The angry phone calls and letters have been coming into Capitol offices for months.
From teachers and school executives who don’t want lawmakers to cut K-12 education. From county commissioners angry about cuts to local aid to counties. From senior citizens furious about the prospect of a property-tax break for the elderly being eliminated for a second year in a row.
The messages come from college presidents appalled about cuts to higher education and from business groups complaining about the potential loss of tax breaks and incentives.
For state lawmakers, closing budget shortfalls totaling more than $1 billion in the 2010 session, which starts Wednesday, will be an exercise in disappointing many constituencies.
“This year is hard because I think this is permanent, in the sense that I don’t see things recovering soon,” said Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder, chairman of the Joint Budget Committee. “We’re hitting bottom, and we’re cutting things that are absolutely affecting people’s lives. It’s not like we can say next year is going to get better, because it isn’t.”
Lawmakers are hoping revenues do not get much worse for the budget in the current fiscal year. The state found out in December that revenues were off from projections by $40 million, bringing the deficit for the current year to about $600 million.
Gov. Bill Ritter earlier last year announced a plan to deal with the current year’s shortfall through more furloughs for state workers, the closing of a juvenile mental-health facility in Fort Logan, the closure of a unit for the developmentally disabled in Grand Junction and the early release of some prisoners.
That said, Ritter and lawmakers still must deal with a budget shortfall of more than $1 billion in the 2010-11 fiscal year, which begins in July.
Ritter, a Democrat, has proposed a budget for next year that includes:
• A $260 million cut from K-12 education
• Generating $131.8 million by suspending or eliminating 13 tax credits and exemptions
• Saving $90.2 million by suspending, for the second year in a row, a property-tax break for seniors
• Cutting higher-education funding by $56 million
• Cutting Medicaid payments to doctors and other health care providers by $28 million
• Saving $20.1 million by a 2.5 percent cut in total compensation for about 25,000 state employees.
Party squabbling
The budget-slashing is likely to result in turmoil not just between ruling Democrats and minority-party Republicans but among Democrats themselves.
Education groups have hinted they may challenge the cuts to K-12 funding as unconstitutional. Meanwhile, some Democrats are still angry with Ritter about cuts made last fall to programs for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.
Republicans say Democrats have been doing a mostly lousy job of balancing the budget and should have made deeper cuts sooner.
“Right now, the way the budget has been balanced is through taxes and fee increases, gimmicks and some cuts,” said Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, “but the cuts represent a relatively small percentage of the actual budget-balancing decisions.”
Penry said Republicans probably would propose consolidating some state agencies, imposing a stricter hiring freeze than one Ritter implemented in 2008 and running legislation “to give the lieutenant governor something to actually do.”
“The environment is changing,” Penry said. “The people of Colorado are tasting the fruits of rule by big government, and they don’t like it.”
Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge, said Republicans are hypocrites. When they were in charge during the last recession in the early 2000s, they used many of the same “gimmicks” to balance the budget, including eliminating the property-tax break for seniors.
“For all the years they were in office, they did not reduce government,” Keller said. “They didn’t close one department. They didn’t do massive layoffs.”
Democrats have said that Republican suggestions to balance the budget often fall apart under scrutiny.
“The luxury of being in the minority party is that they don’t have to be serious about balancing the budget,” said Keller, a member of the Joint Budget Committee.
School-funding cuts
Still, one of the chief ideas for balancing the budget comes from Republicans this year: cutting school funding. Democrats resisted the idea in past years, worried that cuts would violate constitutional mandates to increase K-12 funding every year by at least the rate of inflation.
But Democrats turned to a legal memo prompted by Republican lawmakers in prior years that says the cuts are legally possible.
House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker, said this session will be a downer for Democrats because they will have to finally face up to an empty piggy bank.
“A Democrat who can’t spend is an unhappy person,” May said.
Pommer, though, said that if history is any guide, Republicans are likely to complain about cuts, especially over small programs that affect their districts.
Whether it’s agriculture programs or subsidies for the costs of installing a water well, Republicans who represent rural areas will kvetch over the cuts, Pommer said.
“They take a state subsidy as a God-given right,” Pommer said. “It’s the kind of thing that anybody else in Colorado would have to pay for.”
Tim Hoover: 303-954-1626 or thoover@denverpost.com
