Air quality, pandemic recovery, staffing shortages key aims of state’s budget

Gov. Jared Polis signed a record $36.4 billion state budget into law Monday while hailing the amount it funnels into reserves and education.

It includes boosted spending to fight poor air quality, hundreds of new employees to fulfill legislative mandates, removing the potentially hundreds of dollars per month formerly incarcerated people pay while transitioning back into free society and bite a big chunk out of the so-called negative factor, or the amount the state owes the public K-12 system.

At the bill signing for the state budget, Polis boasted of record reserves for the next time the economy sinks and lawmakers face the choice of where to cut deepest. He also highlighted money returned in the unemployment trust, drained during turmoil from early in the pandemic, to avoid a “costly payroll tax increase.”

“We’re able to do this because Colorado is one of the strongest economic recoveries in the nation,” Polis said, citing the state’s 3.7% unemployment rate and that the state has recovered more jobs than were lost during the pandemic.

Joint Budget Committee Chair and state Rep. Julie Mccluskie, D-Dillon, echoed the themes, saying the budget “fuels the Colorado comeback” from the pandemic.

“We had really tough conversations about what we needed to do to ensure that Coloradans got back on their feet, and so that we didn’t just go back to where we were before the pandemic,” said state Rep. Leslie Herod, D-denver and a JBC member.

The so-called Long Bill was subject to last-minute wrangling — not unusual as days are set aside for members of the General Assembly to suggest and vote on amendments to the spending package. This year featured a Republican proposal to completely eliminate the negative factor — an amendment that earned bipartisan support via a voice vote, meaning there’s no record of specific yeas and nays.

That $500 million amendment, along with another $250 million in miscellaneous spending, threw the budget “wildly out of balance” as Senate leaders from both parties described it. The move left the Joint Budget Committee — the bipartisan collection of lawmakers charged with writing the budget and meeting the constitutional requirement that it be balanced — to pare it back down.

While that amendment was stripped away, the budget still bites a chunk out of the negative factor, state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, D-arvada and a JBC member, said at the bill signing. The plan is for next year’s legislature to completely eliminate it.

“We are within striking distance of absolutely eliminating the budget stabilization factor,” Zenzinger said.

State Sen. Bob Rankin, a Carbondale Republican and JBC member, said there were the expected political differences between the minority party and Democratic majority, but that his caucus’ priorities, such as rural schools, got a fair shake.