As the chair of Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee, a billion dollars is a lot. Maybe folks in Congress can joke that a billion here and a billion there adds up to real money, but in Colorado we run a tight ship. This year we’ll balance our state’s general fund at right around $16.5 billion.
Without changing any of our budget investment strategies from last year, then adding in the $350 million for public safety required by voters, we’re at just over a billion in the red. That’s really not good for Colorado families and our state’s economic future.
Unlike a household budget, Colorado’s budget is almost entirely just the necessities. We don’t have an entertainment category, so we can’t just skip the Dave Matthews concert and save a billion dollars. Any cuts hit the government equivalent of utility bills. Sure, we can turn down the thermostat a bit, but we can’t cut a billion dollars without real consequences for folks across our state.
About a third of our general fund budget goes toward health care for seniors and the most vulnerable through Medicaid. Another third goes toward public K-12 education. Around 7% for prisons, 11% for higher education, 4% for state courts, 10% for Human Services including behavioral health care and disability services … you get the idea. That’s almost our entire budget.
The rest are mostly smaller departments like Agriculture, with a budget of about $22 million. We could eliminate it entirely and still need to cut … about a billion dollars.
These investments aren’t nice-to-haves. We already underfund higher education more than just about every other state. Our legal system often has year-long waits for simple hearings. And our corrections officers are so overworked that one of them fell asleep at the wheel and died.
Over the last few years thanks mostly to federal COVID recovery dollars, we’ve seen what smart, targeted investments can do. We’re building affordable homes for working families. We made two years of college debt-free for families making $90,000 or less. We fully funded public K-12 education for the first time in a decade. And our prisons finally have more staff to keep both officers and inmates safe.
But this year, we may have to pause or even reverse this progress. The governor’s budget proposal includes $150 million less for K-12 along with significant cuts to higher education and Medicaid compared to the investments made last year. We as a budget committee want to avoid these cuts if we can and we’re shaking out all the couch cushions to do it — but couch cushions aren’t enough.
We do find the occasional program that sounded like a good idea when it passed, but isn’t giving us the return we’d hoped for. For example, there’s a $500,000 a year grant program in the Colorado Energy Office to improve efficiency for marijuana grows. That reduces our state’s fossil fuel use, but not as effectively as measures that increase renewable energy standards for utilities. So that’s gone.
Unfortunately, there aren’t 1,999 more programs like this to reach a billion dollars. (For anyone with ideas, my cell phone is 303-358-5551. Not kidding.) There will be cuts, and they will hurt.
So why do we have to cut $1 billion? The simple answer is that TABOR contains an arbitrary rationing cap that forces cuts even in times, like now, of strong economic growth. The costs that drive our budget — like health care, wages, and construction — grow faster than this TABOR rationing cap, which creates a structural deficit requiring us to make deep cuts in an ongoing and painful way.
It’s not easy work. It’s not fixing rounding errors or just sorting through a myriad of small cuts. As I’ve said before, cutting programs means some people who really need it will get less money. That’s just math. We’re eliminating a bit less than half the cost of the USS Colorado nuclear-powered attack submarine from our budget. It’s not possible to do that without causing some meaningful and regrettable harm. (Though perhaps less harm than an actual attack sub?)
These cuts are especially frustrating because, given the strength of our economy, this is exactly when private companies would invest profits back into future growth rather than pay dividends. Economic development experts agree that to attract more good-paying jobs to Colorado we need to improve our schools, expand transportation, and build housing that’s actually affordable.
Here’s the good news: The six members of our committee, from both political parties, are thoughtful, caring, intelligent, experienced, and deeply good people. We’re closely examining programs across the budget to determine their return on investment for our economy and our families, and will cut what’s not producing. And we’re prioritizing investments that pay returns into the future like public education, and health care.
I’m confident the budget we end up with, though arbitrarily limited by outdated parts of TABOR, will come together through the combined talents of an incredible bipartisan team working diligently to create a state budget that reflects our Colorado values.
Sen. Jeff Bridges is an Arapahoe County Democrat and chair of the Joint Budget Committee.
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