Area: Counties of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfiled, Denver, Douglas, Jefferson.
Population: 2,439,967
Tax: additional 1/10 of 1% sales tax
Yearly Revenue: Approximately $35 million
Uses: Scientific, cultural, zoos.
This policy was created due to a loss of funding from the general fund in 1982. At this time arts
leaders were searching for a way to compensate for the loss of revenue. Over the next six years a
plan was developed to create the Science and Cultural Facilities District which would provide a
stable source of funding through a sales tax increase. The amount of the tax was set at .1 %. The
District covers a large geographic area encompassing seven counties.
As a critical aspect of the legislation, time periods were written into the law that would allow
the public the authority to perpetuate the policy or repeal the legislation through general
elections. The policy has been up for reconsideration twice since 1988, first in 1994 and recently
in 2004.
The policy designated a three-tiered system that allows a specific amount to each level. While this
created some heated debates over how much money each tier should receive and what attributes should
be used to determine a tier assignment, it proved to strengthen the initiative when an agreement was
reached. It is important to remember that this initiative covers the arts, the zoo, science
facilities, and research.
A major unforeseen challenge that arose in the latest re-election was a drastic increase in the cost
of the election. SCFD went from spending $30,000 in 1994 to spending $700,000 in 2004. The campaign
for this initiative spent 1.6 Million dollars on advertising to voters. This major jump in costs is
attributed to a state amendment which was passed in 2000. The amendment puts strict limitations on
the state government to reimburse counties for electoral expenditures. This in turn passed the cost
directly on to SCFD. As of October 2005 the SCFD still owed the county $700,000.
To compound the difficulty of the increased cost, the legislation for the SCFD mandates that 99.25%
of the revenue must go directly to the organizations that they serve. This allows less than one percent
for administration expenses, and no money to pay the county back for the cost of the election.
Despite the challenges faced to the SCFD it remains one of the most clearly successful policies to
publicly fund art in the United States.
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