Follow the money

Where will $313 million
of Lakewood’s money go?

Lakewood’s 2026 adopted budget authorizes $313,382,438 across all funds. That is money the City Council allowed the city to spend for the year, not money already spent. Lakewood is a city inside Jefferson County, which runs the jail, the courts and the safety net, so every figure on these pages says which government it belongs to, and none is added across governments.

FACT Source: 2026 Adopted Budget book · City of Lakewood · adopted by ordinance O-2025-32, finally passed October 20, 2025

Adopted budget FACT

$313.4M

$313,382,438 in 2026 adopted appropriations, total expenditures, all funds, by ordinance O-2025-32. The same ordinance adopts 2025 as revised, $345,294,034: revised is a different stage from adopted, so the two are never compared as if alike, and each year is its own appropriation, and the two are never summed.

2026 capital appropriations CALC

$76.1M

$76,102,156 appropriated for 2026 across the ten funds of the city’s five-year Capital Improvement and Preservation Plan. The city prints a total for each fund and none across them, so this is our sum of the ten. Only one of the plan’s five years is appropriated; the other four are forecasts.

Police budget FACT

$73.1M

$73,052,892, 2026 adopted, all funds: $23.31 of every $100. It is the city’s own police department and not a corrections budget, because the city runs no jail.

Per Lakewood resident CALC

≈ $1,997

$313,382,438 ÷ 156,927 residents (Census estimate for July 1, 2025, the newest there is). The 2026 budget year begins six months after that date, and both dates are stated so the pairing is visible. A scale, not a bill: businesses and visitors pay too.

The $100 receipt See where $100 of city spending goes, by department Seven departments by name and the rest grouped, from the budget book’s own table of its adopted total. Capital projects See the capital projects the city lists for 2026 The city’s five-year capital plan, of which only 2026 is appropriated, project by project, on a page of its own. The Budget See the budget in dollars and per resident The departments in dollars and per $100, three totals per resident, and what a household pays, named 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 department CALC

Our arithmetic over the budget book’s own 14-department table, which sums to the all-funds total exactly. Each share is a department’s appropriation divided by that total and rounded to cents, and the eight shares sum to exactly $100.00. The dollar figures are the book’s own, and they are on the Budget page.

Department	Per $100
Public Works	$25.18
Police	$23.31
Community Resources	$17.61
Sustainability and Community Development	$9.54
Non-Departmental	$7.40
Information Technology	$4.06
Facilities & Infrastructure Maintenance	$3.05
All other departments	$9.85
Total appropriations	$100.00

Non-Departmental is cost the book assigns to no department. All other departments groups the seven smallest, none larger than Finance. The bar is shaded by size, not by category: darker means a larger share, and nothing else, because fourteen departments are too many for one categorical palette. The gray segment is the grouped remainder, placed last.

What this total is and is not

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

The total cannot tell you which stage you are reading. The book itself states that no appropriation changed between the proposed and the adopted budget, so the two stages print identical totals. Only the cover, “Adopted ANNUAL BUDGET FY 2026”, and the ordinance’s own enactment record identify this as the adopted one. We read the stage off the ordinance, never off a filename or a total.
An appropriation is not spending. Every figure here is money the City Council authorized. What was actually spent is a different quantity, reported later in the city’s audited financial report, and the book itself notes that its fund balances deliberately differ from that report’s. The two are never mixed in one row.
Why seven departments and not all fourteen. The receipt names the seven largest and groups the rest, as the state receipts on this site do. The cut is by size, never by preference. The largest line inside the group is Finance, at $8,590,311.
County money is not in it. Jefferson County runs the jail, the courts, public health and human services out of its own budget. The two governments overlap on this ground, so their figures are never summed: a combined number would count the same taxpayer twice under one name. What the county publishes about its own budget is in its own section, under the county’s name.

What is deliberately not shown

The Lakewood Reinvestment Authority. It is a separate legal entity, and the book states it is not presented there, so it is outside this $100. The fine print says why the city’s own checkbook, which includes it, is not read beside this total.

Capital projects

Lakewood’s own capital money for 2026 is $76.1M, the hero’s capital tile, from the five-year capital plan in the 2026 Adopted Budget book. Only one year of the plan, 2026, is appropriated; the later years are the city’s own forecasts. The Projects page lists every project the plan prints, fund by fund. Spending by project is not published, so none is shown.

The project ledger Open the capital ledger Each project with its 2026 appropriation and the forecast years kept apart from it, and an honest blank for spending.

The State of Colorado also spends capital money inside cities. That is a different government’s money. The Projects page shows what the state’s own schedules place in Lakewood, kept apart from the city’s plan and never added to any figure here. State projects in Lakewood

The county around this city

FACT

This is Jefferson County’s money, not the city’s. Lakewood is a home-rule city inside Jefferson County, and the two are separate governments with separate budgets. The jail, the courts and the safety net for people in Lakewood 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
Jefferson County	$934,508,200	$164,401,000	Detentions	$66,676,900

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 line is printed beside the department it sits in, and beside the county it sits in, 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.

What Jefferson County calls it, and what it covers

Jefferson County calls it Detentions, and it is the county jail. It is one of the six divisions of the Sheriff’s Office, and those six sum exactly to the department total beside it — a figure the county’s countywide department summary then states again from a different table. The three figures on that row are nested inside one another and belong to one government: the jail line ($66,676,900) is one division of the Sheriff’s Office ($164,401,000), which is one department of the county ($934,508,200). They are never added to each other, and never to anything on this page above.

Where the money comes from

PENDING

Where Lakewood’s 2026 money comes from, by source, is printed in the same 2026 Adopted Budget book. It has not been read into this site’s data yet, so this section stays blank on purpose rather than estimated. The taxes a household pays directly are in the next section, and they are named as not read yet too.

What a household pays

Two city taxes reach a Lakewood household directly: the sales tax at the register and the property tax bill. Neither has been read into this site’s data yet, so each line below is named as not read yet, and nothing is borrowed from a county or from another city. A county’s or a school district’s share of a bill is another government’s money and is never added to the city’s.

PENDING Lakewood’s city sales and use tax rate, and the combined rate a shopper pays in the city, are not on this page yet. The line stays blank rather than borrowed from a county or another city.
PENDING Lakewood’s own property tax levy is not on this page yet. No levy row for Lakewood alone has been read into this site’s data, and a county’s figure is never shown as the city’s. The line stays blank.

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

Why this exists

Government you can actually see.

Lakewood Works Better turns the city’s $313.4 million of 2026 adopted appropriations into plain-English answers. The total cannot identify the stage it belongs to — the budget book states that no appropriation changed between proposed and adopted, so only the ordinance says which this is, and the page cites it. Lakewood is a home-rule city inside Jefferson County: the county runs the jail and the courts, 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 Adopted Budget book and Ordinance O-2025-32.

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 to know before comparing Lakewood’s figures Why the city’s checkbook is not read beside its budget book, and what these pages do not cover yet.

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
Oct 5 · The police tile called Police the largest department line. Public Works is larger. The Police budget tile said $73.1M, 2026 adopted, all funds, was “the largest department line,” and the receipt table beside it called Police “the largest personnel budget in the city.” The adopted budget book shows Public Works at $78,921,797, which is larger than Police at $73,052,892. The $73.1M figure was right and the word “largest” was wrong. We also removed the personnel claim: nothing on this site is sourced to a personnel total, so it had no support. The tile now states the Police figure without a ranking, and the Budget page lists every department by sizecorrected

2 corrections since 5 October 2026, the most recent on 6 October 2026. Last checked 6 October 2026. The full log, on a page of its own