Colorado’s easy ballot-access laws have resulted in a ludicrously tangled and contradictory state constitution. It is a supreme irony that one of the few clauses added to that constitution to slow down the degradation of our basic governance document is now standing in the way of a cleanup.
Nobody would have ever deliberately designed our constitution. By separate and uncoordinated steps, Colorado lurched into a position where, as former state Treasurer Mike Coffman said, the constitution now requires continuous tax cuts and continuous spending increases.
This bizarre fiscal odyssey began in 1982, when the legislature referred the Gallagher amendment to the voters, who happily approved it.
The Gallagher amendment stipulated that business would forever pay 55 percent of the property taxes in Colorado while residential property paid 45 percent. That measure has today produced a business property tax that is about three times as high as the residential tax on property of equal value. But for the first 10 years of its existence, it didn’t hurt state or local government budgets since cuts in residential property taxes were offset by increases in business taxes.
Then came the 1992 Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which forbade even revenue-neutral increases in mill levies without a vote of the people. The combination of TABOR and Gallagher then began reducing local revenues, especially to schools.
But in 2000, Amendment 23 was approved, requiring continuous funding increases for K-12 schools. So, state revenue collections, which were limited by TABOR, had to be used to offset local school revenue losses triggered by TABOR and Gallagher acting together. During the state budget crisis, these mandates could be met only by savagely cutting higher education.
Passage of Referendum C in 2005 brought a five-year reprieve from TABOR ceilings. But other laws have required most of the revenue that exceeds a 6 percent increase in the state general fund to go to highways. That means Colorado can’t restore the cuts in higher education we made during the budget crisis.
Obviously, cleaning up our constitutional morass would take several different measures. But that cleanup is made even more difficult because legislators, appalled at the many rules and formulas added to the constitution by TABOR, later referred yet another amendment to the people limiting future constitutional amendments to a single subject.
The people obligingly passed that amendment also.
Only then did it dawn on the legislators that their own handiwork would make it impossible to pass a single amendment rationalizing our many contradictory fiscal mandates – since by definition the cleanup would have to address several sections of the existing constitution.
House Speaker Andrew Romanoff has thought at length about this dilemma and wants to draft a new constitutional amendment that would allow the legislature, on a one-time basis, to submit a multisubject amendment to clean up and reconcile all those previous multisubject amendments. It sounds like the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you approach to constitutional reform.
But if voters approved Romanoff’s plan, they might vote on a comprehensive fiscal clean-up in 2009 or 2010.
Now, Romanoff is mulling a suggestion by Sen. Steve Johnson, R-Fort Collins, to have lawmakers actually draft the proposed fiscal sanity amendment before they ask approval of the voters to put it on a later election ballot. Johnson fears, with reason, that asking permission to place an as-yet-undrafted plan on a later ballot might trigger fears of buying “a pig in a poke.”
Either way, we’d have a first, “Mother-May-I” election. If that passed, we’d vote at a later date on the fiscal reform package itself.
Such a multi-election approach sounds complicated no matter how you explain it. But cleaning up the mess in our constitution is itself a messy business.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@denverpost.com) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
