Last week’s vote in the Colorado House of Representatives to extend the budget-bollixing provisions of Amendment 23 was a blow to the efforts of House Speaker Andrew Romanoff to find a way out of Colorado’s fiscal-policy tangle.
It also was a symptom of almost everything that’s wrong with the legislative process in this state right now — single-party rule, term limits and voter-approved fiscal restrictions that simply do not work together.
Single-party rule — by the Democrats, for now — is a problem no matter which party controls the governor’s office and the legislature. Some politicians just can’t resist the temptation to get greedy and cozy up to the special interests that take credit for putting them in power.
Term limits are a problem because legislative leaders like Romanoff are lame ducks with no real standing to enforce party discipline. Legislators figure leadership inevitably will change for the next session, so there’s no danger of losing favor with the people who make bill and committee assignments.
Then there’s the basic problem Romanoff was trying to address: a fiscal bind created by conflicting constitutional provisions that both restrict spending and require spending increases.
Amendment 23 is the Democrats’ teacher’s pet. It was they who amended this year’s school finance bill essentially to continue Amendment 23’s requirement that annual state spending on public schools exceed the rate of inflation. That is due to expire in 2011, but 33 Democrats — a bare majority — voted to extend the protection. More prudent Democrats like Romanoff and budget committee chairman Bernie Buescher voted against it, with the Republicans.
The amended bill still faces votes in the Senate, but the coalition Romanoff was trying to build is on shaky ground, to say the least. Republicans, especially the more conservative ones, now have their own plan — one that retains the revenue-limiting, government-shrinking TABOR amendment intact.
Douglas Bruce may be in ill favor at the Colorado Capitol, but his Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights still has its defenders, enough to doom any effort this year to untangle the fiscal mess in the state constitution. It takes a two-thirds vote in both houses, and the numbers just aren’t there.
Romanoff’s plan is elegant in its simplicity. “It’s baffling to me that more folks haven’t jumped on board,” he said last week, just hours before his efforts at bipartisanship were crippled by members of his own party.
He thought he had addressed all the opposition arguments: repealing Amendment 23’s automatic annual increases for public schools, tripling cash reserves and protecting transportation spending. His plan also removes TABOR’s requirement that the state give extra refunds when revenues exceed the rate of inflation, thus pleasing Democrats and others who see legitimate reasons for government to spend the money it collects from existing taxes.
Romanoff would retain the compelling idea that was the basis for the campaign in favor of TABOR: No taxes could be increased without approval by a majority of the voters affected.
That requirement alone makes Colorado’s state government uniquely weak. Every other state legislature can raise at least some taxes. But Colorado’s fiscal policy now is shaped by ballot issues. Its “representative government” has no comprehensive authority over fiscal policy. It can’t raise taxes, and it’s under voter mandates on how to spend the money it collects.
But it’s late in the session, the groundwork hasn’t been laid for this reform, and the politicians in both parties are hardening in their positions.
Too bad. It could have been, as Romanoff put it, “a big leap into the world of representative government.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
