Follow the money

Where will $914 million
of Colorado Springs’ money go?

The City of Colorado Springs’ 2026 Budget appropriates $914 million across all city funds, adopted by Ordinance No. 25-95. That total leaves out Colorado Springs Utilities, which is budgeted separately. Four governments spend money on these pages: the city; El Paso County, which runs the jail, the courts and the safety net; the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority; and the State of Colorado. Every figure says whose money it is, and none is added across governments.

FACT Source: 2026 Budget book · City of Colorado Springs · the annual appropriation ordinance, calendar year 2026

All city funds FACT

$914.2M

$914,244,032 of 2026 budgeted expenditures across every City fund, reconciled to the dollar three separate ways against the book’s own tables. It excludes Colorado Springs Utilities, which is budgeted separately: see the tile beside this one.

Colorado Springs Utilities FACT

$2.24B

A city enterprise budgeted separately, by its own process, in its own plan: $2,239,136,000 approved for 2026, which the plan’s prose rounds to $2.2 billion. It is not in the $914.2M at left, and the two are never added on this site. The city’s audited financial report is the one document that covers both, on a different basis.

Total 2026 capital program FACT

$301.8M

$301,757,941, the city’s own printed Total 2026 CIP, from all funding sources. It is not the city’s own money alone: it is every dollar the city programs through its capital plan, whoever raised it. The Projects page names the source of each project’s money.

PPRTA — another government FACT

$115.8M

38.4% of the program beside it, raised and controlled by the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, a separate government with its own board and its own voters: $115,796,978. It is shown because it is in the program, and labeled because it is not the city’s.

The $100 receipt See where $100 of city spending goes, by fund group Five fund groups, from the budget book’s own totals for its adopted budget. Capital projects See the capital projects the city lists for 2026 Every project the city publishes, with the funding sources that pay for it, and the share that belongs to another government, on a page of its own. The Budget See the budget past the headline The five fund groups per $100, and what a household pays. Three things are marked as not read yet. Follow Your Dollar Estimate what your own household paid the state Colorado’s tool, by ZIP code. The arithmetic runs in your browser, and nothing you type leaves the page.

Where $100 goes, by fund group CALC

The five fund groups, as the book prints them. The division into $100 is our arithmetic: each group’s budget over the printed total, times 100, rounded to cents. The five lines sum to exactly $100.00.

Fund group	Per $100
General Fund	$46.74
Enterprise Funds	$19.85
Special Revenue Funds	$19.68
Grant Funds	$13.67
Permanent Funds	$0.06
Total	$100.00

Enterprise Funds are the city’s operations that charge for what they provide. Colorado Springs Utilities is not one of them: the book budgets it separately, and it is not in this receipt.

Police budget FACT

$145.6M

$145,572,009, the 2026 General Fund budget for the Police Department, stated identically in two tables of the book and reconciling exactly from its three printed component lines. The General Fund line only: the fund beside it adds more, and the publisher does not sum the two.

Public Safety Sales Tax fund FACT

$52.3M

A 0.4% city sales tax funding police and fire: $52,262,048 of 2026 expenditures, in a special revenue fund the book budgets separately from either department’s General Fund line. The publisher prints no sum of this fund and the Police budget, so this site does not print one either.

What this total counts, and what it leaves out

Four things decide what the total above means. Each one is stated here so a reader can check it.

Colorado Springs Utilities is not in it. The utility is an enterprise of the city, and the budget book’s own words are that its budget process is managed and administered separate from the city’s budget process. A “Colorado Springs budget” figure means nothing until it says with or without the utility, so every citywide figure on these pages says: without.
Internal Services Funds are outside the total by the book’s own design. They carry $71,055,238, a portion of which is allocated inside the General Fund and Enterprise Funds, so adding them back would double-count.
It includes about $2.5 million of transfers between funds, per the book itself.
The appropriation ordinance disagrees with itself, and the page says which half won. Section 2 of Ordinance 25-95 prints the lodging-and-rental-tax fund at $9,979,031. Its own Attachment C prints $9,994,031, and the book’s All Funds Summary agrees with Attachment C, so that is the figure inside the total above. Section 2’s fund table also omits one fund, Briargate GID 2021, at $2,083,911, which the All Funds Summary carries.

What is deliberately not shown here

County money is refused, with the county named. The city runs no jail. The jail is the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center, run by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, and the courts and the safety net are county and state functions. El Paso County’s own budget is published below as the county’s money, and no county figure appears under the city’s name.

Capital projects

The city’s capital program for 2026 is $301.8M, the capital tile at the top of this page, and 38.4% of it is not the city’s money: it is the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority’s, flowing through city projects. The city publishes every project one by one with the sources that pay for it, and the Projects page shows all of them, each labeled. Spending by project is not published, so none is shown.

The project ledger Open the capital ledger Each project with its 2026 allocation and who paid for it, the State of Colorado’s own projects kept apart, and an honest blank for spending.

The State of Colorado also spends capital money at sites in Colorado Springs. That is a third government’s money. The Projects page lists it below the city’s own, and it is never added to any figure here. State projects in Colorado Springs

The county around this city

FACT

This is El Paso County’s money, not the city’s. Colorado Springs is a home-rule city inside El Paso County, and the two are separate governments with separate budgets. The jail, the courts and the safety net for people in Colorado Springs are the county’s, which is why the city’s own corrections measures above are marked not eligible. This section shows what that county publishes about its own money. None of it is part of the city budget above, and none of it is ever added to one.

County	The county’s own 2026 budget	Its Sheriff’s Office	What it calls its jail line	That division’s 2026 budget
El Paso County	$532,290,173	NOT PUBLISHED	no separate jail line	NOT PUBLISHED

Why there are three money columns and not one

A county Sheriff’s whole department is the wrong answer to “what does the jail cost”, and it is always the nearer and larger one — it also pays for patrol, for investigations and for everything else the office does. So the jail keeps a column of its own beside the department it would sit in, and beside the county that department sits in — empty here, because no county on this page publishes one, and the reader is told which is which instead of being left to assume. Every figure here was reconciled against a total the county itself printed before it was published, and each county’s document is named on the methodology page.

El Paso County NOT PUBLISHED

El Paso County publishes its Sheriff’s Office business unit by business unit — five of its units are named for detention — and prints no Detention Bureau total. Its own narrative describes a Detention Bureau made of several units, and which unit belongs to which bureau is not published anywhere. Adding the five would be our sum over a membership nobody could check, so no jail figure appears here. The county’s own budget total above is published, and is the county’s.

Where the money comes from

PENDING

Where the city’s 2026 money comes from, by source, is printed in the same 2026 Budget book. It has not been read into this site’s data yet, so this section stays blank on purpose rather than estimated. The Budget page says what is and is not there. The one city tax that funds a named service is in the next section.

What a household pays

Each line names where it is published. A household also pays El Paso County, its school district and the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, which are not the city’s money, and none is added to a city figure.

FACT Public Safety Sales Tax: a 0.4% city sales tax funding police and fire. The book budgets $52,262,048 of 2026 expenditures from it, in a special revenue fund of its own. Source: City of Colorado Springs, 2026 Budget ("Final Budget" book), Overviews chapter.
PENDING The city’s general sales tax rate is printed in the city’s budget book. It has not been read into this site’s data yet, so no rate is printed here.
PENDING The city’s own property tax levy is not on this page yet. A county’s levy is the county’s, so it stays blank rather than borrowed from the county.

What the money buys See what the city’s spending delivers, and what other governments run Vehicle theft from the city’s own police department, and why jails and schools belong to other governments. No causal claim is made.

Why this exists

Government you can actually see.

Colorado Springs Works Better turns the city’s $914.2 million of 2026 budgeted expenditures into plain-English answers. Colorado Springs Utilities is a city enterprise and its own plan sits OUTSIDE that total, so the exclusion is stated wherever the citywide figure appears rather than left for a reader to discover. The city is the unit here: El Paso County runs the jail, and county money is refused in writing rather than borrowed.

Facts, not spin

Every figure ties to an official record with its source and confidence grade. We keep appropriated, spent, and delivered clearly separate — and never estimate what we can’t verify.

Plain language

No jargon, no 400-page PDFs. If a resident can’t see where the money goes in under a minute, we haven’t done our job.

Accountability

We publish the open questions the city should answer, and the ones it has not answered yet. When a brief worth reading exists we will put it in your hands — and until it does, this site says so rather than announcing a schedule it has not kept.

CollectOfficial public records — the 2026 Budget book and the appropriation ordinance that adopts it.

VerifySource every figure, grade its confidence, separate fact from calculation.

PublishPlain-English dashboards anyone can scan in a minute.

AnswerOpen questions put to the city, their answers when they come, and a brief once there is one to write.

Weekly reports

PENDING

No brief has been published for this locale yet. This section is empty because there is nothing to put in it, not because the format is still being designed. There is no publication schedule to announce, and none is claimed below.

Nothing published yet

The first brief has not been written

Rather than show an example of what one might look like, this space stays empty until a real one exists. A sample brief on a page like this is indistinguishable from a real one at a glance, and the whole point of this site is that you never have to guess which you are reading.

The fine print Read what the Colorado Springs pages do not cover yet Two city data sources this site does not use, and what these pages leave out.

The corrections log

Oct 6 · Reader input — until today the sign-up on this page was demo only, nothing was collected, and a project page had no Follow or rating. From today the sign-up, Follow and your take on a project are real. What you send goes to a store this project controls: a rating or comment is kept with no name, address or identifier, and no rating and no total is published on this site, while a comment is never published on it; a sign-up or follow keeps your address and what you follow, sends a confirmation link before anything else, and unsubscribes in one click. We do not record IP addresses, and we do not track whether an email was opened. The handling note is in the methodologydisclosed

1 correction since 6 October 2026, the most recent on 6 October 2026. Last checked 6 October 2026. The full log, on a page of its own