Wheat Ridge narrows telephone tax to landline service
The council’s 8-0 vote follows a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Lakewood needed voter approval to extend a similar tax to wireless service.
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Wheat Ridge City Council voted 8-0 on Oct. 26 to restore the pre-2023 definition of telephone service for the city’s occupation tax, excluding cellular service. The council’s recorded discussion and vote describes the restored definition as covering non-cellular landlines. City staff said cellular providers had not been remitting the additional amounts associated with the expanded definition.
The council adopted Council Bill 19-2026 on second reading. The change takes effect 15 days after final publication.
Wheat Ridge expanded its definition in 2023 to include cellular or mobile-radio telephone service, as the ordinance shows. The legal context for the council’s action was the Colorado Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in MetroPCS California, LLC v. City of Lakewood. The court held that Lakewood’s 1996 and 2015 expansions of its tax to cover cellular and wireless services created new tax liabilities requiring advance voter approval under the state constitution, and invalidated those ordinances. The ruling did not decide Wheat Ridge’s tax or require the city to adopt a particular definition.
Wheat Ridge’s city attorney said broader future changes that produce a net increase in tax revenue could require voter approval; the Lakewood decision did not resolve that separate question. The attorney also projected that revenue under the restored definition would decline by about 5% to 10% a year as landlines disappear. That is a projection, not a measured effect of the bill.