Mayor Graham speaks on raising taxes and increasing arrests

State of the City address

By DEVIN FLORES

Pueblo, Colorado. The weather outside was frigid, with nearly 20 degrees of windchill, as Mayor Heather Graham gave a State of the City address at Pueblo Memorial Hall Friday, Jan. 24. 

The mayor’s primary topics reflected crime and safety concerns, the city’s budget, and her administration’s work to combat homelessness.

Most notably, she spoke of cutting the city’s budget significantly, including a 49% decrease in non-departmental funding, a proposed sales tax hike for 2025, a 143-percent increase in staffing with the Pueblo Police Department, and the clearing of unhoused people from Pueblo’s public lands.

When speaking on the budget, Mayor Graham highlighted the deficit faced by the city.

“Pueblo is facing an $8.6 million shortfall over 2025,” she said, before going on to explain that her controversial budget reflects a more “conservative and prudent” attitude towards expenditure.

“Approximately 62-percent of the city’s budget comes from sales and use tax,” she said. “In actual reporting, sales tax was down 7 out of 11 months (in 2024). The city’s lodging tax is also down 8.8-percent.”

Despite the economic downturn, she said some city services were expanding, including expansion of transit, the construction of new affordable housing, and the repair and maintenance of roads and sidewalks across the city.

However, closer scrutiny suggests that many of these infrastructure projects were centered on already-affluent sections of the city. The projects she highlighted included repaving Elmwood Golf Paths, Dillon Drive, and 29th street. Among other projects, none listed were in the East Side.

Mayor Graham expanded on her administration’s efforts to combat homelessness in the community. She spoke on the city’s plans to expand the city’s only permanent homeless shelter, and spoke proudly of the fact that ten individuals who were previously housed at the shelter were able to secure permanent housing last year.

“The city has allocated funding for pallet housing facilities,” she continued, without specifying how much.

She then spoke briefly about the clearing-out of the encampment known as “The Jungle”, referring to it as an “urban clean-up” to “combat illegal dumping.”

“Living conditions were deplorable,” she said, referring to the encampments used by unhoused persons in the communities, “and were a health and safety risk to the public. We worked with many of our nonprofits to ensure that children, pets, and individuals were well cared-for as they were displaced.”

Many of these same organizations were defunded by the mayor’s budget reductions proposed and passed last year, raising questions about how these nonprofits will be able to collaborate with the city on such issues in the coming years.

The final major talking point of Mayor Graham’s address was public safety and crime. She proudly announced that the city saw a 7-percent overall decrease in crime, including a 26-percent decrease in homicide, which she attributed in part to the city’s expanding police department.

“We saw a notable improvement in recruitment and retention in 2024,” she said. “I recognized the necessity of internal changes to improve our recruitment numbers. Twenty officers left the department in 2024, a decrease from 40 in 2023. Our recruitment efforts led to 34 new hires, and we retained 30 of those hires.”

Despite all of this, she revealed that the city has seen an overall increase in theft, larceny, aggravated assault, and sexual assault cases. She blamed lax policing on these numbers.

“These offenders ignore their court dates, repeat their behavior, and continue to harm our communities,” said Mayor Graham. “It is my belief that jailing these people [immediately] will help reduce crime. We will continue to work with the sheriff’s office — really, to beg the sheriff — to keep these people in the jail, instead of releasing them after a five-minute processing.”

Notably absent from her address was any mention of immigration or ICE, which are confirmed to be present in Pueblo County this last week. Other mayors across Colorado addressed this activity this month, as did the Pueblo County sheriff, taking various stances on it, so Mayor Graham’s neglect to mention it stood out.

Mayor Graham closed her address by speaking about her administration’s plans to shore up the city’s budget. She spoke in broad terms about raising the city’s sales tax to help plug the deficit.

“Across Colorado, 77-percent of communities have a higher sales tax than in Pueblo,” she argued. “For every dollar spent in Pueblo, only 3 cents lands with the city. That means for a grocery bill of $200, only 6 dollars are collected for public funding.” This was followed by a mention of a proposed tax on food items, which was brief and undetailed.

At a time of economic uncertainty for many across the country, her statements may ring as tone-deaf, especially in Pueblo. While it is true that other Colorado municipalities pay higher sales taxes, those communities are also on the whole better paid than Pueblo, which has a median household income of $52k, compared to $65k in Greeley and $83k in Colorado Springs.

In addition, her call-out of raising taxes, especially a food tax, on a $200 grocery bill at a time when rising prices are outstripping stagnant wages, may raise concerns about the cost of living in Pueblo.

This was Mayor Graham’s first State of the City address since her inauguration last year. She will continue to serve as the mayor of Pueblo through 2027, when she will be up for reelection.

Devin Flores is an. Independant writer from Pueblo, CO. He specializes in local Colorado culture, history and politics.