Where the money comes from, and where it goes.

The cost page answers what incorporation costs you. This one answers the other question: how a town of 4,300 people pays for roads, a sheriff’s contract, snow removal and a staff — and whether the arithmetic actually closes.

Everything below is the Niwot Incorporation Committee’s pro forma, which models fourteen years and stress-tests every line. We have not rounded it in our favor or left anything out because it was inconvenient. Where a year looks tight, we say so.

The figures shown are 2030. It is the first year everything runs at normal size: 2028 is a partial year with one-time startup costs, and 2029 carries the road bond in and the deferred repairs out, so both sides of that year are ten times trend and tell you nothing.

Two lines are worth stopping on. The Highway Users Tax Fund and the Road and Bridge share are state money distributed by formula — and unincorporated Niwot gets none of it. That revenue exists today and goes somewhere else. Becoming a town is what redirects it here.

Sales tax is the largest line, and the one people assume comes out of their own pocket. Most of it does not. Households account for about 40% of total town revenue; the rest is businesses, contractors, visitors and state formula money. That is the whole reason a town costs a household about $60 a month while running a $4.6 million budget.

Roads are 58% of the budget. That is the answer to “is this really about the roads?” — it is what the town would mostly be. Maintenance, the bond repayment, snow removal, sweeping, signs and striping together run more than everything else combined.

There is no town hall in this budget, and no police department. Public safety is a contract with the Boulder County Sheriff for two deputies dedicated to Niwot. The building department is contracted, and its permit fees more than pay for it. Parks stay with the county. This is a deliberately lean contract-first town, and that is why the staff line is four and a half people rather than forty.

The town borrows $15 million in 2029 and spends it clearing the backlog of deferred repairs in one go, then repays it from sales tax over about fifteen years. The repayment is the second-largest line in the budget above.

Borrowing is the cheaper option, and it is not close. Pavement does not degrade in a straight line — once a road drops below a condition score of 50, the repair cost triples, and below 25 it has to be rebuilt rather than resurfaced. Niwot’s average is 44 today. Saving up for fifteen years means paying to rebuild roads that could have been resurfaced.

This distinction matters more than it sounds, and it is the thing most summaries of a municipal budget get wrong.

The roads reserve comes first. Look at the largest expense line above — ongoing maintenance, $1.3 million a year. That is not just this year’s crack sealing and chip seal. It carries an explicit annual set-aside for the next round of road capital projects, and it is expensed every single year rather than left to accumulate somewhere. It grows to $1.7 million a year by 2040.

The general fund reserve is what is left over after that. Not before it. Every figure in the table below is the town’s cushion after operating costs, after bond repayment, and after the full roads-reinvestment commitment have all been funded.

They rise every year, and the low point is the beginning rather than some later dip. 2030 is the tightest year — the town adds only about $12,000 to reserves, because full bond repayment begins while the repair backlog is still being worked off. We would rather point at that than have you find it. It is a thin year on top of $2.9 million already banked, not a shortfall.

One more thing worth knowing, because it cuts against us. An earlier version of this pro forma let the roads set-aside accumulate inside the general fund, which produced a reserve figure of about $15 million by 2040 — more than double what we show. The current version expenses that money each year instead, so it appears as a funded commitment rather than as savings. The smaller number is the more honest one, and it is the one on this page.

That is also the whole difference between a town and the arrangement Niwot has now. Deferring road maintenance is precisely how an average pavement condition of 44 happens. A budget that expenses the next cycle every year is the opposite of deferring it.

Fair question, and the pro forma tests it directly rather than asserting confidence. Two answers.

Sales tax would have to fall 20% permanently — and stay there — before general-fund reserves would be exhausted at any point through 2040. Every other revenue line would have to fall much further than that, or disappear entirely.

Under a correlated downturn — a Monte Carlo simulation where sales tax, use tax and permits all fall together in clustered bad years, with expenses rising at the same time — the probability of reserves ever going negative is 3.4%.

Both tests are run against the reserves in the section above — the cushion that sits on top of a fully funded roads commitment, not instead of one.

Every number on this page comes from the incorporation pro forma, a fourteen-year model published in full by the Niwot Incorporation Committee — a separate organization from this campaign. It includes the sensitivity analysis and the Monte Carlo runs quoted above, and the assumptions behind every line.

If you find something here that does not match it, tell us and we will fix it and say so. That has already happened more than once.