Issues

Follow every cent

You should know where every single cent of your tax bill is going and which authority is responsible.

Property taxes are hard to follow. The state Legislature sets the tax framework; local taxing authorities set mill levies and receive the revenue. Property tax dollars stay in your county and do not fund state services; they support local entities such as schools, counties, cities, and special districts. The Assessor does not write tax law or set mill levies; the job is to value property fairly and run an office that puts clarity first: what drives the numbers on your bill and where to go next. This page goes deeper on the assessor-shaped parts of that picture: what is easy to find, what is explained in plain language, and what is available by default. For a plain-language statewide overview, see Understanding Property Taxes in Colorado from the Colorado Division of Property Taxation.

Property taxes in Colorado have gone up sharply. The assessor does not set assessment rates or mill levies; the question is whether you can see what drove the increase.

For many Arapahoe County residents, the answer to all three is no, or getting a clear answer takes more work than it should. Much of what you need is public, but it is not assembled in one place: you have to trace it across statutes, metro districts, mill levies, and county tools. Residents should not have to do that detective work just to understand their assessment and their bill. Making the picture clear, plain, and easy to follow is the assessor's job.

Burden of proof

The burden of proof for an appeal should rest on the county, not you, as long as you have made a good-faith effort to justify the discrepancy.

Appraisers must show their work so you are not left to reverse-engineer a black box alone. Any person, regardless of appraisal experience, should be able to understand the entire process that led to a property's valuation.

Government should never benefit from the fact that citizens lack the time, resources, or expertise to challenge it.

Fraud, waste, or abuse

Fraud, waste, or abuse should be assumed until proven otherwise whenever anyone cannot easily follow the money.

Open the books and show the work so taxpayers can verify the record themselves. Mistakes happen, but opacity is what fails the test.

Show your work

You should be able to follow every cent of your property tax bill and know exactly why your taxes continue to increase. CivicLookup™ (I built this for free from public data) is one answer for the bill side: mill levies, year-over-year changes, and often a "Who authorized this?" trail back to legislation or ballot measures.

The valuation side needs the same standard. Every step, figure, formula, and decision in the appraisal process should be 100% visible to the public by default. If the average resident cannot understand how an appraiser arrived at the number, that appraiser has failed the transparency test for this office.

Speaking with the Assessor's office, some aspects of valuation were described as public and others as not. Valuation is public data. A process that is not fully auditable and understandable to someone without appraisal or real estate experience is a transparency failure. Fraud, waste, or abuse should be assumed until proven otherwise whenever anyone cannot easily follow the money.

Appraisers should know their work will be public by default and therefore must be defensible.

Open CivicLookup™

Comparable sales (comps)

Comparable sales (comps) are recent sales of similar properties used to help determine your property's value. They are central to understanding a valuation. The current handling in Arapahoe County is not acceptable for taxpayers:

• Comps grids are not mailed to the property owner. Owners have to intentionally seek them out on the county website, which is already difficult to navigate.
• Comps are not always available. After the even-year reappraisal process began, prior-year comps sheets became unavailable. The county confirmed that no comps sheets would be available until 2027.
• Comps are written for professionals. They assume appraisal or real estate fluency: undefined abbreviations, no glossary, and no plain-language definitions. Most people without prior knowledge cannot use them without intentional research. That does not serve the public.
• No adjustment column on the latest Notice of Valuation (NOV). The comps grid in the latest NOV PDF has no adjustment column for each comparable. Without adjustments, owners cannot see how each sale was brought to their property's indicated value. That is not showing the math.

Supporting evidence for your valuation should be pushed to you in usable form, remain available for every year as a permanent record (new comps are added to the stack; prior years do not disappear), and be understandable without an appraisal license.

Property valuation appeals (Arapahoe County)

Under Colorado's two-year reappraisal cycle, odd years are general reappraisal years for real property; even years are often intervening years where many parcels see smaller year-to-year changes. That can make it easy to assume "nothing big is happening" even when a protest window is open for the current tax year, which helps explain why owners miss deadlines even when the county has posted them online.

Several residents have told this campaign they only learned about the 2026 window from social media or a neighbor, not from postal mail. That pattern is why the campaign pushes for clearer notice and county information that is easy to find year-round, not dependent on whether mail caught your attention. If you are unsure whether you already filed or what your Notice of Valuation shows, use the county's official channels (including e-notices, if you enrolled) rather than unofficial screenshots alone.

Fairness in appeals: The burden of proof for an appeal should rest on the county, not you, as long as you have made a good-faith effort to justify the discrepancy. In plain terms, once a resident shows up in good faith with real evidence, the county should carry the weight of defending the valuation on the record. Do not leave people to reverse-engineer a black box alone. That is a standard for how the office should operate; specific rules and evidence requirements for any given protest still come from state law and county materials.

The valuation appeals process should favor the property owner by default, not the county.

Government should never benefit from the fact that citizens lack the time, resources, or expertise to challenge it.

The immediate first step is the same as show your work: every step must be publicly visible and understandable without appraisal experience. Without that, "easier appeals" is an empty promise.

Transparency that matters

A lot of information is public, but it is often scattered, buried in PDFs, or hard to reuse. You should have easy access to what you need to understand assessor-related parts of your bill: not a treasure hunt, and not something that requires you to be a tax or tech specialist to get the basics.

Transparency that matters means helping people see how valuation and line items connect to the legal framework (state law and local overlays), in plain language. The goal is clarity: useful information you can act on, not a maze of PDFs and disconnected pages.

• People should not have to connect the dots across county sites to interpret public data.
• Plain-language explanations should be consistent wherever you look, so taxpayers are not piecing together conflicting stories from notices, portals, and other pages.

Public APIs and machine-readable data

When assessor-related data is only available as unstructured pages or PDFs, residents and third parties end up retyping, screen scraping, or maintaining one-off tools. That is friction, and it increases the chance that copies of the data drift out of sync with the official source.

Where appropriate, public APIs (or other stable machine-readable feeds) make it easier to build accurate, repeatable, auditable tools. That includes people who want to manipulate raw data for research, journalism, or their own analysis, not only casual browsers.

• Structured, machine-readable data (CSV and similar) and clear presentations reduce guesswork and repeated manual work, and they make transparency easier to verify than when everything lives in PDFs or unstructured pages.
• Residents and software developers should not have to rely on scraping just to get straightforward answers.

Mass appraisal (CAMA)

Computer-assisted mass appraisal (CAMA) is the software and workflow stack counties use to value large numbers of properties: models, comparable data, rules, reappraisal cycles, and the workpapers appraisers rely on. It is not a casual policy dial; it exists so professional judgment can be applied at scale while staying defensible under Colorado appraisal standards and oversight.

That judgment shows up in concrete office choices: neighborhood boundaries, how tax increment financing (TIF) and other classifications interact with value, and which comparables and adjustments the workflow uses. Those choices change the assessment. One Colorado example is Aurora Urban Renewal Authority litigation over TIF reassessment, resolved by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2024 (details in the note below). How much of that judgment and supporting evidence owners see on notices and portals before they protest depends on configuration, product capabilities, and office policy. None of this is fully black and white: state law and Colorado appraisal standards still leave room for interpretation and practice, so counties do not all land in the same place.

Campaign positions are goals, not a guarantee of a specific vendor or contract. Nothing here claims how Arapahoe County's system is set up today; the Assessor's office holds that operational record. The point is to treat taxpayer-facing outputs as a first-class outcome of how mass appraisal is run.

Metro districts

Metro districts can affect a significant portion of property tax bills, especially when long-term debt (bonds) is involved. Example concerns include how districts are governed and how debt service can shape the tax bill over time. The core campaign goal is the same: make underlying public data understandable.

Note: This page is campaign informational. Always verify details with official county and district sources.

One ask of the Legislature

The Assessor does not write tax law or set mill levies. If there were one change worth urging from the Colorado Legislature and Governor to aid both the office and the public, it would be this: make it harder for tax authorities to raise property taxes without radical clarity.

• Bond-funded projects: when taxpayer money repays a bond, not all of it funds the project itself; some goes to interest and other financing costs. Borrowing is not inherently wrong, but taxpayers should clearly see how much of their money funds the project versus servicing the debt.
• Proposed tax increases: require detailed, radically transparent documents that ordinary taxpayers can understand, showing exactly where every cent of a proposed increase will go.

This is accountability-through-clarity advocacy, not a claim that the Assessor can enact those rules alone. CivicLookup™ already starts the resident-facing half: where every cent goes and why.

Modernizing property assessment

Modernizing assessment still means inward systems and outward clarity working together. The full Modern Systems / Better Outcomes write-up lives on the Approach page so Issues can stay focused on the resident-facing fights: show your work, comps, appeals, and following the money.

Next step: explore CivicLookup™ , built from public county data.

This is informational and not legal or tax advice. Always verify details with official county sources.