CoMoBUZ Insider Briefing, May 29, 2026

Mike's quick, weekly no-nonsense look at civic affairs in Columbia and Boone County, Missouri. This week, Mike takes a long look at the City of Columbia’s financial condition and how recent spending growth, utility indecision, public safety needs, pension obligations and management decisions have converged into a tax proposal and utility rate increases that are reshaping the cost of living in Columbia.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Columbia voters are being asked a simple question with a complicated history. Should they approve a new one cent sales and use tax for public safety? That's the ballot question. But it's not the whole story. The tax is arriving with rising utility bills. It's arriving after years of payroll growth, repeated deficit budgets, and real police and fire needs. Columbia is moving toward a proposed one cent public safety sales and use tax that city leaders say would pay for police, fire, emergency response, facilities, vehicles, technology, and pension support. The need is real, but the broader story is affordability. Taxes are headed up, utility rates are headed up, the cost of local government is headed up, and voters are being asked to decide whether this new tax is a necessary investment in public safety, a rescue plan for the city's general fund, or both. In a minute, how Columbia got here. But first, here's what this proposal really asks voters to decide. This week on the Como Buzz Insider Briefing, we're doing one subject, Columbia's proposed public safety tax. The city's argument for it, the budget behind it, the utility increases beside it, and the affordability question underneath it. For City Hall, these are different funds and different spreadsheets. For residents, they're all the same bill. All right, let's start with the question on the ballot. Columbia voters are expected to decide whether to approve a new one cent sales and use tax dedicated to public safety. City staff project the tax would raise about $38 million a year. The money would be used for police and fire operations, public safety buildings, vehicles, technology, and pension obligations. The plan calls for adding 50 police officers over four years. It calls for adding roughly 40 to 42 firefighters. It includes a new police facility, two new fire stations, renovations to three existing fire stations, vehicles, and technology. That's the public facing case. And it's not a fake case. Columbia has real public safety needs. The city has grown, its population has grown, its land area has grown, public safety expectations have grown. City materials say Columbia had about 1.49 sworn officers per 1,000 residents in 2000. By 2026, that number was closer to 1.39. That may sound like a small difference, but over time, in a growing city, it matters. The fire department has its own staffing argument. The city says more firefighters would improve fire and medical response and help the department handle simultaneous fire ground tasks. Then there's the pension issue. The City Police and Firefighter Retirement Fund is deeply underfunded. In the May 2026 sales tax presentation, the police pension was listed as 53% funded. The firefighter pension was listed at 61% funded. The combined unfunded actuarial accrued liability was listed at nearly $149 million. That is serious. A pension obligation is not a wish list item. It's a promise already made. So the first point has to be said plainly. Public safety needs are real. Police staffing matters, fire staffing matters, pension obligations matter, facilities, vehicles, and technology cost money. But that is only the first layer, because Columbia's public safety tax is both what City Hall says it is and more than City Hall wants to say. It's a public safety tax, but it's also a general fund rescue plan. Here's why. Public safety is already the largest expense in Columbia's general fund. In the fiscal year 2026 budget, public safety accounts for 48.3% of general fund spending. Under the proposed structure, Columbia would create a new public safety fund. That fund would receive the new sales tax revenue. It would also receive about $60 million from the existing general fund sales tax as an ongoing allocation. That structure would separate police and fire expenses from the rest of the general fund. On paper, that creates transparency, but the structure also relieves pressure on the general fund by moving its largest cost category into a dedicated funding structure. This is not a trick, but it is the budget mechanic at the center of the proposal. The phrase dedicated to public safety is true, but it's incomplete. The tax would pay for public safety. It would also help stabilize the larger city operating structure by creating new recurring revenue for the largest part of the budget. That brings us to one of the most misunderstood pieces of this debate, Columbia's cash reserves. The city had $533.5 million in cash reserves as of March 31st. That number is real, but it is often used badly. It is sometimes cited as if City Hall has more than a half a billion dollars sitting in one giant account, available to avoid tax increases, rate increases, or budget cuts. That is not how municipal cash works. City officials refer to it as pooled cash. It is the combined balances of many separate city funds. Some of it is operating cash, some is legally restricted, some is set aside for debt payments, customer deposits, voter approved purchases, utilities, or capital projects. So the pooled cash number matters, but it does not answer the tax question by itself. The relevant question is this. Which funds hold the cash? What restrictions apply? What obligations is it already assigned to? And does that fund have enough recurring revenue to pay recurring expenses? A city can use reserves for one-time expenses, emergencies, or temporary gaps. But a city cannot responsibly use reserves year after year to pay permanent payroll benefits, pensions, and operating costs. Once reserves are spent, they're gone. The recurring expenses remain. A police officer hired with reserves still has to be paid next year. A firefire added with reserves still requires salary benefits, equipment, and pension contributions next year. A pay raise funded with reserves becomes part of the base budget for every future year. That is the heart of the general fund problem. Pooled cash does not solve it. And that leads directly to the next part of the story. Columbia did not stumble into this proposed tax increase. It budgeted its way there. For several years, City Hall increased employee pay, added positions, and used cash reserves to cover ongoing operating revenues. At the same time, city leaders avoided a direct public conversation about the tax increase that would eventually be needed to sustain the larger, more expensive government that they were building. The numbers show the shift. In the five years before DeCarlin Seawood became city manager and Barbara Buffalo became mayor, the city added 26 new budgeted positions. Beginning with fiscal year 2023, the city has added 151 new budgeted positions in just four years. Salaries increased, compensation was overhauled, across the board raises followed. The fiscal year 2026 budget calls for personnel expenses to reach just under $175 million. That's a major increase in the city's permanent cost structure. City leaders have defended those decisions as necessary. And there is a fair argument there. The city had recruitment and retention problems. Public employers face wage pressure. Police, fire, utilities, and city operations all depend on people. But salary increases do not pay for themselves. New positions do not pay for themselves. They become recurring obligations. They affect benefits. They affect pensions. They affect future raises. They affect utility rates when employees work in the utility funds. That is why the order of events matters. City Hall expended recurring costs before securing recurring revenue. Then it used reserves to cover the gap. It outlined options for raising sales taxes and property taxes, including public safety tax options. That meeting happened during the mayoral campaign. Buffalo then said the city was not proposing a tax increase right now and blamed media misinformation. Technically, no tax had been placed on the ballot, but substantively, City Hall was already preparing the ground. The words changed over time. First, it was new revenue sources, then revenue analysis, then public safety needs. By fall of 2025, Seawood acknowledged that a tax increase was likely. He said the city might need to go to voters and that fees alone could not close the gap. A month later, then Councilman Don Waterman said the public safety tax possibility out loud at a council meeting. That moment mattered. It converted months of euphemism into a public discussion. The accountability question is not whether Columbia needed to improve employee pay, it likely did. It's not whether police and fire have real needs, they do. The question is why City Hall expanded recurring costs before securing recurring revenue and why the public conversation about taxes lagged so far behind the spending decisions that made those taxes likely. And now even that is not the whole affordability picture. Because while City Hall prepares to ask voters for a public safety tax, utility bills are also headed higher. City staff are preparing utility rate increases for the fiscal year 2027 budget. Those include a 10% increase for water on top of a 12% increase last year, electric rate increases of at least 6%, and solid weight increases that begin at 5% next year, with 10% increases discussed in each of the following two years. Those increases are separate from the general fund tax proposal. Water, electric, sewer, solid waste, and stormwater are enterprise funds. They're accounted for separately and are supposed to operate like business units supported by customer rates and fees. That distinction matters legally and financially, but for residents, that distinction is not the bottom line. A higher sales tax and higher utility bills both come out of the same household budget. For city accountants, the sales tax and utility rates live in different funds. For a household, they live in the same month. And utility bills are not isolated from the broader city budget. One way utility money moves into the general fund is through the city's payment in lieu of taxes or pilot. In the city's fiscal year 2026 revenue picture, pilot accounts for 14.4% of general fund revenue. A second transfer comes through intra-governmental expenses. Those are internal charges paid by utility funds for shared city services. The practice is not automatically improper, but it does mean ratepayers are helping carry more than the direct cost of utility services. And that puts utility increases inside Columbia's larger affordability debate. Water customers already absorbed a 12% increase for fiscal year 2026. Staff is now preparing to recommend another 10% increase for 27. Electric is even more volatile. The main driver is purchased power. Columbia has failed to arrange sufficient long-term sources of electric power, so it must buy electricity from the energy market. Those costs have been rising faster than city rates. Staff said Columbia carried over about $10 million in unrecovered power cost adjustment expenses. The Water and Light Advisory Board has recommended raising the cap from 15% to 25%. That would allow the utility to recover even more power costs more quickly. But it would also drive up customer bills. And even that is not the full exposure. Advisory board members have pressed staff about major future costs not clearly built into the forecast being shown to council. Utility Director Aaron Keyes acknowledged that if the Sykston Power arrangement goes away, electric expenses from that alone could rise by $13 million a year. That's a major future risk. Solid waste is another rate problem moving toward customers. The proposed fiscal 2027 plan begins with a 5% increase, but forecasts show additional increases will likely be needed, included 10% in the next two years. Each year. This is the pattern. Delay the decision, soften the forecast, raise the bill later. City Hawk can argue that each increase has its own justification. Water needs revenues and capital work. Electric needs to recover power costs. Solid waste needs equipment. Public safety needs people and facilities. Pensions need stabilization. All true. But residents are entitled to see the whole bill, not just the final installment. They are facing a stacked set of costs: a public safety tax, water increase, electric increase, solid waste increase, power cost adjustment, and future capacity costs. And household budgets don't care what fund the cost came from. That is the affordability question. Voters are not simply evaluating whether police and fire need support. They're evaluating the total cost of local government. Sales taxes, utility bills, water rates, electric rates, trash rates, fees, transfers. The family struggling in Columbia does not care whether the next dollar is called a rate adjustment, a pilot, a fee, a tax, or a cost recovery mechanism. It's still gone. After all of that, here's my view. Columbia's affordability problem is not the result of one ballot measure alone. It is the accumulated result of public safety needs, pension obligations, spending choices, utility decisions, and city management. The proposed public safety tax may be necessary, but necessary does not erase accountability. Police officers and firefighters need support. Public safety staffing has not kept pace. Pension obligations are real. Facilities, vehicles, technology, and fire station needs cannot just be wished away. But voters are not being asked this question in a vacuum. They're being asked after years of rising city costs. They're being asked after City Hall added roughly 150 budgeted positions in four years. They're being asked after payroll expenses rose sharply. They're being asked after the city used reserves to cover ongoing expenses. They're being asked while utility bills are under pressure. And they're being asked by a city government that too often treats taxpayers and ratepayers as the fallback plan. That is not simply a revenue problem. It's a competence problem. And competence matters because incompetence has a price. In Columbia, that price is showing up in utility bills, sales taxes, and the monthly budgets of families already stretched thin. Buffalo and Seawood did not create every problem. Some of these pressures began before them. But leadership means owning the moment you govern. Seawood became city manager in January of 2022. Buffalo took office in April of 2022. Since then, the curve has changed. City government became more expensive. The city added positions, compensation increased, utility pressure deepened. The public safety tax moved from a quiet revenue discussion to formal proposal. And the affordability burden now falling on Columbia families is part of the record. Some of the spending may have been justified, but justified spending still has to be paid for. And if City Hall raises permanent costs without a permanent revenue plan, the bill eventually reaches residents. That is what's happening now. Before asking for a new tax, City Hall should have gone through a serious public reprioritization, department by department, program by program, not a vague budget conversation, a real review. What is essential? What can wait? What can be cut? How much of the public safety needs can be funded by redirecting existing dollars? How much current cost growth is tied to these compensation decisions? How much utility pressure is tied to city management choices? Those are basic questions. If every program is essential, then nothing is prioritized. If every department is protected, then public safety is not truly the priority. If every cost increase is unavoidable, then management is not really management, it's administration by invoice. That is why voters face such a difficult decision. A no vote may punish City Hall, but it also may punish public safety. A yes vote may help police and fire, but it may also reward the governing habits that help create this crisis. That is the bind. The better question is whether City Hall has earned trust, whether it has told the full story, whether it has clearly explained what went wrong, whether it has shown what will change, and whether voters believe more money will produce better government. If voters approve the tax, City Hall should not treat that as a validation, it should treat it as a rescue, a rescue of public safety, not a vote of confidence in the full governing record. Approval should come with demands, a full spending review, a utility management reckoning, a clear accounting of compensation driven cost increases, a serious affordability analysis, better long-term capital planning, clearer utility forecasts that show known risks before residents are surprised by them later. Bad government has a way of making the public pay twice, once for the mistake and again for the repair. Columbia residents are now being asked to pay again. They may decide they have to. Public safety may be too important to let City Hall's failures stand in the way. But no one should confuse that with confidence. If this city government gets more money without becoming more competent, how long before Columbia families are asked to bail it out again? That is the honest debate. Not whether public safety matters, it does. It certainly does. Not whether Columbia has real police and fire needs, it does. Not whether pensions, facilities, vehicles, and emergency response cost money, they do. The honest debate is larger. What changed? What went wrong? What did City Hall choose? And what costs are still coming? What are residents really being asked to pay for? And what will be different if voters approve the tax? Columbia's proposed public safety sales tax is not just a ballot question. It is the place where several years of city choices, city needs, city delays, and household affordability pressure finally meet. The full five-part series is available now at Como Buzz.com, and if you value this kind of local accountability reporting, consider becoming a Como Buzz member. I'm Mike Murphy. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.