Colorado’s special legislative session resumed Friday as lawmakers work to address a nearly $800 million budget shortfall caused by impacts from the recent federal tax bill.
This story will be updated throughout the day.
11:15 a.m. update: The Senate gave formal approval Friday morning to a bill diverting some general fund money from wolf reintroduction to a state health insurance fund — marking the sole bipartisan agreement in what has so far been a hyperpartisan special session.
Senate Bill 5 passed 32-3, with Democratic Sens. Lisa Cutter, Tom Sullivan and Katie Wallace voting against it. Wolf reintroduction, narrowly approved by voters in 2020, has divided urban and rural Colorado. Several Western Slope Democrats sponsored the bill, along with Sen. Marc Catlin, a Montrose Republican, but an amendment Thursday stripped out their goal of imposing a mandated pause on further wolf releases this coming winter.
Catlin said sponsors did hope to pause wolf reintroduction in the state, but they saw who was willing to put their money behind the effort if lawmakers wouldn’t.
“The goal was to get a pause,” Catlin said. “But it was also to stop general fund money from being used to purchase the wolves, and to take those dollars and put them into the insurance enterprise. We accomplished that.”
The bill takes $264,000 from the state general fund and transfers it to the Health Insurance Affordability Cash Fund. An amendment Thursday, however, allowed for the hole that would be created by the bill to be plugged with cash from other sources.
Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat, said he voted against the bill not because of a policy disagreement, but because of how the amendment played out. He laid it on Gov. Jared Polis for trying to keep wolf reintroduction ongoing without a fight with the legislature.
“Apparently, in the final moments, the governor’s office didn’t want to take the chance that (the original bill) might pass, and they would have to pause, or the governor would have to veto,” Sullivan said. He added that maybe the legislature should look harder at the governor’s budget to fill the $783 million funding gap in the state, if Polis’ office can effortlessly fill the void from the wolf dollars.
The Senate also gave formal approval to several other bills, albeit on partisan lines.
Those bills would let state Medicaid dollars go to Planned Parenthood after national Republicans banned federal dollars from going to the organization; change a ballot measure on universal school meals to allow extra money to go to a food assistance program, if voters adopt the measure in November; and to require the governor’s office to notify lawmakers on the Joint Budget Committee when he needs to cut a certain amount of spending mid-fiscal year because of an unexpected budget crunch.
Those bills still need approval from the House before they go to Polis for final approval.
11 a.m. update: The Colorado House is up and running this morning, with Democratic legislators moving to take initial voice votes on a suite of revenue-raising changes to the tax code, in proposals intended to raise more money from corporations.
First up was House Bill 1001. Federal tax law allows for a deduction based on business income. But Colorado has temporarily limited that deduction here in recent years, and HB-1001 would make that limit — which blocks people who make more than $500,000 a year from taking the deduction — permanent.
State fiscal analysts project the change would raise $46 million for the state through the rest of this fiscal year, which ends next June, plus roughly $100 million in each of the next two years.
Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat sponsoring the bill, said it was intended to balance out new benefits given to corporations under the federal tax bill, which is what caused the hole in the state budget. The federal changes were passed by congressional Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump last month.
“What we are saying is that if corporations are going to get about 80% of the benefits of (the tax bill) that is gutting services — like Medicaid and food stamps, taking health care and food from families across Colorado — what we think is that state tax policy should say, ‘Corporations and the wealthy should pay their fair share,’ ” she said.
Republicans queued up to oppose the bill as debate began Thursday morning and tried to shift blame for the budget shortfall from the tax bill, which is causing the state to lose a projected $1.2 billion in total revenue, to Democratic budgeting practices.
Blaming the Republican tax bill “is blatantly false,” Rep. Anthony Hartsook, a Parker Republican, said. “… The malfeasance of the structural deficit goes back seven years,” he added, in a reference to when Gov. Jared Polis was first elected and Democrats took full control of state government.
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