At its Aug. 17 meeting, the Monument Town Council approved an ordinance that will ask voters for a 1.5% increase in the use tax on construction materials.

The ordinance will not affect sales tax.

“There’s use tax and sales tax. Sales tax is easy; you go in the store and you buy something, you pay sales tax and the sales tax gets remitted to the town,” Mayor Pro-tem Steve King said. “When projects get built, most of that lumber, packs and appliances and everything else gets purchased from outside of the town and brought into the town.”

The builder will estimate the cost on all of those materials purchased outside of the town and pay a use tax. The problem is that the use tax has long fallen well below the sales tax. That presents a grievous shortfall for the town.

“I believe since 1982, the use tax rate has been 2% and the sales tax rate that we have here is 3.5%,” King said. “So the town in essence is getting shorted on sales tax revenue from large construction projects — anything that requires a building permit.

“The purpose of this is to try to bring that up to where it’s equal with each other.”

If passed in the Nov. 3 election, the increase will take effect on Jan. 1. The revenue generated will be spent on “capital projects, including streets, roads, bridges and sidewalks and stormwater improvements,” according to the ballot language.

“I think (the use tax rate) needs to be the same as our sales tax rate,” King said. “It’s fair to everybody that way.”

In other business

The council passed the final planned unit development for Conexus Lot 1 Filing 2 (also known as Hillpointe), which is part of the larger Conexus development along the west side of I-25 and the east side of Old Denver Road and north of Baptist Road.

The development will consist of 312 apartment units and 42 townhome-style units.