No matter how you crunch the numbers, the latest Colorado budget forecasts are bad news for a state already stressed by lower revenues and unemployment.
The new budget deficit for this year is anywhere from $50 million to $257 million, according to figures released by economists from the governor’s office and the legislature. Next year, the state could face a shockingly large $1.1 billion deficit.
So what would Colorado’s leading gubernatorial candidate do to fix the gap? Hard to say.
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the clear favorite, recently told us that every part of the state government is “grossly underfunded,” yet he also conceded there is no appetite for new taxes.
When we asked him specifically how he would deal with a $1 billion shortfall in the state budget, he talked about convening smart people to distill the state’s core values and create a vision to pursue. That’s important over the long haul but won’t close a looming shortfall.
In an hour-long conversation with the Denver Post editorial board, Hickenlooper declined to provide any sort of meaningful blueprint for dealing with the state’s immediate budget problems. He wouldn’t even commit to an extension of Referendum C when revenues rebound — and he jumped out of a plane to pass that in 2005!
Election Day is in less than six weeks and none of the candidates for governor has put forward what we would consider to be a detailed, nuanced plan to deal with the shortfall.
Republican candidate Dan Maes has offered a dull-ax idea of whacking 2,000 state employees “just like that,” but it’s not well-thought-out and may not even be legal. As The Denver Post reported in August, those terminations could be prohibited by state laws and rules.
Maes’ other proposals are equally ill-conceived and in some cases naive. He supports reversing FASTER transportation fees, decreasing taxes on property and individuals and offering tax incentives to businesses. Those would result in decreases in state revenue and undoubtedly would make the immediate budget situation worse.
Maes talks about increasing revenues from energy development, but his view ignores broader environmental issues and economic forces that have resulted in decreased energy exploration.
Tom Tancredo, the American Constitution Party candidate, on Tuesday called for 10 percent across-the- board cuts in the state budget. He said that on his first day in office, he would call for a “top-to-bottom review of state departments, agencies, boards, and commissions with everything on the table except the safety of our citizens and tax hikes.”
His blunt-instrument idea also fails to take into account the complexities of the state budget and its many caveats.
What if, for instance, a 10 percent cut in the corrections budget were to put Colorado out of compliance with required guard-to-prisoner ratios?
What if a 10 percent cut in K-12 education funding means the state was not meeting its constitutional requirement of providing “a thorough and uniform system of free public schools”?
State budget solutions have to be more nuanced than a broad whack off the top. That’s what we had hoped to hear from Hickenlooper.
But instead of offering bold ideas, he sounded more like a candidate who was afraid to commit to difficult decisions. It’s a political strategy, to be sure, but we think voters are owed detailed budget plans from those who want to be Colorado’s next chief executive.
