In cash-strapped Colorado, lawmakers tap an unorthodox pot of money for priorities. But is it too risky?

Facing a $1.2 billion budget gap this year, Colorado lawmakers turned to a source of money they had mostly ignored for the past several years to pay for some priorities: the unclaimed property trust fund.

The legislature looks poised to tap the fund for two bills in the waning days of the legislative session, even as critics — chief among them Treasurer Dave Young — argue against drawing from a fund made up of lost money, not taxes, to cover the cost of government services.

The trust fund holds money from Coloradans’ old savings accounts, unpaid wages, insurance payouts and other cash lost on the way to its rightful owners. The treasurer’s office has a long-running program to return that money called the Great Colorado Payback.

The fund accounts for some $2 billion that doesn’t belong to the state, but it nonetheless has proven a tempting a source for a constantly cash-strapped legislature. Over the past two decades, lawmakers have pulled more than $660 million from the trust fund to pay for programs, according to the treasurer’s office, and not a single penny has been paid back.

That’s left it with about $1.3 billion in cash and about $2 billion in liabilities.

That deficit could grow. A bill that would give safety-net health care facilities a lifeline following the pandemic and another supporting fire departments across the state could add some $140 million to that debt if lawmakers pass them by the end of the legislative session on Wednesday. (A third bill also sought to tap into the fund, but it died in committee Monday.)

“It’s not a tax fund. It’s a trust fund,” said Young, a Democrat. “There actually aren’t any taxes in this, though there might be some tax refunds that have gotten trapped in there.”

The importance of the programs justifies the unorthodox budget move, backers of the bills said, especially when lawmakers spent the year making deep cuts to state spending.

“It’s a tight budget year, so we’re looking everywhere to fund things,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a sponsor of the health care bill and a member of the Joint Budget Committee. “… There are certain services we have to provide as a government, and that’s things people can’t do for themselves. We have to look into it.”

Helping safety-net hospitals

Senate Bill 290 would use the trust fund loan to seed an account to help keep safety-net hospitals afloat throughout Colorado, with matching money provided by state hospitals and the federal government. The bill aims to backstop critical health care infrastructure, while saving Medicaid money by treating people before their ailments progress into costlier hospital stays.

That helps put the proposal in a class of its own, in the view of Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican. She also emphasized that the bill taps the money as a loan, not as a simple cash grab.

The proposal might be well intentioned, but it still creates unnecessary risk, Young said. The general fund will have to repay the loans if the trust fund ever falters, and, more existentially, tapping it could disincentivize companies from depositing lost money to the state.

They, too, could argue they’re investing the money in critical programs while holding onto it for its rightful owners, he said.

Loans from the fund often don’t “pass the smell test” because of the terms written into law, Young said. The loans tend to be interest-free, with a single bulk repayment when they’re due decades from now — and no repayment plan.

“I don’t think anyone could go to a bank and get a deal like that,” Young said. “I don’t think anyone could get a mortgage and say ‘We’ll pay it back in 40 years, in one lump sum, with zero interest.’ ”

Sen. Jeff Bridges, the chair of the budget committee, said the use of the fund for loans instead of direct spending made him “somewhat less uncomfortable, though still deeply uncomfortable,” given the state’s budget situation.

Still, he said, people should assume the loans will be forgiven instead of paid back by future lawmakers.

‘We have to be cautious’

The fund generally collects more money every year than it doles out, said Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat, even as he praised Young for the campaign to connect people with lost money. Given the state’s fiscal problems, the bills tapping the fund this year didn’t bother him, though he warned that “this can’t be a pattern that continues.”

“We have to be thoughtful, we have to be cautious,” Bridges, who is running for treasurer in 2026, said. “But for what’s running this year, I think the fund can handle those expenditures.”

Young cautioned that new ways of reuniting people with money, along with a more proactive approach to finding folks who have lost cash in the fund, make it hard to calculate how much money the state could deem truly lost and unclaimable.

“The really assertive way the team has gone about using tools and finding people has made it hard to judge. We really want to get people those claims,” Young said.