By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Homeowners inside the Riverdale Peaks II Metropolitan District pay one of the highest tax rates of any special district in Colorado. Their metro district levied 115.019 mills in 2024, good for fifth place on a list of eleven districts statewide charging 100 mills or more. That levy pulled in $428,566 in property taxes for the year.
Riverdale Peaks II is one of 19 districts that told the state, in their own financial filings, that they have been or will be unable to make principal or interest payments on their debt as those payments come due.
It taxes its residents at more than 100 mills and still reports to the state that it can’t keep up with the full payments on its bonds. That combination is the core finding of a state audit released in June, one a search of Colorado news coverage turns up no reporting on.
What the audit found
The report is Report 2649S, the “Colorado Special Districts Fiscal Health Analysis” for calendar years 2022 through 2024, dated June 3 and prepared by the Office of the State Auditor for the Department of Local Affairs.
State law requires the OSA to review the annual reports filed by special districts created after July 2000 and report to DOLA any district whose ability to pay off its debt appears to be slipping.
Colorado had more than 2,900 special districts as of March 2026. About 2,300 of them are metropolitan districts, which provide at least two services, such as fire protection, water, sanitation, street improvements and parks, and can finance infrastructure for new developments, repaying that debt in part through property taxes and sometimes drawing on early loans from developers.
The auditors were able to include 1,824 special districts in their fiscal-health analysis, scored against 11 financial ratios.
The mill levy list is where the numbers get personal for homeowners. The audit flagged 680 districts charging total mill levies above 50 mills in 2024. Eleven of those crossed 100 mills.
Yarrow Gardens Metropolitan District topped the list at 134.430 mills. Belleview Place followed at 131.513. Sky Ranch Metropolitan District No. 3 came in third at 128.670, and its sister district Sky Ranch No. 5 charged 120.482. Then Riverdale Peaks II at 115.019, Ash Meadows at 111.591, Homestead Hills at 111.482, Twin Buttes No. 4 at 110.000, Commons at East Creek at 100.923, Highline Crossing at 100.909, and Hance Ranch at 100.198.
To put that in dollars, the audit walks through a worked example.
A home with an actual value of $500,000, using the 2024 residential assessment rate of 6.765 percent, carries an assessed value of $33,825. At 100 mills, the metro district piece alone runs $3,382.50 a year, before the county, the school district, fire protection, and every other overlapping levy is added on top.
The district that flagged itself to the state
Riverdale Peaks II shows up twice in the audit.
It’s on the 100-plus mill list at 115.019 mills. It’s also in Exhibit 2, the roster of 19 districts that reported difficulty making current or future debt service payments.
The district carried $3,065,000 in outstanding general obligation bonds at the end of 2024 and, in the auditors’ review, sat among the districts levying the maximum mill levy their bond agreements require.
The district’s own filings show how long the payment shortfall has persisted.
In the 2024 budget message filed as Exhibit A to its 2023 annual report, the report Riverdale Peaks II posts on its official district website, the district states that it has been unable to pay the scheduled principal and interest on its Series 2005 bonds since 2015. And the district’s 2022 audit, filed as Exhibit B to that same report, lists more than a dozen bond payment dates, from 2015 through 2022, on which it notified bondholders that the money available fell short of what was due.
Three of the 19 districts reported flat-out that they were unable to make their debt service payments: Highland Estates, Marin, and Miners Mesa Commercial metropolitan districts. The auditors couldn’t determine from the filings whether those three were in default of their bond agreements.
The other 16, Riverdale Peaks II among them, reported that their failure to make full payments doesn’t count as a default.
They told the state they were complying with their bond agreements because they were levying the maximum required mill levy and making payments as pledged property-tax revenue became available.
In other words, they were taxing at the maximum required rate and still falling short of the full debt service when it came due.
The OSA recommended DOLA consider further investigation of all 19.
Debt ceilings in the tens of billions
The mill levies show up on a homeowner’s tax bill. The debt authorizations do not.
Alongside the mill-levy watch list, the audit tracked a second warning sign: districts carrying “authorized but unissued” debt above $500 million. It found 654 of them. Eighteen reported authorized debt above $50 billion.
The largest belongs to the Aerotropolis Area Coordinating Metropolitan District in Aurora, which reported $104 billion in total authorized debt, with $103.6 billion still unissued.
Its City of Aurora-approved service plan caps borrowing at $8 billion. A cluster of Green Valley Ranch East and Aurora Highlands metro districts, also in Aurora, each reported authorizations in the $52 to $64 billion range against service-plan caps of $4 billion.
These are voter-authorized ceilings, not current debt.
Most of the districts show only a few million dollars, or nothing, as outstanding debt on their own financial statements.
That “nothing” can be misleading: Aerotropolis reports $0 outstanding because the debt issued on its behalf sits on the books of a related entity, the Aurora Highlands Community Authority Board, which reported $390.5 million outstanding at the end of 2024.
But the gap between what a district’s own service plan says it may borrow and what its bond election nonetheless authorizes runs into the tens of billions of dollars, and the audit is what puts those two figures side by side.
Districts that stopped reporting
The audit closes on a compliance problem with a hole built into it.
Of the 2,000 districts created since mid-2000 and required to file an annual report with both DOLA and the OSA, 383 had not filed their 2024 report as of April 14, 2026.
Separately, 79 districts are delinquent under the state’s audit-filing law for one or more years, and 29 of those have been delinquent for two or more consecutive years.
Two or more consecutive years of delinquency is the trigger that lets DOLA consider dissolving a district administratively.
But the report is internally inconsistent on how many of those 29 districts that tool can’t reach. Its narrative says 21 have remaining financial obligations from debt, while Exhibit 14 marks only eight that way.
Either way, Colorado law bars administrative dissolution of any district that still owes money, so the dissolution tool doesn’t reach districts that still carry outstanding financial obligations.
Twelve districts triggered four or more of the audit’s 11 warning ratios. Every one of the twelve also tripped at least one of the two watch indicators, excessive unissued debt or a mill levy above 50.
A recommendation, not an order
The OSA’s report is a recommendation to DOLA, not an enforcement action. It asks the department to consider further investigation of the flagged districts and to chase down the missing annual reports. Whether any of that happens falls to DOLA.
For 2024, the arithmetic was already set. Riverdale Peaks II levied 115.019 mills, carried $3.065 million in general-obligation bonds, and told the state it could not make the full required debt-service payments as they came due.
The levy, at least, has not eased.
In the transparency notice the district filed with the Special District Association of Colorado, Riverdale Peaks II lists a levy of 115.871 mills for collection in 2026, slightly higher than the rate the audit captured.
And on the annual report’s required disclosure about its debt obligations, the district wrote that it “has not been able to pay its obligations as they come due.”
That 2023 annual report is also the latest one posted on the district’s website.
It points back to the audit’s finding on reporting. The state’s oversight depends on districts filing the reports and financial records required of them, and 383 annual reports for 2024 alone had not been filed when the audit closed its books.