirmed that water remains an eligible use, and the council agreed to seat a citizen advisory committee to help decide specifics each year.
Montezuma County’s question, by contrast, asks only for the rate. The county already has a lodgers tax committee that reviews grant applications and recommends disbursements to commissioners. What commissioners have not said is whether the new money would continue through that tourism grant cycle or move toward infrastructure, public safety, housing and childcare, all uses HB25-1247 now permits. Voters are being asked to trust a process rather than a plan, and that trust needs to be earned before Election Day.
Durango’s history argues for flexibility. Its 2021 lodgers tax split was fixed by formula: 55% marketing, 20% transit, 14% arts and 11% flexible. By 2024, La Plata County voters had redirected up to 70% of the county’s tax from marketing toward workforce housing and childcare. This January, Durango’s flexible fund put its largest allocation, $260,000, into regional childcare, plus subsidized parking for downtown workers, while turning down $77,000 for park artwork.
Five years in, the money followed need rather than the original formula. That is the strongest case for Cortez’s broad language and annual review rather than a fixed split locked in now.
It also sharpens the real nexus at stake here, one deeper than a park bench both residents and visitors use. Second-home buyers usually arrive as tourists first; as housing costs follow them, the workers tourism depends on get priced out, and childcare gets squeezed with everything else. A lodgers tax funding housing and childcare is not mission creep. It is the industry that creates the pressure helping pay to relieve it, the same logic behind a severance tax funding reclamation.
One caution: Bayfield voters rejected a lodging tax last November that would have cost visitors nothing new, only shifted who collected it. “Free money” still lost. “Trust us, visitors pay it” is not, alone, a winning argument, and both measures here need a clear one.
Both Cortez and Montezuma County deserve credit for asking voters at all after decades at 2% and for building in processes to involve the public. Cortez has scheduled an information session on its city lodgers tax from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Cortez Area Chamber of Commerce. State law limits officials there to informing, not persuading, so the case will fall to the rest of us.
On a $100 room, Cortez’s increase costs a guest $4 more, with $9.69 in tax bringing the total to $13.69 once sales tax is added. Durango’s total on the same room already runs $14.65. Even at 6%, Cortez remains the better bargain in the region.
