The clerk at the Broncos Team Store on Thursday handed me the team visor and a receipt.
$25 for the visor. Plus sales tax of 7.72 percent, or $1.93, for a total of $26.93.
Whoops.
The sales tax that voters approved in 1998 to pay for the stadium that houses the Broncos Team Store expired Dec. 31. That dropped Denver’s sales tax on most items to 7.62 percent.
So, did the stadium store just fail to reprogram its registers?
“Um, yeah, pretty much,” said Justin Mangnall, controller for Gameday Merchandising, which operates the Broncos store.
Though the state notified businesses last year that the stadium tax would expire at the end of 2011, the rather momentous occasion passed quietly, and it seems some retailers missed the memo. The state won’t know how many until Feb. 21, when January tax returns are due.
The inaccurate collections aren’t likely to add up to a huge amount of money. The tax itself was just a penny on every $10 in spending, or a dime on $100 and $1 on $1,000.
That said, it was collected in seven metro Denver counties, and it was enough to pay off $259 million in taxpayer obligation, plus interest, just 13 years after voters authorized the extension.
And that alone is a pretty unusual story.
A government structure created by the state and embraced by voters has kept every promise made. In a rare combination of regional cooperation, sound financial planning and good governance (by volunteer politicians), residents of metro Denver paid for two new stadiums — baseball and football — in a shorter time frame than almost any other metro area has managed for just one.
Then, when the tax expired, the government let it go. No whining, no pleading for more — no fiscal shenanigans.
“The uncommon thing here is that the tax wasn’t extended before it expired,” said Jim Grinstead, publisher of Revenues From Sports Venues, which tracks developments like this for the stadium-building industry. “Paying it off early happens, but governments will typically try to extend it to move to other projects.”
Actually, it was extended once, with voter approval, after the same tax collected in a roaring local economy paid off Coors Field way ahead of schedule. After the Broncos’ first Super Bowl win, supporters asked voters to keep the tax going through 2011 to build the team a new home (good timing).
But now it has ended, and it is a shame we didn’t all get to have a mortgage-burning party in the parking lot before the Steelers game. We might still get another chance, somewhere else.
“I’ll get a phone call probably two or three times a week about this tax, usually a legislator or someone asking how it was structured and what we were going to do with it,” said Ray Baker, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, which technically owns Sports Authority Field at Mile High.
Baker is not revealing whom, if anyone, he has heard from who might be next to ask voters for approval of a similar tax. But it is an open secret that some backers of a Denver bid for the Winter Olympics have made googly eyes at taxpayers, as have some who advocate a wholesale renovation of the National Western Complex. They could even be combined into a single tax request.
This experience with the baseball and football stadium taxes should inspire voter confidence. We got exactly what we paid for.
Now if only the retailers would perform as well.
Any business that inadvertently collected the stadium tax should remit it to the state. From there, said Ro Silva, spokeswoman for the state Department of Revenue, it will be sent to the Stadium District anyway.
Baker doesn’t want it.
“We don’t believe we have any right to any additional dollars after the debt is gone,” he said.
It could be returned to the cities and counties where voters approved it. But the least likely scenario is that it will be returned to the people who paid it — and who have already done their part to give Tim Tebow and company a place to play, only to be overcharged by a dime for his jersey.
“We’d end up spending thousands of dollars to reimburse hundreds,” said Gameday’s Mangnall. As for those Team Store cash registers:
“It’ll be fixed tonight.”
Chuck Murphy: 303-954-1829, cmurphy@denverpost.comor twitter.com/cmurphydenpost
