April 2010

The state budget bill is called the “Long Bill” because it is – yes – long, two inches thick, in fact, and that’s with printing on both sides of the pages. It’s so long that if you look it up on the Internet http://www.leg.state.co.us/clics/clics2010a/csl.nsf/StatusAll?OpenFrameset you’ll see that instead of the bill coming up, you get a table of contents, and you have to click on the parts individually. There are also a dozen bills that accompany it; they are necessary because they make “substantive changes” to legal policy regarding how the state spends money. The House of Representatives spent the week of March 29 – April 2 on the Long Bill, and the Senate spent the week of April 5-9 on it. That’s nothing in comparison with the 5 previous months it took the Joint Budget Committee to compile it, by holding meetings with departments of the state and their stakeholders in order to determine what to fund and what to cut.

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between the Legislature’s role regarding education and that of the State Board of Education, the local school board, or the Board of Regents? Find out from elected members of all three of these boards who represent our district at my next Town Hall Meeting this Saturday, April 17, 10:30 a.m. to noon, at theStandley Lake Library, 8485 Kipling Street. (By the way, we always serve refreshments at these meetings.) 

 

Colorado’s Constitution requires that we balance our budget every year.  That’s right; unlike the federal government, Colorado never runs a deficit.  During the economic downturn of the last few years, the Legislature has continually reduced state spending per capita. Over the last ten years, the state budget shrank by 28% while the population grew by 18% - which means more students to educate, more struggling families needing medical care, and more roads to build or fix, with less money to afford these critical services.  There are now 1,150 fewer employees in our state departments than two years ago.  Colorado is 48^th in the nation in our spending on education, health care, clean water and air, and public safety.

 

About 95% of the state budget pays for these six things:

·         K-12 education (teachers and schools)

·         Higher education (colleges and professors)

·         Human services (child protection and food assistance for hungry families)

·         Health care (Medicaid and Children’s Health Plan)

·         Judiciary (judges and courts)

·         Corrections (prisons, prison guards, and parole officers)

 

These are the cuts we made this year:

·         K-12 education: $260 million

·         Higher education: $61.5 million

·         Medicaid: $17.9 million

·         Personnel: $9.6 million

·         State employees’ pay: $37 million (a 2.5% reduction)

·         Budget reductions in other departments: $15.7 million

 

With extremely limited resources, our state still offers a high quality of life.  Part of this high standard of living means building opportunities. That’s why we protected valuable programs for Colorado kids and struggling families. Arizona eliminated their entire healthcare program for kids, but we know Colorado can do better for our most precious resource – our children – so we preserved the Children’s Health Insurance Plan. We also protected full-day kindergarten and programs for 20,000 needy preschoolers, and protected women, infants, and children from going hungry by maintaining the Supplemental Food Grant Program. In addition, we safeguarded services for people who have disabilities, our most vulnerable citizens.  

 

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee (which I serve on) held a meeting for over 7 hours to consider a group of bills related to workers compensation. These bills came from an interim committee that met after the 2009 Legislative Session to look into Pinnacol Assurance, a subdivision of the state established to provide workers comp. Pinnacol insures approximately 55,000 businesses and 2,500,000 workers.  The Pinnacol Interim Committee suggested legislation that lowers premiums, increases transparency, and protects injured workers covered by Pinnacol Assurance. These are the bills that the committee passed so far:

 

We also considered the following bill, but did not take action on it yet:

 

Here are special updates on some of the bills I am sponsoring: