March 24, 2025 01:42 PM UTC

Lawmakers Take Extra Week To Eat TABOR "Turd Sandwich"

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Bente Birkeland reports, normally the Colorado General Assembly would be starting debate this week on what’s known as the “Long Bill,” the state’s general fund budget appropriating thousands of spending line-items that fall within the legislature’s control. But this year, faced with the unpleasant task (for one side of the aisle, anyway) of making painful cuts to public-facing functions of government like education and Medicaid, the legislature has pushed back the start of Budget Week to try to come to an agreement on what stays and what goes on the chopping block:

Even though the state has a budget shortfall, the economy is growing, just not fast enough to keep up with expenses in areas like Medicaid, which make up a large part of the state budget. Costs and demand for services like in-home care have increased. Colorado also faces budget constraints under TABOR, limiting growth to inflation plus population growth. [Pols emphasis]

The budget process is the culmination of months of work from non-partisan staff and the six members of the budget committee, three members from each chamber, and 4 Democrats and 2 Republicans. Once the bill is introduced, the committee will field dozens of amendments from lawmakers as they defend their proposal.

“We have gone through and really top to bottom soup to nuts, looked at everything that we can see in these departments, identified programs where we can give a haircut and not dramatically impact services,” said the JBC Chair, Sen. Jeff Bridges of Greenwood Village.

As we tally the damage from the estimated $1.2 billion shortfall lawmakers must close in order to pass our constitutionally mandated balanced budget, the first place to start as is always necessary last it be forgotten is Colorado’s unique fiscal chokehold known as TABOR, which has left the state in a state of continuous fiscal insufficiency since its passage over thirty years ago by a slim majority of that year’s voters. It’s not just the inability to raise revenue now to confront the current shortfall, but the inability over the course of decades to prepare fiscally for inevitable bad years that makes every reduction in revenue a crisis.

And that’s not the only problem this year. Voter approval last November of Proposition 130 mandated a $350 million carve-out of revenue to fund law enforcement, tough to argue against in the moment politically, but in practice yet another constraint imposed on elected lawmakers trying to cobble together a budget, makes the challenge that much greater:

The budget committee also needs to determine how to handle the voter-approved measure that requires the state to put $350 million in a fund to recruit, train and retain law enforcement officers. Governor Polis had proposed setting aside that money this year, which the budget committee was reluctant to do.

The combination of the state’s competing fiscal limitations and declining revenue with no way to alleviate the latter without TABOR’s Byzantine process of asking the voters in the stilted way Doug Bruce intended to make rejection the most likely leaves the state’s Democratic majority trifecta government power to do little else than make cuts they abhor across state government. During the amendment process, Republicans are expected to offer dozens of amendments hypocritically seeking to restore cuts to programs that they are in fact thrilled to see being squeezed–and even if they’re not, content to let Democrats take the blame for cutting.

There are unfortunately no good answers. All Democrats can do is try to effectively communicate why these budget cuts are happening, and hope voters see past attempts at political victim-blaming by the other side. In Denver as in D.C., only one side wants to eat this fiduciary turd sandwich.