A man who moved to Colorado Springs about 16 months ago is trying to get a measure on the November ballot that would phase out property taxes in the city over five years.

If passed by voters, city officials said the proposed charter change would lead to drastic cuts in such things as police and fire services and the watering of parks.

“That borders on some kind of insanity because what it does is it tells me that some person that wants to be considered serious has not given serious consideration to the ramifications of that kind of action,” City Councilman Tim Leigh said Wednesday.

But Roger McCarville, a 70-year-old self-described political busybody who is sponsoring the proposed charter change, said taxes are needed to provide government services but that property taxes are unfair because, for example, nonprofits are generally exempted.

But the primary motivation behind the proposed charter change is because the city government “is being run very inefficiently,” he said.

“There’s so much slop in that budget,” he said.

However, McCarville could not provide specifics, claiming the city budget is not “transparent in the way that I would like to see it.”

One thing is clear: The proposed charter change is moving through the process.

The city’s Initiative Title Setting Review Board will consider it at 10 a.m. Thursday.

Under McCarville’s proposal, “the city property tax rate shall phase out in five equal consecutive yearly steps” starting in December.

The city, which has one of the lowest property tax rates in the state, is expected to receive about $19.7 million in property tax revenue this year.

McCarville said his proposal gives the city government time to deal with the shrinking revenue stream.

“To phase it out one fifth each year, it’s not even one percent of the total budget,” he said. “There’s nobody on earth that cannot get along with one percent less this year than what they got last year.”

McCarville, who is traveling to Alaska for two weeks, said he couldn’t attend Thursday’s title board hearing, and he declined to disclose who would represent him. Members of his petitioner’s committee include businessman Ed Bircham, who ran for City Council last year as part of the so-called Reform Team formed by Douglas Bruce.

Before the election last year, McCarville, who supported the reform slate, filed a complaint alleging that other council candidates had failed to file the proper campaign forms or had filed them late.

McCarville said Bruce, who recently got out of jail after being convicted of tax evasion, wasn’t helping with the proposed ballot measure.

“He’s been out of sight for so long that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have had contact with him,” he said. “You know he took kind of a four- or five-month, would you say, sabbatical.”

It’s unclear how many signatures McCarville would need to collect to put the proposed ballot measure on the November ballot. The City Clerk’s Office did not return a call for comment. McCarville said he would need to collect a minimum of 13,000 signatures.

“I might fall on my nose. This is my first time tackling this,” he said. “Then again, I might scare myself to death with the success of it all.”

McCarville has never been elected to office. He said he ran twice for City Council in Arvada and for Congress on the Constitution Party ticket about six or eight years ago.

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