Senate passes unbalanced budget
The state Senate on Thursday passed a “wildly out of balance” budget, as the chamber’s majority and minority leaders called it, but lawmakers pledged it would return to constitutionally required equilibrium in the next legislative phase.
The bulk of the imbalance comes from a single $503 million amendment that is intended to finally pay back what the state owes to K-12 schools. The author of the change also hopes to get more money to teachers. It’s a pledge that has bipartisan support — but nonetheless is poised to evaporate under questions of constitutionality.
Not to mention there’s little room left in a record budget where all but about $40 million is spoken for.
Senators this week added more than $750 million via amendments to a budget that arrived in the chamber at $36.4 billion after it passed the House last week. That total would mark a second consecutive $2 billion annual increase compared with the prior year.
The biggest amendment, offered by Republican Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and adopted by members of both parties, would send that extra $503 million to education. The sum essentially would eliminate a longstanding debt, known as the budget stabilization factor, that still had more than $300 million outstanding in the House version of the budget.
The change passed on a voice vote during a slate of proposed amendments Wednesday, meaning there’s no exact tally of who voted for what. And with that voice vote, there’s no record of who voted against a half-billion dollars for schools, regardless of what the implication would be for future education programs and money for other state programs.
The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee will be tasked with sorting it all out to produce a balanced budget in coming days.
Kirkmeyer, of Brighton, said she was a bit surprised her education amendment passed, given its “huge” fiscal note and given that a bill she ran earlier in the session — to largely accomplish the same thing — failed to make it out of committee.
“When the legislative body says this is our priority, the Joint Budget Committee should be finding a way to fund it,” Kirkmeyer said. “If that means they need to cut programs or not expand, that’s what they should be doing.”
Kirkmeyer, like almost all Republican senators, voted against the overall budget despite her amendment making it through. The budget as a whole didn’t meet her priorities in other areas that include public safety and transportation, she said.
Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat who sits on the budget committee, called that amendment unconstitutional because lawmakers can’t usurp local school districts by directing teacher pay and because the addition would break the requirement for a balanced budget. But Kirkmeyer said the pay increase would be a matter of intent, not a state mandate.
Zenzinger said the vote reflected lawmakers wanting to give teachers more money, regardless of the amendment’s feasibility. She said it would end up making the budget committee’s members the “bad guys,” giving cover to the rest of the Senate.
She also pointed to the risk the state wouldn’t be able to meet this funding obligation next year, given a rocky economic outlook because of high inflation.
She said the safer move is what the budget committee proposed in its original budget: putting $250 million toward the education debt this year, with the goal of finishing it off a year or two after that.
Senate President Steve Fenberg, D-boulder, said he was confident the next version of the budget would return it to balance and retain investments in education as initially proposed — at levels he already saw as historic.
He called Kirkmeyer’s amendment “not realistic” and said it came with the danger that education cuts would be needed in a matter of months.
“The Democratic Party has been the champion for ensuring we have more resources for classrooms and parents have what they need for their kids to be successful,” Fenberg said. “We’re going to continue that. We’re not going to play games. We’re not going to introduce amendments or bills that are what we call ‘letters to Santa Claus.’ ”
Sen. Bob Rankin, a Carbondale Republican who sits on the budget committee, said $503 million wasn’t the right amount, and he agreed that the legislature couldn’t tab some of it for teacher pay. He also said he advocated all year to eliminate the budget stabilization factor, while acknowledging the risk of doing so.
He plans to press his case when the majority-democrat committee meets to merge the budgets passed by the two chambers.
“My argument will be that there is risk, but it’s worth taking this year,” Rankin said. “I wouldn’t give myself a 100% chance of success, but we have honest dialogue. We have good debates in JBC. And I intend to have it one more time.”