When Gov. Bill Ritter told the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee that the state needs to have a “conversation” about the conflicting constitutional provisions that tie the state’s budget into knots, he was well aware that such a discussion was already underway.
Indeed, the level of discourse might be better described as a cacophony than just a conversation. Our hope is that the discussions bear fruit in the form of a sweeping constitutional reform no later than 2010, though sooner would be better.
Former state Treasurer Mike Coffman, who’s now secretary of state, once quipped that Colorado is the only state whose constitution requires both spending increases and tax cuts. The biggest bogs in our quagmire are the 1982 Gallagher Amendment, the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and 2000’s Amendment 23. The three laws are now at war in ways unforeseen by the voters who approved them in widely separated elections.
Gallagher was passed to hold down residential property taxes, which it does mostly by shifting that burden to business. When TABOR passed a decade later, it interacted with the Gallagher formula to cap overall property tax revenues, not just those from homeowners. That caused, among other problems, a revenue shortfall for many local school districts. As a result, Amendment 23 was passed, which forced the state budget to replace that lost local school revenue. It also afforded K-12 education some much-needed protection from incessant state budget cutting, increasing local school budgets by the rate of inflation and an additional 1 percent every year through 2010.
The extra spending mandated by Gallagher and Amendment 23 has to come from a state general fund that is limited to just a 6 percent annual increase by yet another 1992 law, known as the Bird-Arveschoug Amendment. It’s not only impossible to pronounce, the law is much more complex than commonly reported. It too – along with numerous smaller mandates in the Constitution – needs to be reviewed.
The best solution would be a state constitutional convention, as proposed by Rep. Al White, R-Winter Park. If such a convention were held in 2009, it could review the warring provisions of our state constitution and blend them into a coherent reform package for the 2010 ballot. Since the five-year Referendum C timeout from TABOR ends in 2010, as does part of Amendment 23, that’s the ideal time to ask the voters to clean up our Constitution.
