By now, Colorado’s state Supreme Court justices know the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights as well as their spouses.
Since voters passed the measure, called the TABOR amendment, in 1992, dozens of cases have come before the court, which has spent hundreds of pages analyzing and interpreting its convoluted provisions.
“TABOR has generated a lot of case law,” said David Broadwell, a lawyer who has been involved in numerous TABOR cases and now works as a Denver assistant city attorney.
News that Gov. Bill Ritter is appealing a lower court ruling on his controversial mill-levy freeze means justices will get another chance to scrutinize the constitutional amendment and tell Coloradans just what the heck it means. But despite that well-worn track record, there are few hints to how the court will receive the mill-levy freeze.
The freeze, passed last year in the legislature, holds mill levies in place when they would otherwise fall, meaning school districts can collect more property-tax money and the state can save an equal amount.
The freeze is only in effect in the vast majority of school districts that already have voted to shed the revenue limits that TABOR puts on governments, and Ritter has argued that those earlier votes were enough to approve the freeze.
Last month, a district court judge ruled otherwise, saying the freeze was unconstitutional because it didn’t comply with TABOR’s requirement that voters approve tax increases.
In interpreting TABOR, the state Supreme Court justices have generally favored a plain-language reading of the measure and not tried to divine the intent behind its words, Broadwell said.
“They’ve attempted to bring a common-sense reading to it while still giving effect to the intent,” said Penfield Tate, an attorney and the board chairman for the Bell Policy Center.
In many cases, the state Supreme Court has decided in favor of the government and against taxpayers charging that TABOR had been violated. That leads TABOR advocates to believe the court is unfriendly to TABOR.
“I’m not certain the Supreme Court has ever been kind to TABOR,” said Jon Caldara, president of the Golden-based Independence Institute, a free-market think tank that organized and financed the lawsuit against the mill-levy freeze. “They have a strong previous position against the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.”
But Broadwell is quick to point out that there have been times when the court sided with TABOR advocates.
Adding to the uncertainty of what the court will do with the mill-levy freeze is that the case presents a largely unexplored area of TABOR law.
“This is a somewhat different question than what we’ve seen before,” Tate said. “It will be interesting.”
