On June 15, after a pollster walked the Monument Town Council through the numbers, the council reached a consensus to move a tax increase toward the November ballot. The measure, which staff will now draft into ballot language, would raise the town’s use tax by 1.5 percentage points — to 3.5%, matching the sales tax — with the money dedicated to roads, streets, and bridges. What the same survey shows, in unusual detail, is that the measure’s fate may rest less on the tax itself than on the words used to describe it.
Cold, the tax is unpopular. When Magellan Strategies — the Broomfield firm the town hired, best known for its work with Republican campaigns — first asked its 636 respondents about a 1.5% use-tax increase, just 39% were in favor and 55% opposed. Then the survey did what these surveys are built to do: it told voters why the town wants the money. After respondents read that the funds would be locked to roads and infrastructure, that developers and builders would bear much of the cost, and that the money could finish the long-stalled widening of Jackson Creek Parkway, support climbed to 64% and opposition fell to 31%. A measure that started 16 points underwater finished 33 points above water — a 25-point swing, produced entirely by information.
Which messages did the lifting is the part the council clearly heard. The single most persuasive statement, moving 68% of voters toward yes, was simply that the money could be used only for roads — a legal guarantee, not a promise. Finishing Jackson Creek Parkway moved 64%. The argument that developers and builders would pay a larger share, because they buy construction materials in volume, moved 63%; the council echoed it almost verbatim, framing the tax around developers “paying their fair share.” Notably, when voters were asked cold how they would prefer to pay for roads, the use tax finished last of four options, named by just 11% — behind a sales tax, a property tax, and even a lodging tax. The town’s chosen instrument is the public’s least favorite, right up until it is recast as a tax on growth.
That gap points to the measure’s real vulnerability, which is not the rate but the trust. Monument residents broadly approve of their town’s services — 64% approve of the job it does, 66% of its public-works department — yet fewer than half, 49%, agree the town “is fiscally responsible and spends taxpayer money wisely.” In the survey’s open-ended answers, opponents returned again and again to the same themes: taxes are already too high, the town should live within its means, and if developers are the problem they should be billed directly through impact fees rather than a tax residents also pay. The strongest pro-tax message — that the money is legally fenced to roads — is, in effect, an answer to that distrust. It works because it presumes the skepticism is already there.
Who will actually settle the question in November is a town that looks less like its reputation every year. Buried in the same survey is a table drawn from the town’s voter file, and it shows that as of 2025, half of Monument’s 10,219 registered voters — 50.8% — belong to no political party at all. Registered Republicans are 35.5%, registered Democrats just 11.4%, barely one voter in nine. The same data tracks the shift over time through turnout: as recently as 2020, Republicans were 45% of Monument’s actual voters and unaffiliated voters under 40%; by 2024 the unaffiliated share had risen to 47% and the Republican share had fallen to 39%. The town has not turned Democratic. It has drifted away from the parties altogether.
That drift is not unique to Monument; it is the strongest pattern in Colorado politics. Unaffiliated voters are now the largest bloc at every level — roughly half the state, 53% of El Paso County, about half of the surrounding state senate district, and a majority in Monument itself. What changes as the map tightens is the runner-up: statewide, registered Democrats narrowly outnumber Republicans, but in El Paso County, the district, and Monument, Republicans climb and Democrats nearly vanish. Monument is the most Republican and least Democratic of those four jurisdictions, and still most of its voters claim no party.
For a tax measure, that math cuts in an unexpected direction. The survey found the informed use tax most popular with the voters Monument has fewest of — Democrats backed it 85% — and coolest among the bloc that turns out most reliably in low-turnout elections: Republicans, who supported it 55%, against 66% of unaffiliated voters. A measure sold on making developers pay for growth lands best with the town’s small Democratic minority and its unaffiliated plurality, and meets the most resistance from the Republicans who have historically decided Monument’s off-year elections. Whether November’s electorate looks more like the town’s registration or more like its turnout history will matter as much as any slogan.
There is a through-line connecting all of it, and it is growth. Newer residents were the likeliest to support the tax — 72% among those in town five years or less — while residents of twenty years or more were far cooler, at 51%; 62% of all respondents have lived in Monument a decade or less. The winning message, that growth should help pay for the roads it strains, tracks an anxiety the survey found everywhere in the open-ended responses, the same anxiety visible the night the council acted: at that June 15 meeting, the council also directed staff to draft a moratorium on data centers, citing their demands on the town’s water and power. A town worried about what its expansion is costing it has been handed a tax built to answer that worry — provided, the survey suggests, it is described in exactly those terms.
Sources and methodology
The survey figures come from the Town of Monument Use Tax Ballot Measure Survey, conducted by Magellan Strategies for the Town of Monument (fielded May 13–19, 2026; 636 respondents; margin of error ±3.76%, larger for subgroups). The full topline and presentation are posted in the town’s public records portal. The June 15 Town Council direction to staff is on the meeting video.
Registration comparisons come from the Colorado Secretary of State (statewide, late 2025) and the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder (county, June 15, 2026); senate-district figures are the closest available proxy for the Monument area. Background on Colorado’s automatic voter registration and the rise of unaffiliated voters: Colorado Newsline.
Note on the numbers: the survey was commissioned by the town and is, by design, a message test — its later questions present the case for the tax before re-asking support, so the 64% “informed” figure measures persuadability under favorable framing, not a current vote count. Registration counts how voters are registered; turnout counts who voted, and the two are not interchangeable: Monument’s 2025 party breakdown is registration, while the 2020–2024 year figures describe turnout. The council’s June 15 action was a consensus directing staff to prepare ballot language, not a final adopted measure.
