At a special work session and meeting Wednesday, Sept. 3, the Summit Board of County Commissioners discussed a ballot measure that would allow them to use lodging tax revenues for road repairs.

The measure would not raise the lodging tax or create new revenue for the county. It would add road and bridge as an area in which the county could use lodging tax revenue, joining child care and housing.

Finance director David Reynolds said that, after some adjustments, the county comes about $1.2 million short in trying to fund the 2026 asphalt capital project budget the Summit County Road and Bridge Department presented to the board in August.

“You guys asked us to find as many ways as possible to actually make that happen because Road and Bridge is one of your key focuses,” county manager Dave Rossi said to the commissioners about fully funding the budget. 

The Road and Bridge Department proposed a $9.3 million budget, which was about $3 million more than what the 2025 five-year plan had budgeted for 2026. Rossi said the increases came from including more money for Swan Mountain Road reconstruction, more money for roads in Copper Mountain and adding money for work on Baldy Road.

If the measure passes and the commissioners gain the ability to put lodging tax revenue toward Road and Bridge, Rossi said they could cover the $1.2 million shortfall with about 45% of the lodging tax revenue. 

The revenue is currently split between housing and childcare, with each receiving 45%. The other 10% goes to marketing and tourism, which is required by state law, according to Rossi. County attorney Jeff Huntley said the county uses that money for education.

“It’s meant to really help educate tourists and visitors and try to help alleviate some of the problems with tourism and the impacts on locals,” Huntley said.

Commissioner Tamara Pogue asked questions during the work session that she said she knew the answers to but thought it would be “important for the public to understand.”

Pogue asked why the county did not include infrastructure as an allowed use for the lodging tax when it first passed in 2022. Huntley said state law did not allow counties to use the funds for infrastructure at the time, but House Bill 1247, which passed in May, changed that.

The bill allows money to be used for infrastructure, conservation and public safety initiatives, and it also increases the cap for county lodging taxes from 2% to 6%.

Commissioner Nina Waters made a point that the commissioners are “practicing a great deal of restraint” by not trying to increase the lodging tax above its current level of 2%. She said the county faces a “dire” budget situation, and increasing the tax would help “take some pressure off the general fund.”

Waters added that it is unlikely state and federal funds will help cover budget shortfalls in the near future.

“Something is better than nothing, and hopefully our voters will allow us to do something,” Waters said. “It needs to be stated that no one is coming to save us.”

Another question Pogue posed had to do with property taxes, which help fund the Road and Bridge Department. She asked why the large increases in property value seen in 2023 did not provide enough funding for the department.

Reynolds said the county lowered the Road and Bridge mill levy when property values increased by around 40% so that the revenue would stay flat “as it had been as a bit of relief to constituents.”

He added that the county gives about a third of the property tax revenue assigned to Road and Bridge to the towns.

“There’s a lot of levers at play in how property tax actually makes it to Road and Bridge,” Reynolds said. “With the (2023) reappraisal, property tax revenue in Road and Bridge remained flat to the prior year.”

Pogue also asked about the Highway Users Tax Fund, from which state taxes on gas are distributed, and “all this money, quote unquote,” the county gets from the fund. Reynolds did not know the exact amount the county receives, but he said it is around $1 million.

Adrienne Saia Isaac, the Summit County government communications director, stated in an email that the county received $1.56 million from the tax fund in fiscal year 2024. State records show the county received $1.16 million from the fund in fiscal year 2025. 

Pogue and Rossi said the amount the county receives each year is about enough to repave a mile of road.

The total budget for Road and Bridge — which includes asphalt capital projects and standard maintenance and operations — sits at $18.3 million in the most recent 2026 draft budget, according to Isaac.

Revenue sources for the department include the Highway Users Tax Fund; the special ownership, or vehicle registration, tax, which contributed $2.55 million in 2024; property taxes, which contributed $2 million in 2024; and miscellaneous sources like sales tax, according to Isaac.

Reynolds said about $7.5 million of sales tax revenue goes to Road and Bridge from the general fund.

Rossi said the county has, in years past, not spent enough on repaving projects to keep the county’s roads from overall deteriorating.

“We keep falling behind and, you know, literally falling off the side of the road,” Rossi said. “The conditions are getting so bad that we’re now in catch-up mode.”

In the work session, Pogue said the county has other ways to fund child care if adding Road and Bridge to the lodging tax takes money away from it.

“For those for whom child care remains their top priority, they should rest assured that we have dollars that we could use to backfill if we start using some of this money (for) Road and Bridge,” Pogue said.

Pogue added that she believes the county should continue funding housing, “so I wouldn’t support a complete elimination of that bucket.” She said the ballot measure is the best way for the county to fund the road work.

The commissioners had a special meeting immediately after the work session, and they approved the resolution. It will be on the ballot of voters in unincorporated Summit County, and if the measure passes, it will affect lodging taxes collected on the short-term rental of property in unincorporated Summit County.