Where will $889.1 million
of Fort Collins’s money go?

Where $100 goes, by fund group CALC

Some of this $100 is the same dollar twice, and here is where. The city’s own glossary says a dollar “may be counted twice, occasionally three times in arriving at total appropriations.” So the receipt names the duplication instead of quietly dividing by a number the reader was never warned about. $12.76 of every $100 is the internal service line — departments paying other departments for fleet, benefits, insurance and computers. That dollar is counted where it is charged and again where it is spent. Another $5.15 is not the city government at all: the other-funds line is four separate bodies the council appropriates for in the same ordinance.

Most of this is not tax money. Enterprise funds are the largest slice, and they are the utilities (electric, water, wastewater, stormwater, broadband and golf). A resident pays into them through a monthly bill, and the city may not spend that money on anything else. The General Fund is the part general taxes reach.

The bar is shaded by size, not by category: darker means a larger share, and nothing else. An appropriation is not spending. What was actually spent is a different quantity, reported later in the city’s audited financial report, and the two are never mixed in one row.

The Poudre Fire Authority line is 6.32% of the net total and 4.75% of the gross. The city levies a property tax and, under an agreement with the Authority, gives 66% of it to the Authority. The city’s line is larger than that share, because the city also pays for the Authority’s operations, maintenance and capital. CALC $41,598,084 ÷ $657,860,360 (Net City Budget, 2026 as adopted) = 6.32%. Over the $876,247,295 gross, the same line is 4.75%. Source: Expenditures by Area (p. 41), the Revenue Summary (p. 38) and the budget message (p. 20) of the 2025-2026 Adopted Budget.

What this total counts

Fort Collins pays some of its money to another authority, and the book counts a dollar more than once. Four things decide what the totals above include. Each is stated here so a reader can check it.

• Transfers between funds are a block of their own, and this ordinance does not restate them. The city publishes a de-duplicated figure, the Net City Budget, on the as-adopted basis only. On that basis it removes internal service funds, transfers, the two improvement districts, the urban renewal authority and the downtown authority. That comes to $657.9M net against $876.2M gross — $24.92 of every $100 as adopted. Ordinance No. 186, 2025 states no net figure, so no amended net is shown here and none is invented. Read the receipt as what the council authorized, not as what leaves the city.
• The Poudre Fire Authority line stays in the total, and it is named. The city levies the property tax, and it pays the Authority under an agreement it made. So the $41,598,084 stays in the gross and in the net. It is shown beside them as its own figure. It is never added to them and never taken out of them. Source: the 2025-2026 Adopted Budget, Expenditures by Area (p. 41).
• The Authority spends its own money. The book says the Authority’s board decides the Authority’s budget and how it uses the city’s contribution (offer 70.1, pp. 401–402). Nothing on these pages counts what the Authority spends.
• The budget book prints this line twice, and the two figures differ. Offer 70.1 prints $42,070,635 for 2026. Expenditures by Area prints $41,598,084. That is $472,551 apart, and the book does not explain it. These pages use $41,598,084, because that table is the one the total itself is read from. No reconciliation is offered here.

What is deliberately not shown here

• The book’s own summary prose is never quoted. Page 26 of the adopted book says the totals are “$921.4M and $863.9M” while the table directly beneath it prints $931.7M and $876.2M. The prose does not say what it excludes. The tables agree with each other three independent ways, so the tables are read and the narrative is not. Our ingest fails if the publisher repairs this, so the finding cannot go stale silently.
• The amended detail rests on the ordinance’s own arithmetic, checked four ways. Ordinance No. 186, 2025 sits behind a document viewer that answers invented links with the same success code as real ones. So this site reads the exported PDF instead. Its as-amended column cross-foots by fund, by section, in total, and against the sum the ordinance states in words. One additions cell fails its row’s arithmetic by exactly $540,000. The published figure does not rest on that column, and the discrepancy is re-measured on every run.
• County money is never mixed in. Fort Collins is a home-rule city inside Larimer County, and the county runs the jail, the courts and human services out of its own budget. A city page that quietly folded county figures in would double-count against the county’s own accounting. So none of it is ever added to a city figure. Larimer County’s own budget is published further down this page, in its own section, under the county’s name rather than the city’s.
• Poudre Fire Authority is not a city department. Fire service comes from a separate authority funded by intergovernmental agreement — the city’s own budget book says 66% of its property tax goes to it. The city’s line for it is a contribution. It is named above, under What this total counts, and no chart here presents the authority as a department.
• Schools are a separate government. Poudre School District R-1 is its own taxing entity, and its boundary does not match the city line — it serves nearly all of the city and territory beyond it, and a small part of the city lies in Thompson School District R-2J instead. Its figures are on What the money buys, labeled as the district’s, and none of them is in any city figure.