It’s been called state government’s star chamber and compared to a board of inquisition. Some lawmakers call it omnipotent and want to do away with it.
But 50 years after the creation of the Joint Budget Committee, the panel that annually crafts the state’s multibillion-dollar spending plan, the JBC remains one of the most powerful institutions on Capitol Hill.
“When you control the budget, you control most of what government does,” said House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, who has at times criticized the JBC’s clout.
This year, the panel is front and center as the state faces a $1 billion shortfall over the next 17 months.
“There are 94 members of the legislature who want to be on the JBC,” said Rep. Mark Ferrandino, D-Denver, who joined the committee this year, “and then there are six members of the JBC.”
Offices aren’t in Capitol
The legislature created the committee in 1959 to allow some lawmakers to focus just on the budget. While most legislators serve on two or three committees, JBC members don’t serve on any others except the respective appropriations panels in their chambers.
JBC members also don’t have offices in the Capitol like other lawmakers. They are across the street in the Legislative Services Building, where they have a hearing room and a staff of 16 with expertise in areas of state government.
“We tend largely to be apart from a lot of the partisan activity that takes place in the Capitol, and that’s the way it needs to be,” said Sen. Al White, R-Hayden.
Membership is weighted toward the majority party in each chamber. The chairmanship rotates every other year between the House and Senate and is currently held by Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge.
“The thing about the Joint Budget Committee is that we have to look at the state as a whole,” Keller said. “We find our votes are not party votes.”
In fact, members say, they often find themselves crossways with their parties.
Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder, said he’s been called a “milquetoast Democrat” for backing cuts to higher education and programs for the elderly — moves he didn’t want to make but felt were necessary to balance the budget.
“I would love to be on the powerful JBC and hand out wads of cash to every constituency,” he said, “but we don’t have wads of cash.”
White, who served in the House until this year, was the only GOP House member last year to vote for the budget. “It was difficult for me to listen to my Republican colleagues go to the mic and absolutely lambaste and berate the bipartisan budget I had helped produce,” White said.
Few changes on the floor
Critics of the budget process say it’s stacked in favor of the JBC. The panel writes the budget, then sends it to House and Senate appropriations committees, which are headed by JBC members and which then send it to the full House and Senate.
Amendments can be offered on the floor, but few changes usually make it, and the JBC can strip them out later. “They get to oversee the whole thing from seed to apple,” said Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma. “Last year, what’d we get — two amendments out of a nearly $18 billion budget?”
Gardner, who thinks JBC members should move back into the Capitol, says the current budget process is outdated. Like Weissmann, he favors a system to allow committees that handle individual subjects like agriculture, local government or transportation to have a say in the budgets for their respective departments.
Keller and others said that if individual committees considered each slice of the budget, they would only see their departments, not the whole pie.
“In the end, we recommend” a budget, Keller said. “The entire legislative body votes on it. We could bring something over and lose it.”
Gardner and other critics say it’s time to give more lawmakers a say. Gardner last year sponsored a measure to refer portions of the budget to individual committees, but it never made it to the House floor. He says he’s putting together a similar measure this year.
“The budget should be a reflection of 100 duly elected legislators,” he said, “not six.”
