Over and over last week, Colorado budget writers kept getting mired in the same debates.
Is a $21 million program that allows recent high school graduates to enroll in free college-level classes worth the cost?
Can the state afford to continue paying bonuses to nurses at its understaffed mental health facilities? What about in jails, where the state has a long backlog of inmates awaiting mental health evaluations in order to stand trial?
Should the state keep providing free lunches to school kids, whether or not their parents are truly in financial need? What if doing so means less money for their classroom teachers – over 1,000 of whom were just across the street Thursday to protest proposed cuts to public education?
Across an agonizing five days of meetings and dozens of votes, Colorado’s six-member Joint Budget Committee voted to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on social services, transportation and state employee benefits – only to end the week facing many of the same dilemmas as when it started.
For months, the JBC has been working to cut $1.2 billion from next year’s spending plan to balance the state’s $17 billion general fund budget.
Lawmakers initially planned to finish the budget proposal Wednesday, a target that would have kept the Legislature on schedule to debate the 2025-26 spending plan in the state Senate this week. Then they kept working into Thursday evening, with no end in sight.
On Friday morning, JBC Chair Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat, finally conceded defeat: there was too much left to do, and not enough time to do it.
The budget panel now plans to finish up its work sometime this week, starting the clock on a busy stretch of drafting legislation before the budget can be introduced in the state Senate on March 31 – a full week later than lawmakers had planned.
They ended last week far closer to a balanced budget than when they started. As of Wednesday, they only needed to cut another $20 million to meet their target – but they’ll likely cut millions more before all is said and done. Lawmakers are still trying to accommodate additional spending on major priorities they haven’t voted on yet, like how much to pay Medicaid providers, colleges and state workers.
With that in mind, lawmakers rarely say no to a budget cut outright. Instead, they stash things “in their back pocket” in case they need to cut it in the future – a phrase that’s been uttered so often that lawmakers joked they’d be walking with a limp because of how heavy their pockets had grown.
On Friday, the JBC declined to vote on a bill that would cut Medicaid coverage for equine therapy – a health service that has been shown to help children and adults with disabilities. But while it would only save $200,000 – 0.0165% of the budget shortfall – lawmakers still weren’t ready to rule it out entirely.
“I’m going to put this in the back pocket with the other tens of millions that we’ve (set aside),” Bridges said.
“We’re not going to take the ponies away from kids – not today.”
Perhaps no single decision has led to more hand-wringing than what to do about Healthy School Meals for All, the school lunch program that voters created in 2022.
Last year at this time, higher-than-expected demand in its first school year busted the program’s budget, leading the JBC to step in with additional state funding to keep it running. This year, Colorado Democrats want to go back to the ballot to ask voters to cover its costs going forward.
But the rescue plan has left state budget writers in limbo. They can’t wait until November for voters to decide whether to keep the program funded.
If voters say no to new taxes to keep the meal program running – and the state doesn’t provide assurances of its own – school districts could run out of money to administer it partway through the school year. That could lead to lunch staff layoffs and leave kids and their parents in the lurch.
The timing problem has divided lawmakers on the JBC. The budget panel initially entertained the idea of eliminating the state’s $42 million contribution to the meal program, only to backtrack on that idea last week.
During hearings last week, JBC staff analysts offered another option – limit the free meal program to schools where at least 25% of students qualify for federal assistance programs. At those districts, all kids would get free meals; at schools with fewer low-income kids, only those who qualify for the federal school lunch program would eat for free.
“If we do this – if we don’t give ‘healthy school meals for all,’ I think it’s a pretty clear violation of what voters were asking us to do,” Bridges said.
Others on the panel weren’t convinced. Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat, said the state couldn’t afford to pay for the lunches of families who aren’t in need.
“I want the kids who are the most needy – who need mental health services, who need child welfare services – I want them to get every penny we can squeeze out of this budget,” she said.
After the staff proposal failed, the budget panel backed a compromise in which the Legislature would cover the existing program for the first half of the school year at a cost of about $8 million, then limit it to lower income schools starting Jan. 1, if voters won’t agree to raise taxes to pay for it.
The vote was 5-1, with Rep. Shannon Bird opposed; the Westminster Democrat said she didn’t want to take money from the State Education Fund, which pays for school operations and is in a precarious position of its own.
For the third year in a row, the budget panel voted to use revenue estimates from the governor’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting to balance the spending plan.
The decision bucks the JBC’s tradition of picking the more conservative of the two revenue forecasts. The OSPB forecast gives the six-member panel an additional $168 million to work with in next year’s budget versus the Colorado Legislative Council staff forecast.
The vote was 4-2, with the committee’s two Republicans opposed. They insisted on caution given the growing risks of a recession.
“It scares me not to take the most conservative approach to this,” said Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican.
The committee’s Democrats, however, said the two forecasts were pretty close to one another in the context of a $17 billion general fund budget. Picking the more conservative of the two, they said, would force the Legislature to make more cuts to public services than necessary.
Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, noted that if there is a recession, their choice would quickly become irrelevant, and require far more drastic cuts than either forecast.
“I don’t want to make those before we have to,” she said.
