But with eight large construction projects underway, another eight coming, not to mention a Bus Rapid Transit corridor planned for Colorado Boulevard, the neighborhood faces a gauntlet of disruptions on its way to transformation.

Parking, long a challenge, has tightened as multiple blocks get redeveloped. Cars face a good chance of getting covered in construction dust, and some stores require navigating a maze of barriers to reach.

Getting in and out, or just around, the district, has become tougher, including for workers.

“Employees in hospitality, retail and other supporting industries by and large do not live in or near Cherry Creek,” said Nick LeMasters, CEO and president of the Cherry Creek Alliance. “For many, housing is unattainable in nearby neighborhoods. Compounding the problem is limited transit service.”

The Colorado Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit project, which is currently planned to stretch along a 7-mile corridor from 40th Avenue down to either Yale or Hampden avenues, should eventually make it easier to reach the area via transit.

But if the BRT along Colfax Avenue offers a guide, adding additional transit stations and rebuilding Colorado Boulevard could prove highly disruptive and snarl traffic for years.

Wishing to avoid that headache, the this month in favor of a “no build option” through its city limits.

Yet, all of those can be viewed as growing pains toward maturity.

Unlike Downtown and the Denver Tech Center, Cherry Creek isn’t worrying about what to do with nearly empty office buildings or how to fill large stretches of vacant storefronts.

The Cherry Creek submarket has an office vacancy rate of 10.5%, but in Cherry Creek North, where the heaviest construction is underway, the rate is closer to 1.9%, according to the , which the Alliance released on Friday.

Downtown Denver is struggling with vacancy rates closer to 40%, while the metro area is just under 30%, according to CBRE. Some of Downtown’s most prominent office towers are selling at discounts of 90% or more. Some may eventually need to be torn down.

By contrast, Cherry Creek has become a model of how to balance residential, retail and work, with 12,600 residents, 16,829 employees and 16.8 million visitors last year, according to the report.

Cherry Creek generated $119 million in tax revenues for Denver last year, up 3.9% from 2024. It now accounts for about $1 in every $20 of retail spending in the city.

That success has drawn attention and investment. Cherry Creek has welcomed about a dozen major developments in the first half of this decade, and has another eight under construction through 2028.

They represent a mix of office, retail and apartments, with a sprinkling of luxury condos from a new Waldorf Astoria Residences, Colorado’s first, at 185 Steele St.

The largest project now going up is Cherry Lane at 2375 E. 1st Ave., with 380 apartments, 132,655 square feet of retail, and nearly 50,000 square feet of office space.

UMB Financial, which has been a downtown fixture on the southeast corner of Broadway and 17th Avenue for more than three decades, plans to relocate there.

“Cherry Creek offers a strong mix of walkability, dining, retail and amenities that support work-life integration and make the area attractive to both current and prospective associates and clients,” said UMB Financial’s Chairman and CEO, Mariner Kemper.

Although UMB is and will remain based in Kansas City, Mo., Kemper chose to live in Denver and build a flagship office here in the early 1990s.

Although the area lacks downtown’s transit options, Cherry Lane will have dedicated parking, and the neighborhood provides “unique and meaningful benefits,” Kemper added.

As large as Cherry Lane is, even larger projects are planned later this decade.

Demolition began in March on the west side of the Cherry Creek Shopping Center in the area that used to host Elway’s and the Container Store.

Cherry Creek West could add 830 apartments, 600,000 square feet of office space and 100,000 square feet of retail in two phases.

Taller buildings are going up, and things are looking up. And yet Cherry Creek is also vulnerable as it grows. A sense of worry about what might come next was a theme on Friday morning as the Alliance hosted a breakfast to discuss its report.

Taxed into leaving

Willy Walker, chairman and CEO of Walker & Dunlop, one of the nation’s top commercial real estate mortgage servicers, moved to Denver during the pandemic.

Like Kemper, he chose to make Denver his home, even though his company is based in Bethesda, Md. He spends most of his days traveling, squeezing in The Walker Webcast when he can each week.

“For the last two years, the narrative in every single meeting is ‘What’s going on in Denver?'” said Walker, whose public company oversees a $144 billion mortgage servicing portfolio spread across 7,000 properties.

Once a popular destination for workers and businesses relocating, the region is now experiencing domestic outmigration. That has resulted in a temporary oversupply of apartments.

Metro Denver had the second biggest decline in apartment rents last year after Austin, which has made it harder for multifamily investors to earn a return, said Walker, who was the keynote interview on Friday when the Alliance released its report.

But unlike Austin, which got ahead of itself, Denver appears to have veered off the race course.

Investments in the state have increasingly become the problem children in portfolios, Walker said. And it doesn’t help that Denver and Colorado are viewed as having a heavier regulatory hand and less friendly business climate.

Under Mayor Michael Johnston, Denver has done better at providing shelter to people living on the street, has made a serious dent in crime, and is speeding up approval times for developments, Walker said.

Walker said he has told a positive narrative as much as he can. But that has become harder as the state looks for ways to fill budget shortfalls.

One ballot measure referred by the state legislature would weaken the refunds taxpayers receive under the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights. But more worrisome for Cherry Creek and wealthier areas is from The Bell Policy Center.

“Protect Colorado’s Future” would take Colorado’s flat 4.4% state income tax rate and replace it with a five-bracket system. Most residents will pay less in state taxes, but those earning $500,000 a year or more could face a higher tax rate of between 7.4% to 8.4% if the measure passes in November.

Matt Joblon, CEO of BMC Investments, a leading developer in Cherry Creek, said Colorado could follow down the path of Washington state.

After that state passed a 7% tax on long-term capital gains above $250,000, its wealthiest resident, Jeff Bezos, relocated to Miami, said Joblon, who shared the stage with Walker.

Bezos regularly sells shares from his large stock holdings, and his wealth is large enough to move the needle. His relocation to Florida cost Washington and Seattle $1.8 billion in lost revenues in 2024 and 2025, Joblon said.

Rather than backing off, Washington’s state legislature this year passed a 9.9% income tax on earnings above $1 million, and has debated putting a 1% wealth tax on portfolios above $250 million.

Those initiatives have contributed to an outflow of wealthy residents to states with more favorable tax policies. Rather than bridging shortfalls, both Seattle and Washington now face more difficult fiscal predicaments, Joblon said.

Likewise, Colorado risks driving away its wealthiest residents with higher income tax rates, said Walker. With his children out of the house, he said he isn’t being held back.

And if there is a Denver neighborhood vulnerable to a flight of wealthy residents, it would be Cherry Creek North, where the median listing price on a home is $3.15 million.

Joblon said he and Walker spent 90 minutes talking to Chris deGruy Kennedy, president and CEO of The Bell Policy Center, about their concerns.

“If you get rid of TABOR and if you see income taxes grow, you will kill Colorado,” Joblon warned. “People will move, people will leave here, you will lose your tax base.”

But Kennedy, reached Friday afternoon, said Initiative 195 is an attempt to address serious budget shortfalls that will harm the state’s most vulnerable residents if not addressed.

As of 2023, there were just over 15,000 taxpayers, single and joint, who made more than $1 million per year. That group had $3.29 million on average in taxable income.

Their state taxes would go from an average of $144,700 to $252,285 at the proposed tax rate of 7.67%, he calculates.

Those earning between $500,000 to $1 million per year would see their state income taxes rise from an average of $27,764 to $31,369.

“I was disappointed that they were exclusively focused on the impact of tax rates on the very wealthy and that they paid lip service at best to the challenges with the state’s Medicaid budget and what the cuts mean for rural health care and the families of severely disabled kids,” Kennedy said.

Walker’s alternative is to obtain the revenues needed from higher taxes on assets, which can’t pick up and leave, rather than from people, who can.

But Kennedy counters that proposals to increase sales and property taxes would “put a huge burden on the bulk of hard-working Coloradans in a way that would exacerbate the cost-of-living struggles.”

With hundreds of high-end apartments and condos planned in the years ahead, November’s election could prove a pivotal one for Cherry Creek’s future direction, as well as those who would benefit from higher state tax revenues.

The budget limited much of what lawmakers could accomplish in the 120-day annual session, which ended Wednesday night. Philosophical differences — despite Polis overseeing unified Democratic control of the Capitol throughout his tenure — killed more efforts.

But Polis, whose final term ends early next year, will also leave office having checked off some issues that have lingered for years.

“I’m so proud of everything we’ve done so far,” the governor said Thursday during a post-session event. “It����ap been really a great honor to work with you all.”

Here are several takeaways from this year’s session.

‘Must-fix issues’ get focus

Lawmakers finally ended the two-year debate over artificial intelligence regulations, while passing a bipartisan measure that attempts to ease the state’s ongoing problems with criminal defendants who are deemed too incompetent to proceed in the criminal justice system.

The majority Democrats passed bills intended to curb the federal government����ap impacts on the state. They also advanced a smaller package of housing bills — including one that would give money to affordable developers and cities working on transit infrastructure and another intended to ease the rising cost of homeowner’s insurance.

“We tackled the must-fix issues facing us,” House Speaker Julie McCluskie said Thursday. “… And we did it all with federal attacks and a billion-dollar deficit nipping at our heels.”

In past sessions, the budget served as something of a legislative sun. Legislation and lawmakers revolved around it in a predictable, if not always passive, pattern. This session, though, the budget felt more like a black hole.

Very few bills with even a modest price tag survived its horizon, limiting lawmakers’ ambitions. And the weight of the cuts it required sapped both the lawmakers who drafted the budget and the broader legislature as a whole.

Because of those dire fiscal straits, the 2026 session lacked the sweeping policy debates of prior years. Some of the most consequential debates — over data centers, immigration enforcement, tax policy and more — ended either with bills dying or being heavily amended. And as they strained to find ways to respond to President Donald Trump, the Democrats who control the chamber wrestled with the limits of their own power and of their own unity.

Lawmakers passed bills requiring college campuses to stock abortion pills and banning pet stores from selling cat and dogs. They worked to ease mounting prison population issues. They made it easier to sell homemade food and, in a contentious vote, made it harder for farmworkers to get overtime pay.

But after successive years of the Democratic majority largely rallying around gun control and abortion proposals, Democrats this year had fewer marquee red-meat policies around which to coalesce.

Instead, the 2026 session felt at times like a legislature catching its breath.

Case in point: While lawmakers passed a bill making it easier for nonprofit organizations to build housing, two other measures in Polis’ yearslong land-use reform push died for lack of support. One bill’s sponsors cited a legislative land-use fatigue — and a desire to slow down while recently approved policies go into effect.

Polis puts stamp on final session

While Colorado won’t know for weeks what the final veto tally is, several lawmakers expected Polis to break his personal record for the number of vetoed bills — 11 last year. More than a dozen are rumored to be on his shortlist for axing, after several more were voluntarily killed or amended to avoid the gallows.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was north of 20 (vetoes),” Rep. Kyle Brown, a Louisville Democrat, said.

On Thursday, Polis wouldn’t say how many bills he might reject. He said he’d defer to his usual multi-tiered analysis to determine if the bills are “good for Colorado” before signing or killing them.

Several lawmakers have been explicit about waiting for the next governor to run bills that Polis opposes. Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Frisco Democrat, said he had delayed some bills related to Colorado River usage because he couldn’t reach an agreement with the Polis administration. The two Democratic contenders to be the next governor, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser, are more aligned on needing to be proactive about likely cuts, Roberts said.

“You can sense that there’s a change in mood coming in this building, knowing there’s going to be a transition on the first floor,” Roberts said.

Republicans have found plenty of reason to criticize Polis, and did so again this year. House Minority Leader Jarvis Caldwell, a Colorado Springs Republican, joked that Polis’ penchant for self-identifying as a libertarian mostly serves to anger libertarians for “damaging the brand.”

But he appreciates when the governor has broken with the Democratic majority.

“He has vetoed some really bad bills, and he has been kind of a backstop in certain cases,” Caldwell said.

Budget misery — again

Lawmakers walked into the Capitol in January knowing the budget outlook was bad. As the session progressed, the prognosis only worsened.

For the third time in two years, lawmakers needed to find some $1 billion in program cuts and new revenue to balance the budget. The deficit sucked much of the policymaking air out of the Capitol.

“For the most part, all of us came in here knowing that was the reality, and we were willing to make the choices that we needed to do to get (a balanced budget) done,” Roberts said. “But it definitely made some of the bigger policy ideas or aspirations that some of us may have had more challenging or outright impossible.”

Lawmakers raised tuition for state universities, took an axe to Medicaid and dipped into the state’s savings account to bridge the budget gap. But they were able to preserve some programs, such as Medicaid coverage for immigrant children, and keep K-12 education funding even.

“At the end of the day, even though it was really, really hard, I think we got to as good of a place as we could have gotten. And we did it without a lot of drama,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat on the budget committee.

But this is likely only the latest in a series of deep cuts to balance the state budget. Medicaid costs continue to outpace overall budget growth and what����ap allowed under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, as do prison costs — challenges that will likely define the next governor’s first budget and the next Joint Budget Committee’s work.

Before the next batch of elected officials get to work, voters will have at least one chance to directly weigh in. Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 135, a referred measure for the November ballot that would exempt education funding from the TABOR formula used to set state spending caps. It would direct extra revenue — billions of dollars over the next decade — to education. The original version would have freed up money for other state spending priorities, but sponsors narrowed the measure to keep it education-specific.

But the measure, if passed, would also essentially eliminate TABOR refunds, such as they exist after the state uses excess money for other tax credits, for the foreseeable future — drawing sharp opposition from Republicans.

Good year for businesses, law enforcement

Moments after ending his final post-session news conference, Polis signed the AI bill, a negotiated settlement that eased requirements that tech companies had blasted as burdensome. After that, he signed a bill requiring the state to conduct regular reviews of rules and regulations, a priority for the Colorado Chamber of Commerce.

“This is a big step in good government, efficiency and making Colorado more competitive,” the governor said, “and taking a look at Colorado’s laws and regulations to really make sure they’re minimizing red tape and reducing costs for the private sector and all Coloradans.”

The signings were emblematic of a particularly strong year for the broader business community. One of Democrats’ more progressive affordability-focused bills died quickly, while a bill that would have put workplace safety protections in state law fell apart on the session’s final day.

Another bill, proposing to assess fees on large businesses that don’t provide health insurance to all of their workers, failed after passing the House. Bills that would have ended business-friendly tax incentives similarly collapsed or, in one case, were amended to direct money to restaurants.

The Sum and Substance, a blog run by the chamber, wrote Thursday that the business community had entered the year with plans to ask lawmakers to “do no harm” to the private sector. Four months later, “it appears that business leaders not only reached the no-harm bar but exceeded it significantly.”

Law enforcement, which has found the Capitol increasingly hospitable after the major police reform measures from several years ago, similarly chalked up a litany of wins this time.

Opposition led by the state’s elected district attorneys torpedoed legislation that would’ve allowed Coloradans to sue federal agents for civil rights violations. Police criticism killed another immigration bill and three other measures that sought to limit law enforcement����ap ability to buy and access Coloradans’ personal information and license plate history.

The shadow of Trump

Last year, Trump’s return for a second term dominated the legislative session. As the president����ap agenda began to rapidly roll out, lawmakers responded to his actions often in real time, while also taking proactive steps in areas like elections or healthcare.

This year, Trump’s shadow still hovered over the legislature, and the dizzying pace of national and international news often made the Capitol, and the state-based debates within it, feel like a bubble.

“The world around us shaped, at times, what our agenda might have looked like,” McCluskie said. “There were immigration crackdowns, children being detained, rising political violence, chaos in Washington. And much of that led us to step up and assert our authorities as a state.”

Indeed, Democratic legislators passed bills related to vaccines, immigration enforcement and healthcare subsidies. But they were less unified in how to respond elsewhere — while facing the hard limits of their own powers.

State lawmakers can’t stop federal agents from wearing masks, for instance, so Democrats brought a bill requiring local law enforcement officers to identify themselves — and to intervene if police see a federal agent using excessive force. But that bill died in its first committee, with two Democrats voting against it.

Two more Democrats voted against the “No Kings Act” — the bill opposed by the district attorneys — which would’ve allowed Coloradans to sue federal agents for civil rights violations. The legislature instead passed a more narrow — and more legally endangered — bill that applies only to immigration agents.

Polis has also not said if he will sign that bill, as he preferred the broader version, and his opposition to another immigration bill prompted significant changes prior to its passage.

“We tried” to respond to federal action, said Brown, the Louisville Democrat. “We’ll do our best. But we can probably only cushion the blow, to some degree.”

Re: “School cellphone policies are being decided right now — with or without you,” April 26 commentary, and “DPS panel advocates phone ban in schools,” April 17 news story

Cellphones are a fact of life in our technologically sophisticated world, and public schools are responsible for teaching 21st-century skills to our youth. A total ban on cellular technology leaves our teens unprepared for the reality of career and life after graduation.

Just as “abstinence only” education doesn’t prevent teen pregnancy, complete technology bans do not foster responsible cellphone use or the self-direction required of emerging adults. Many of these young adults hold jobs, drive cars, and vote in presidential elections. They are responsible cashiers, lifeguards and babysitters. They can be drafted to serve our country in a time of war, and I think we can trust them to text friends to find a lunch meet-up or use their phone to buy lunch during the weekday.

With a total cellphone ban, I wouldn’t have gotten the “I’m OK, Mom” texts after multiple school shootings and SWAT incidents, hours before any Denver Public Schools notification arrived.

Today’s youth are growing up in a world infinitely different from the one I grew up in. The responsible and appropriate use of cellphone technology should have a scaffolded approach consistent with other learning and technology objectives. Just as the educational needs and expectations of a second grader vastly differ from those of a 12th grader and the cellphone policy should be too. Please don’t completely ban phones and watches in our high schools!

Joanne Scarbeary, Denver

Vote no on SB 135 and tell legislators to ‘live within their means’

Re: “SB 135 allows us to give our kids the education they deserve,” April 26 commentary

Senate Bill 135 is a boondoggle. would reduce TABOR refunds for more uncontrolled spending. Kevin Vick pointed out in his April 26 commentary that schools lack air conditioning. And that teachers are woefully underpaid. K-12 education is specifically funded by Amendment 23 and provides an inflationary increase.

Sixty percent of my property taxes in Adams County go directly to K-12 education. Teachers receive a pension benefit that most Coloradans do not. Who wouldn’t want a guaranteed pension as part of their compensation package?

As far as maintenance, school districts should be more responsible with their funds. recently that Joint Budget Committee member Barb Kirkmeyer calls this a slush fund, and the bill does not detail how the $28.5 billion would be spent.

Colorado Medicaid has proved that the progressive leadership cannot be responsible with funds, given the fraud that has occurred in that program. And here the progressive party in charge wants more money with no accountability.

The progressives who are in charge of our government should do what Coloradans are already doing: live within their means. The answer to SB 135 is a big “No.”

Jeff Jasper, Westminster

This immigrant’s love story hits readers differently

Re: “Waiting to be together,” April 26 news story

This article is a biased piece intended to make us all feel sorry yet again for people who skirt the system and then cry foul when they are asked to live with the consequences of their decisions.

My son met an amazing Canadian woman 10 years ago while she was traveling through our country on vacation. Love ensued and they jumped through all the hoops required by our immigration policies. Was it easy? No. Even after they got married, they had to spend another year apart (and she was not even allowed to come here for a visit) before she was able to move here legally and get her green card. She is now a citizen.

When I read slanted stories like the one in The Post, I have to think, “Cry me a river! Go back to your own country and come here the legal way like so many before you.”

Michelle Murphy, Lone Tree

Kudos to your writer, Elizabeth Hernandez, for her portrayal of the story of Lucie Donovan and her ICE-detained husband, Juan, father of three; a roofer without a criminal history, who overstayed a 2018 work visa, and was swept up in an instance of ICE serving an arrest warrant upon one of his acquaintances in 2025.

Sadly, even with legal representation and despite the writer’s well-documented description of their love and marriage, this couple is necessarily making plans for what seems like a looming contingency of failure on his green card case, of voluntarily moving to Mexico.

Lord knows, America doesn’t need roofers, or special education teachers for that matter, right? There’s not much real fact or significant numbers to back the oft-repeated President Trump mantra about removing the worst, the prison rejects, the gang members and criminals, but there seem to be countless cases like Juan’s.

Peter Ehrlich, Denver

Hardware stores stocked with lifelong memories for readers

Re: “Hardware stores hold the mundane, the magical,” April 26 feature story

Every day except Wednesday and Sunday, I pull out The Post’s sports section, find the pages with the comics, puzzles, Asking Eric, and tech news, and toss away the sports. That starts my day over breakfast. On Sunday, the routine is different. I find the Life & Culture section to check Sunday night TV listings for Channel 6 and read Asking Eric before I rip off the last two pages and begin the two crossword puzzles.

This Sunday, I was waylaid on Page 1 with the feature about hardware stores, and I read it first, before TV or Asking Eric. The author is a person after my own heart. I grew up with a father and brothers who saved every little part, gadget, fastener, stored in wooden cheese boxes on a bank of shelves, all carefully labeled. A few of those boxes are still in my own garage. When I began buying houses for rentals in the mid-1980s, Hugh M. Woods was my go-to because it was smaller. I lamented when they closed the General Hardware on South Broadway because it always had the older parts I needed. Then I converted to Ace Hardware, where my motto has been “it’s an hour in Home Depot, and 10 minutes in Ace” because, after all, time is money. There is always someone to greet me and direct me if I don’t know my way. 12th Avenue Ace Hardware and Ace on The Fax are my stores, and you captured them perfectly.

Thank you for disrupting my routine. Great article!

Jessie Tramutolo, Denver

Loved your column Sunday morning about 12th Avenue Ace Hardware. Like you, that place is our go-to for all sorts of stuff. We also love Moore Lumber & Hardware in Pine Junction and its sibling in Bailey. Hardware stores are being eased out, it seems, in favor of the Home Depots of the world, and it’s a damn shame. I’m hoping that 12th Avenue will survive long past the time that we will.

Caroline Schomp, Denver

I love them too, and my husband, Dick, and I especially liked the larger Country Stores we found when living in New England. And your description of your dad in his workshop made me nostalgic for my dad and his. He made special things for my sister and me. Unfortunately no desks.

I can still smell the sawdust. Thanks for the memories.

Dotttie Lamm, Denver

Editor’s note: Lamm is a former first lady of Colorado.

Are New Mexico voters content with Democrats’ outcomes?

Re: “New Mexico gubernatorial race: Haaland’s run hits a primary snag,” April 26 news story

Reis Thebault����ap New York Times article regarding Deb Haaland’s surprise primary challenge from Sam Bregman in New Mexico’s Democrat primary for governor also put a spotlight on that state’s most dire problems.

The story stated that New Mexico has one of the highest percentages in the country of residents who are reliant on food stamps and Medicaid, one of the highest rates of violent crime, and one of the worst national rankings in education. Situations like these don’t develop overnight, but over decades of bad governance.

Since 1987, New Mexico has had three Republican governors for a combined 20 years in office, and three Democrats for another 20 years through the current term. Equal blame there, but the numbers in the state congress tell the true story. During the same period, the Democrats have held a majority in the state House of Representatives every year except the 2015-2016 legislative session. Even more amazing, in the state Senate, the Democrats have had the majority every year.

Why do the citizens of New Mexico keep voting for the same Democratic state leadership that has proved itself over 40 continuous years to be woefully inept at lifting the quality of life in their state? Maybe they should change the slogan on their license plates to The Land of the Enchanted by the Democrat Party.

Kevin Getz, Westminster

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That����ap just one example of what more than three decades of chronic school funding shortages under Colorado’s decades-old spending cap has led to. Our educators, school leadership and staff, parents, and students can give you hundreds more: teachers buying their own school supplies while also being drastically underpaid, districts forced to cut back to four day weeks, students unable to access the mental health care or resources they deserve, and parents scrambling to work with their local schools to piece together the supports they need to help their children thrive.

Senate Bill 135, and the critical school funding it represents, is about whether Colorado’s children, in every kind of public school, in every corner of this state, get the investment they deserve.

A recent Denver Post opinion piece claimed that SB 135 is a backdoor attack on taxpayers dressed up in the language of helping kids. I want to be direct: that claim is factually incorrect, it����ap politicians playing politics with children’s futures, and it badly misses the point of what is actually at stake.

The truth is, this measure is a targeted, structural update to an outdated limit initially set in 1992, more than 30 years ago. Let that sink in. Given the extreme amount of growth and change the state has experienced, our schools are burdened by an arbitrary cap set more than a quarter-century ago.

Let’s start with the facts. This measure does not raise the tax rate, not even by one percent. Coloradans will not pay more than they do today. It simply allows Colorado to use all revenue it already collects instead of paying some as TABOR refunds.

Equally inaccurate is the claim that this would take away TABOR refunds forever. That is simply not true. The measure raises the revenue cap. When Colorado’s economy grows, and revenues exceed the new cap, refunds remain on the table, just like they always are.

Every student in Colorado is underfunded by roughly $4,000 per year. That adds up to a $3.5 billion to $4 billion annual shortfall for our public schools, putting Colorado near the bottom nationally in teacher pay. As a result, educators are leaving the profession, classrooms are overcrowded, and mental health counselors and other critical supports are disappearing.

The tragic part is our state has the money; what we lack is the ability to use it, because of an outdated rule written when the internet was barely a concept and Colorado’s population was millions of people smaller than it is today.

Most importantly, Colorado voters would make the ultimate decision.

: it refers the policy outlined above to the November 2026 ballot, which, if voters approve, would allow the state to retain revenue it already collects and invest it in K-12 education first. This measure also relieves pressure on the broader state budget by leaving more funds available for priorities like Medicaid, behavioral health, infrastructure, and public safety.

The measure will provide stable, predictable increases in education funding of up to 2 percent annually over 10 years, and mandates a yearly public audit so Coloradans can see exactly where every dollar goes. That����ap not a “paltry” amount. In good economic times, that����ap hundreds of millions of dollars each year for upgrading classrooms, boosting teacher pay, improving security, and enriching learning in our schools. It is a structured, transparent investment in our kids and our communities.

That����ap why this measure has such a broad base of support. The Colorado Education Association is joined by Stand for Children, the Colorado Children’s Campaign, the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, the Colorado Association of School Boards, the Colorado Parent Teacher Association (PTA), the Public Education and Business Coalition, and more because Colorado’s students cannot afford more years of the same structural underfunding.

The critics of SB 135 are missing the bigger picture. This is not about politics. This is about whether a child sitting in a sweltering Denver classroom in August, or a rural school that has cut its counseling staff for the third year in a row, or a teacher who finally left the profession because she couldn’t make rent, will finally get the support they need.

This bill gives voters the chance to answer that question. I believe they will say yes, and I hope you join me in supporting this common-sense measure so our kids and our grandkids can benefit from the quality education they deserve.

Kevin Vick is the president of the Colorado Education Association.

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One of the two must-pass bills, the annual budget, is already all but complete. The Joint Budget Committee will meet later this week to review amendments to the spending package and decide which, if any, it will keep. The House and the Senate each adopted several amendments to the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, including measures relating to veteran services and the state’s sexual assault testing kit backlog.

However, the legislature must also pass a balanced budget, and paying for those changes would affect spending in other areas. A final vote to send the budget to Gov. Jared Polis is expected later in the week, setting off the final mad dash of activity under the Gold Dome.

The other must-pass bill, the annual School Finance Act, will also begin its journey this week. That measure, , will be heard in the Senate Education Committee on Monday, its first step toward becoming law.

Scheduled hearings are always subject to change at the Capitol, but here’s what else is on the legislature’s docket.

Tuesday

The full Senate is expected to debate a referred ballot measure that would ask voters this November to exempt education from the state’s spending cap under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. In effect, it would free up billions of dollars to spend on general state priorities over the next decade, while funneling more cash to education. is part of a series of proposals from Democrats and liberal groups that would remake state budgeting.

The bill still would need to move through the House before voters may decide on it.

Also on Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee will hear , a measure that would regulate gaming and sports betting. It is separate from , which also looks to regulate the booming industry. That bill is scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday morning.

Wednesday

The House Judiciary Committee is set to hear , a measure that would provide the ability to sue to people who have their civil rights violated during immigration enforcement actions. It is one of several bills introduced this year that deals with how immigration enforcement agents operate in the state.

The Senate Local Government and Housing Committee will hear . That bill would make it easier to declare towns abandoned and stems from tumult in the tiny southeast Colorado town of Hartman, which had its entire town government resign.

Thursday

The Senate Local Government and Housing Committee will hear a series of bills aimed at increasing density in cities. would allow people who build an accessory dwelling unit, or so-called “granny flat,” to split that into its own property to sell it separately. would prohibit local governments from setting minimum lot sizes at more than 2,000 square feet.

Also on Thursday, the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee will hear , a proposal to have users to affirm their age on a computing device, which can then be used to prove their age when accessing age-restricted materials online. It is the only surviving measure this year that seeks to enforce online age requirements.

On the same afternoon, the House Energy and Environment Committee will hear , one of two bills whose sponsors seek to regulate data centers. That bill, however, has been subject to some turmoil as backers negotiate changes.

Under consideration are cuts, big and small, that would affect areas including assistance for families that adopt children, health care for immigrant children without legal status, grants for solar energy projects in agriculture, compensation for health care providers, raises for state workers and substance abuse programs.

Those programs — and dozens more — are likely victims of a “structural deficit,” in which costs in must-spend areas are far outpacing how much money the government has to spend. That comes both in the trickle-down aftermath of federal tax cuts made last year through H.R. 1, commonly known as President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and under the general growth constraints imposed by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR.

In the paradox of government budgeting, the state general fund, which takes in the state’s general tax collections and contains the most flexible money available to lawmakers, grew by 1.2% compared to last year. But rocketing costs in those must-spend areas — chiefly the prison system and Medicaid — necessitated broad cuts elsewhere across many areas and programs. In effect, spending more on Medicaid means less money to spend on other priorities.

Overall, the state expects to have about $17.4 billion to spend in its general fund in the fiscal year that runs from July 1 to June 30, 2027, or about $212 million more than the current fiscal year. The overall budget is about $46.8 billion, with the balance made up by federal dollars and cash fees paid to specific programs.

The general increase for alone, at $213 million, is greater than the total budget increase. That means the general fund budgets for most other departments — 13 of the 22 that receive general fund dollars — would be cut.

Other than Health Care Policy and Financing, which oversees Medicaid and is commonly referred to as HCPF, the only departments that would see general fund increases of more than $10 million are Corrections, at nearly $69 million; Judicial, at nearly $31 million; and Treasury, at $14 million.

But those increases mask a swath of cuts of varying size as the state has grappled with a projected overall budget shortfall of $1.5 billion, driven by spiking costs associated with the prison population and Medicaid.

“The two drivers are HCPF and Corrections. Without question,” said Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican on the Joint Budget Committee. “If you take those caseloads out, then we’d have actually reduced spending across the board.”

Even in Medicaid, as the overall budget rises, there’s a need for cuts to individual programs to keep surging costs under control. According to from House Democrats, the budget cuts would amount to $270 million in total from Medicaid, $340 million taken from the state reserves, and $150 million generated from cuts across smaller departments. More money would be saved by not giving across-the-board pay raises to state employees and by taking money from cash funds and other prior investments.

Taken together, these and other moves are what would close the $1.5 billion budget gap — the third time in two years the legislature has had to scramble to find money to close a massive deficit.

The formal budget proposal was released Monday, with the House spending much of the week debating the spending plan. During marathon meetings, the body’s members — primarily led by Republicans in the minority — sought to amend the document and move money around to other priorities.

The vast majority of those amendments died; a handful stuck, at least for now. One in particular seeks to shift more money to the Cover All Colorado program, which mirrors Medicaid for immigrant children and pregnant women who lack legal status; its cost has shattered spending projections. The Joint Budget Committee is set to take one more crack at the document to reconcile any imbalance created by adopted amendments.

On Thursday, a House Republican slowed the budget debate’s pace to a crawl. Rep. Brandi Bradley, of Littleton, asked that the entire 661-page budget bill be read at length in protest of how the House handled an ethics complaint. As of Friday afternoon, the computer program being used to read the bill aloud was roughly halfway through the 15-hour task.

The delay set the House up for a likely weekend of work to finish its debate on the budget and to conduct a formal vote.

Once the budget clears the House, the process will begin again in the state Senate this week, before heading to the governor’s desk. That will kick off the final sprint of the120-day legislative session as lawmakers try to pass their priority bills before adjournment on May 13.

‘A lot of very, very painful cuts’

The HCPF department, despite receiving the steepest general fund increase, also faces some of the steepest cuts to specific programs and benefits — more than $162 million that would have otherwise gone to dental benefits, the health care program for undocumented immigrant children, pay for health care providers, and services for people with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Some of the cuts are huge, with potentially far-reaching consequences this year and next.

A general 2% cut to how much health care providers are paid out for Medicaid services is expected to save the state $84 million in general fund dollars, and $222 million in the total budget because of lost federal matching dollars. Medicaid providers, however, worry about what this would mean for their long-term sustainability.

That cut is not universal, however. The budget committee, in its spending proposal, exempted neonatal intensive care units — which specialize in care for prematurely born babies and young infants — and pediatric behavioral therapy for people with autism from the cut. 

Other large cuts include reductions in rates paid for nonemergency medical transportation by $15.4 million in general fund dollars and $51.4 million overall. That program, in which contractors provide transport services for Medicaid patients, has been plagued by fraud. The budget would cut the overall pickup fee for clients from $36.40 to $12.40, but it would leave the mileage fee, which is $3 per mile, untouched.

That proposed cut, however, has met resistance from some members of the legislature’s Democratic majority, who worry it would devastate small businesses. Attempts to amend the budget bill to erase that change, however, failed.

Budget writers are also running a bill that would pare back the new Cover All Colorado health care program for immigrant children and pregnant women. would eliminate long-term services for people who are not already enrolled in those programs, and it would cap dental services, limit behavioral health services and cap enrollment for future fiscal years.

That bill is running as an orbital to the budget bill, or one of the dozens of proposed new laws that are budget-related but don’t fit specifically in the main budget bill.

That program faced severe cost overruns after enrollment and use far outpaced what analysts predicted. Tens of thousands of migrants arrived in Denver during the Biden administration, including thousands sent to the city by Republican governors of other states protesting federal policy. An Associated Press tally found Denver had the fourth-highest number of migrant arrivals on a per-capita basis.

What forecasters predicted in 2022 would cost the state general fund about $15 million this fiscal year has ended up costing $104 million. Some 21,000 children are enrolled in the program.

“We are in a situation where this program is growing at an unsustainable rate,” said Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat on the budget committee. “But ultimately, we are talking about kids and pregnant folks.”

Taggart, the Republican House member on the budget committee, called it “the most painful bill I’ve ever been on” — one characterized by lost sleep and tears as lawmakers have sought a compromise to keep the program going.

“(This cut) tests your value system, and it continues to test my value system,” Taggart said. He worried about children who likely had no say in coming to Colorado now losing health care coverage, as well as about hospitals needing to pay for care without the hope of being paid back.

The budget committee also made a series of changes in the budget proposal to programs for intellectually and developmentally disabled people who need around-the-clock support, amounting to a $17 million savings.

Those include ending automatic enrollment for youth who are aging out of certain child assistance programs, requiring individuals who are able to help pay for residential services to contribute, and reducing waitlist funding. The last one would mean that for every two people who disenroll from the developmental disability waiver program, only one person would be enrolled.

That waitlist is already seven years long, according to nonpartisan staff analysis. 

As cuts like those mount, the overall spending in Medicaid continues to grow. The budget committee is earmarking another $351 million in general fund dollars for general medical spending, $45 million for behavioral health services, and $32 million for the Office of Community Living, which provides long-term support for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The Department of Human Services is facing an $11 million cut, the largest straight cut of any department. (Though the Department of Education is losing $82 million in general fund dollars, that would largely be replaced by money from the state education fund.)

The DHS cuts include cutting funding by half for a transitional jobs program for low-income adults and $2.2 million in cuts to benefits for families that adopt children or provide guardianship as a child’s relatives.

Among moderately sized departments, the Department of Agriculture stands out for taking the largest cut as a percentage of its general fund budget. Its $20.4 million budget would be cut by nearly 10%, to $18.4 million. About $700,000 of the cut is to end or reduce grants for solar energy in agriculture, for conservation and for equine welfare.

“This is a lot to take in,” Rep. Emily Sirota, the chair of the budget committee, told her fellow Democrats while previewing the budget. “These are a lot of very, very painful cuts we didn’t want to have to make. And now you’re being asked to maintain them so we can keep a balanced budget.”

Prison costs draw consternation

Perhaps the most controversial part of the budget, at least among the Democrats, is the Department of Corrections’ proposed increase.

That department����ap $69 million in general fund growth would represent a 6.1% year-over-year increase — easily the largest percentage increase among the so-called Big Six departments that make up the bulk of the general fund budget. The department’s overall general fund budget is nearly $1.2 billion.

The proposed increase, juxtaposed with cuts to a slew of programs for the lowest-income Coloradans, drew frequent comparisons from Democratic members of the House.

“We have this conversation every single year — about more beds, more money for prisons — when today we’re going to be talking about a lot of tough cuts,” Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat, said during a caucus meeting Tuesday. 

The single-largest cost increase outlined in the budget bill is $27.1 million for medical care for inmates. Sirota, from the budget committee, said that about a fifth of the inmates, or about 4,000 people, are at least 50 years old — technically geriatric, per the DOC’s definitions.

The number of people being kept in prison, versus released on parole and for other reasons such as health, has become an increasing frustration for lawmakers. The Joint Budget Committee earlier this year temporarily rejected a request by Gov. Jared Polis for more prison funding because its members wanted to see a plan for lowering the overall prison population.

Polis made a late request to the committee to spend up to $200 million on new prisons to handle the growing number of inmates. The committee rejected that request, opting instead to budget about $13 million for private prison beds in the hopes it would be a temporary solution to a temporary problem.

Sirota told the other Democrats that she shared their “intense frustration” about the increased cost for prisons. But the committee also has an obligation to budget for projected costs based on current law.

“The system is not setting us up for success in terms of reducing the prison population,” Sirota said. “So, if the General Assembly wants to see more people heading to community corrections, I think there needs to be significant discussions and policy changes made.” 

A clear majority of likely voters — 55% — predicted the economy would worsen over the next year, compared to 46% who answered the same way in a similar survey also conducted for the Colorado Polling Institute in November.

Meanwhile, opinions of some of Colorado’s top elected officials — Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, all Democrats — have grown only more unfavorable. And that fall has largely been driven by disenchanted Democrats.

“We’ve seen Democrats become quite frustrated with incumbent legislators and executives across the state and across the country,” Kevin Ingham, principal of Democratic polling firm Aspect Strategic, said.

In a poll conducted around the same time last year for the Colorado Polling Institute, Polis sat at 51% of Coloradans holding a favorable opinion of him, to 40% unfavorable. In its November poll, he landed underwater by 1 percentage point. Now he’s down a net 4 percentage points, with 44% favorable to 48% unfavorable.

Bennet and Hickenlooper saw similar slips, though neither landed in explicitly negative territory in this latest poll.

Bennet, who is running for governor this year to succeed the term-limited Polis, moved from 45% favorable in March 2025 to 40% favorable now, and from 31% unfavorable then to 39% unfavorable now. Hickenlooper, who is running for reelection, moved from 49% favorable a year ago, with 36% of voters holding an unfavorable view, to an even split of 43% for each view.

In each case, the difference between favorable and unfavorable now is roughly within the margin of error of the poll, which surveyed 613 likely voters statewide through online interviews March 20-25. Its margin of error is plus or minus 3.96 percentage points. It was released by the Colorado Polling Institute and conducted by a team of Democratic and Republican pollsters.

The increasingly unfavorable feelings toward the officials could have some ties to overall economic malaise, but other data points indicate that “maybe what we’re seeing here is more general frustration among the Democratic base toward their party in the way they are resisting — or not — the Trump administration,” Ingham said.

The poll did not offer a head-to-head question surveying support in the Democratic primary for governor between Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser, his chief rival.

But the poll found name recognition continues to plague Weiser. While he had overall higher favorability than unfavorable feelings, at 26% to 23%, a majority of respondents, 51%, said they either hadn’t heard of him or had no opinion of him. That is an improvement from six months ago, when 58% said they had no opinion of him or had not heard of him.

For Bennet, 21% of respondents had either never heard of him or had no opinion.

Views on economy dive as gas prices surge

Views of the state’s economic future have also grown more sour amid general nationally and rising prices.

Three-quarters of Colorado voters were extremely or very concerned about the availability of good-paying jobs in their communities. More than 90% considered the price of housing, health care, home and car insurance, food and utilities to be a problem.

The cost of gasoline is now considered a very big problem by 41% of Coloradans, up from 17% a year ago.

Over the past year, the average price of regular unleaded gasoline has risen from $3.10 a gallon to $3.82, according . The price of diesel has risen from $3.38 to $5.14 per gallon. Prices spiked after the United States and Israel launched in late February, prompting Iran to choke off a key access point for .

In the aftermath, 55% of Coloradans predict the state economy will worsen in the next year, up from 46% who felt the same way last November.

Lori Weigel, principal of the Republican polling firm New Bridge Strategies, a partner in the new poll, said economic worries split most heavily along educational lines — not partisan ones. Among Republicans, 48% of respondents felt the economy would worsen, while 51% of Democrats and 62% of unaffiliated voters felt the same.

Meanwhile, the higher a person’s education level, the more likely it was that they would think the economy would worsen, Weigel said. The poll found 36% of people with a high school diploma or less were sour on the economy’s prospects, rising to 52% among people with some college education and 62% for people with a college degree.

“There was a pretty direct relationship with education level for predicting the state’s economy was going to get worse,” Weigel said.

In a separate poll question, Weigel also found strong ongoing support for the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the amendment to the state constitution that limits the growth of government and requires a vote of the people to raise taxes.

The poll asked a general question about support for TABOR, finding 62% viewed it favorably, compared to 22% who felt unfavorable about it. Republicans supported it at the highest level, 74%, while 63% of unaffiliated voters supported it. A plurality of Democrats, 48%, also supported the amendment.

Weigel warned that such support might bode ill for pushes to reform the state tax code at the ballot box this year.

One measure, which is being pursued through the legislature, would exempt state education spending from TABOR’s spending growth cap, freeing up potentially billions of dollars for other state priorities; it would still need approval by voters in November to become law. A second proposal, being pursued as a ballot initiative, would create a graduated income tax in which high-income Coloradans would pay a higher income tax rate than low- and moderate-income Coloradans.

“I would say most people think about TABOR as the thing that gives them checks sometimes, or money back, and then they think about being able to vote on tax increases,” Weigel said.

It’s a hole that will swallow Medicaid benefits, substance-abuse programs, a portion of the state’s rainy-day reserve and hopes for across-the-board salary increases for state workers, just for starters.

The Joint Budget Committee’s half-dozen members finished their extensive preparatory work on the annual spending plan last week. Now legislative staff is busy converting their many decisions — made over the course of several months — into the formal state budget proposal, which should land at about $18.6 billion for the general fund that covers most day-to-day operations. When the legislature unveils the massive bill this week, the depth of the cuts for the upcoming fiscal year will come into focus.

But nobody involved in the budget process is kidding themselves: Colorado’s budget challenges will persist after the 2026 session, especially as costs in the Medicaid program continue to rocket up.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the state budget has whipsawed between a need for slashing reductions, then to a roaring economy bolstered by an influx of federal cash — easing pressure on the budget significantly — and now, to a recent history of year-over-year cuts. Lawmakers closed a large budget gap last spring and then again in August, when they gathered in a special session to grapple with the fallout of tax code changes foisted on the state by recent federal legislation.

In flush times, lawmakers have bolstered services and created new programs to meet what they see as voter demands. In the red years, they’ve scoured cash funds to plug holes and ended programs so that they could soften the impact of cuts forced by the growth in ballooning, must-spend imperatives like health care — including Medicaid.

The most recent budget crunches have been characterized by the majority Democrats as a battle against a structural deficit exacerbated by the constraints of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Republicans, meanwhile, point to what they see as a lack of budget prioritization by the party in control, whose members have been too eager to expand government, despite constitutional limits on growth.

This budget, for the fiscal year that begins July 1, will be the latest entry in that saga.

Over the past several months, budget writers have agreed to let state universities raise tuition at a higher rate to make up for lagging state cash, and they’ve agreed to cut overall compensation for most Medicaid providers — a decision that balanced fiscal needs with risks to the overall health care system. They have rejected salary increases for most state employees, though they’ve found money to absorb the increase in health insurance costs so that paychecks didn’t actively shrink. They’ve also looked at cuts to substance use disorder treatment programs, too.

Colorado is going to continue facing budget struggles as long as voters want both expanded services and limited spending under TABOR, said Bethany Pray, the chief legal and policy officer at the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, a left-leaning anti-poverty organization. The state constitutional amendment, passed by voters in 1992, requires voter approval for tax increases and allows state revenue collections to rise only as fast as general inflation and in line with population growth, with anything over that cap refunded to taxpayers.

“We have a red-state budget and we have blue-state ideals, and that doesn’t work very well,” she said.

Over the past decade, the state’s direct revenue collections have increased from about $12.8 billion — or about $17.5 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars — to an estimate of about $19 billion in the current fiscal year, which runs through June 30. 

The overall budget, including the federal funds that make up the bulk of state spending, was about $26.6 billion in the 2015-16 fiscal year, or about $36.4 billion when adjusted for inflation. That has grown to nearly $44 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

As the state’s revenue has grown, so have the services the state promises to residents. Those costs have included efforts to boost education spending, to grapple with rising prison populations and to expand behavioral health services.

But Medicaid, and the expansion of eligibility and what the health insurance program for low-income Coloradans covers, has been a particular pressure point.

Because of Colorado’s unique spending cap under TABOR, every dollar spent on Medicaid is effectively a dollar that can’t be spent on other services, no matter how much money the state otherwise brings in.

‘Unsustainable’ growth in Medicaid

Medicaid accounts for a third of the state’s general fund budget — similar to the among states of 30.7% — meaning that passing large spending reductions without touching it is practically impossible.

In addition, the insurance program, which is a safety net for low-income people and those with disabilities, has grown significantly faster than the state’s overall budget. Kim Bimestefer, the outgoing executive director of , described the recent annual growth rate, which ranged from 8% to 13% in most years since the pandemic began in 2020, as “simply unsustainable.”

Bimestefer announced last week that she would resign in early April as the state Senate prepared a no-confidence vote, which was motivated in part by revelations of program overpayments and allegations of fraud by some providers.

In the larger picture, more than half of the state’s total general fund growth over the last six years has gone to the Medicaid department, . Over the past decade, the total budget for Health Care Policy and Financing has doubled, from $9.1 billion to $18.2 billion. More than half of that total comes from federal dollars.

According to an analysis by Gov. Jared Polis’ office, the cost of Medicaid services has grown by 8.8% per year, or double the overall growth rate allowed by TABOR, over the past decade.

Other states have also struggled with rising Medicaid costs since the pandemic, and Colorado ranked 22nd among states in terms of the highest growth rates since 2020. Over a longer period, however, the state does appear to be an outlier, with the 15th-highest growth rate since 2015 and second-highest since 2010.

On average, states’ spending on Medicaid grew 5.3% in the 2024 fiscal year and 8.4% in the current fiscal year, according to data compiled by the National Association of State Budget Officers.

All states are dealing with increasing Medicaid costs because their populations are aging — and older people tend to have the most expensive needs, especially for long-term care, said Jason Schrock, a principal researcher at the Institute of Evidence-Based Policy. At the same time, wages are up for the workers who provide that care, and prescription drug costs also keep rising, he said.

In Colorado, the cost of long-term care services grew by 44% — or more than $1 billion — between the 2020-21 fiscal year and 2023-24 fiscal year alone.

State lawmakers and Polis administration officials committed to increasing access to behavioral health care, so much of that growth reflects improving access to needed services, said Isabel Cruz, the policy and advocacy director at the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative.

In other cases, such as with the nonemergency medical transportation program that shuttles some Medicaid patients to appointments, the state apparently missed signs of fraud, she said.

“I think there are some aspects of that (spending growth) that could have been preventable and some that are by design,” she said.

But still, the size of the Medicaid budget — and the need to rein in its spending before it consumes the bulk of the general fund budget — has spurred lawmakers to use their scissors there. Rep. Kyle Brown, a Louisville Democrat who is in his first year on the budget committee, said he’s spent his career fighting for affordable health care as a right, not a privilege.

The cuts there have been particularly painful, he said.

“The nature of our budget means that we’re having to make painful cuts — cuts that, quite frankly, will affect kids and families, and that hurts me a lot,” Brown said. “But it is the nature of our constitutional duty and the nature of not having enough money to fund the kind of services that Coloradans really need.”

‘It’s complicated how we got here’

The other departments in the “Big Six,” or those that account for the largest shares of state general fund spending, have also seen growth that outpaces TABOR’s allowance. Those other departments are education, higher education, human services, corrections and judicial. Including Health Care Policy and Financing, the departments together account for about 90% of the state’s general fund budget.

Some of that structural deficit was by the influx of federal funds — more than $6.6 billion — that came during the COVID pandemic, nonpartisan staff found, even though that one-time money largely went to one-time services. Even still, it simply freed up money to close the state’s growing structural deficit, without addressing the underlying issues.

But the state budget is also a massive, complex thing that accounts for billions of federal dollars, grants, cash funds and more.

That complexity means there isn’t a single thread to pull that would untangle the annual spending deficit the state has faced, analysts wrote in on the budget shortfall.

“It����ap complicated how we got here,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat on the budget committee. “Basically, we have TABOR and we have been doing all these TABOR workarounds over the years — and we have created a whole budgeting and accounting system and fiscal policy around the constraints of TABOR. And now we have pushed so far that there’s less and less places to go.”

Rep. Emily Sirota, the chair of the Joint Budget Committee, noted that the budget forecasts lawmakers rely upon are just predictions, bringing uncertainty — and budget writers have tried to match their spending plans to them.

“Everybody was making the best decision that they could at the time,” she said.

And more importantly, she said, echoing a point also made by Amabile, Coloradans have wanted more from their state. They wanted an end to the budget stabilization factor, the accounting maneuver that allowed the state to spend less on K-12 education than mandated by the state constitution. They wanted more services covered by Medicaid. And they wanted more robust behavioral health care services.

“I don’t think that Coloradans would have accepted us saying, ‘Let’s just keep underfunding these priorities,’ ” said Sirota, a Denver Democrat.

But Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican on the committee, called it “a crisis of priorities” and blamed “one-party control” of state government.

Democrats won control of both legislative chambers in 2018 and have occupied the governor’s office for more than 19 years. She rejects the argument that the TABOR cap has been the big problem.

The state simply needs to find a way to live within its means, in her view.

“They just want to overtax, overspend and underdeliver,” said Kirkmeyer, who is running for governor this year.

The majority Democrats’ priorities have also, at times, cost more than predicted.

In one notable case, a program providing health coverage through Medicaid to immigrants without legal status was expected to cost the state general fund about $14.7 million this fiscal year to cover about 3,700 people. Now, it����ap predicted to cost $105 million, with nearly 28,000 enrollees. The overage in the program, called Cover All Coloradans, was first reported by .

Sirota said she regretted that fiscal analysts “grossly underestimated” the cost of the program — though she and other Democrats defend it, even with the massive cost overrun. Now, budget writers need to figure out how to put the program on a sustainable path, possibly by limiting its availability in future years.

“At the end of the day, they’re kids and pregnant people who are deserving of health care just like anyone else,” Sirota said of program participants.

The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing has also made costly errors.

For years, the state paid transportation providers as much as 10 times the appropriate rate to pick up Medicaid patients who use large wheelchairs, and the department estimated that correcting the mistake would save $33 million over roughly six months. Colorado can’t recoup that money because providers followed its directions — meaning the payments, while excessive, weren’t fraudulent.

Separately, the transportation fraud scheme — first reported by The Denver Post in 2023 — cost about $25 million, counting both state and federal money, as fraudulent providers were packing cars with patients for unnecessarily long trips. The state had also raised the rate it paid for nonemergency transportation based on a flawed analysis, meaning that it paid for trips in passenger cars at roughly the same rate as ambulances. 

The fraud emerged shortly after the rate increase. During that time, spending nearly tripled, from $93 million in 2022 to $270 million in 2023.

“Unforced errors” such as the nonemergency transportation fraud were particularly galling when lawmakers already faced difficult choices with limited options, said Rachel Zenzinger, a former state senator and member of the budget committee. 

“Those are like gut punches,” said Zenzinger, a Democrat who is now a Jefferson County commissioner.

Lawmakers did their best to adjust as the budget situation changed, she said. But they couldn’t have predicted the revenue losses that came with H.R. 1, the federal tax bill commonly known as President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” as its federal tax code changes filtered down to the state’s code, she said. Similarly, they couldn’t have known how quickly costs would rise during and immediately after the pandemic.

And lawmakers can easily get tunnel vision when they have a difficult problem they have to solve quickly to balance the budget, Zenzinger said. For example, they increasingly have relied on cash funds, which collect fees charged on a particular business or activity, as a way to free up general fund dollars for priorities.

But those fees count against the state’s TABOR limit, meaning that as they increase, the amount of general fund money Colorado can keep gets further squeezed, Zenzinger said.

No easy options to cut Medicaid

While nearly everyone accepts that cutting Medicaid is inevitable, the choices for how to do it can be agonizing.

States have few options to make significant reductions: cut the rates paid to providers, cover fewer people, or slash programs that aren’t federally mandated, such as home- and community-based services that allow people with disabilities to stay out of nursing homes.

“There’s only three levers that can significantly lower costs in Medicaid, and they all have negative effects,” said Edwin Park, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Usually, states turn to provider rate cuts and limiting non-mandated services first, Park said. Better care coordination and the offering of incentives to keep people healthy can yield savings in some cases, but not on the level that the other options can, he said.

Colorado could opt to undo its Medicaid expansion, which opened coverage to adults without children who earn up to 138% of the poverty line starting in 2014, said Chris Stiffler, a senior economist at the liberal-leaning Colorado Fiscal Institute. But it wouldn’t help the general fund, because the federal government covers 90% of the cost, and the state’s share comes from a fee paid by hospitals, he said. 

Theoretically, the state could cut eligibility for groups other than the expansion population, yielding some general fund savings, Stiffler said. But that move would be unpopular and result in an increase in uncompensated care for hospitals and other providers.

Cutting provider rates also comes with drawbacks.

The state already is facing settlements under which it has to increase access to behavioral health care for high-need youth and to home- and community-based services for people looking to leave nursing homes, said Pray, with the Colorado Center on Law and Policy. If providers think Medicaid rates are too low and drop out, she said, Colorado would have an even harder time complying.

But with so few options — and a reluctance to limit services — lawmakers did turn to the cutting of provider rates. House Speaker Julie McCluskie, a Democrat and former member of the budget committee, defended it as a necessary move and one that comes as the state has sought to increase those rates in recent years.

When states faced a federal Medicaid funding cliff following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, they almost uniformly to people with disabilities, increasing their waiting lists, said Shea Tanis, an associate research professor at University of Kansas’ Center on Disabilities.

Under the original law creating Medicaid, states didn’t have to provide home- and community-based services, though they had to cover care in institutions, such as nursing homes. People who receive home-based services “waive” their right to nursing-home care at the time, though they may enter institutions later.

Legally, home- and community-based services are optional, but in practical terms, families have to fill the gap because no alternatives exist, Tanis said.

The disability care system is already inadequate nationwide, with some families relying on Medicaid payments to keep themselves and their loved ones housed because they can’t work while providing care, Tanis said. Others are scraping by without any public support because the documentation is too onerous, she said.

“There’s a line where you cut something so much that it cannot be effective,” she said.

‘Poorest, most marginalized’ face cuts

Family caregivers say the state is singling them out to try to balance the budget.

The budget committee balked at many of the changes the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, or HCPF, suggested. But it could still lower the daily rate families receive to care for their relatives with severe disabilities and require people with developmental disabilities to give up a portion of their Social Security Disability income, said Deana Cairo, the president of Colorado Advocates for Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

While no Medicaid cut is ideal, Cairo said she’d rather see the state reduce provider rates, spreading the pain rather than concentrating it among people with disabilities who require around-the-clock care.

“These are the very poorest, most marginalized people, who are going to be cut again and again,” she said at a rally near the Capitol on March 25.

Kathy Kennedy-Tuckfeld, a Littleton mother, said her 29-year-old son, Jake, can never be at home alone because he can’t perform basic tasks like feeding himself or make accurate judgments about what could be dangerous.

Family caregivers are the only viable option for adults who can’t care for themselves, she said.

Medicaid officials “didn’t start with those with the least need. They started with those with the greatest need,” she said.

A different group of advocates, including the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition and the Colorado Developmental Disabilities Council, released a saying that they could accept most of the likely Medicaid cuts to prevent even deeper losses in the future. But they said reduced rates paid to families caring for a loved one at home must be phased in gradually, to prevent sudden financial hardship.

Bonnie Silva, the director of HCPF’s Office of Community Living, said the focus on disability services reflects unsustainable growth in that spending, mostly driven by an increase in the number of services each enrollee receives. The cost of the developmental disability waiver more than doubled from the 2018-19 fiscal year to 2024, when it reached $894 million.

The department projected the waiver’s cost would exceed $1 billion in the budget year starting in July.

The COVID-19 pandemic “opened the door” for Medicaid to pay family caregivers for more services, given the shortage of health care workers and concerns that they could carry the virus to medically fragile clinics, said Tanis, at the University of Kansas. Not all states pay parents for care for their children, but of those that do, Colorado isn’t one of the most permissive, she said.

A consulting group the state hired to assess its Medicaid spending also raised concerns that staffing agencies could be coaching families in order to maximize their state payments, from which the agencies receive a cut, even if the person paid to provide the care is a family member. That could result in caregivers getting paid for services that exceed enrollees’ needs or that overlap with a parent����ap usual role, such as paid homemaking time, Manatt Health managing director Kevin McAvey said.

Silva defined proposed changes that would limit the hours and services caregivers can bill for as “guardrails” to make sure people with unusually high expenses actually needed the level of services they received, rather than cuts. The goal is to blunt the trend of increasing costs before care to people with disabilities becomes unsustainable and the state can no longer pay family caregivers, she said.

“For that to continue, we have to make sure we have the right policies in place. If we don’t, next year, I’m going to be coming back here with really deep and painful cuts that will impact eligibility,” she said.

Kirkmeyer, from the Joint Budget Committee, described the plan to limit spending on disability services as part of a pattern.

“For years, it was about balancing the budget on the backs of students,” Kirkmeyer said, referring to the state’s shortchanging of education. “… Then in the special session, we’re … balancing it on businesses and individuals by increasing taxes. And now it’s like, ‘Let’s just balance the budget on the backs of those that are the most vulnerable and medically fragile in our state.’ “

More difficult choices to come

After lawmakers finish sorting out the new budget, Colorado will likely continue to face difficult budget years.

Under the 2025 federal tax bill, states will have to pay more toward the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Starting in 2027, they also won’t be able to collect as much in fees from hospitals and other providers, which they use to draw federal matching funds, according to a .

Another federal provision, an increase in the share states must pay for SNAP and Medicaid if their eligibility decision error rates are too high, could make the budget situation even worse in the coming years, Pray said.

Compounding those pressures, the cost of health care continues to rise — and may increase even more sharply in the next few years, since parts of that sector rely on immigrants and the migration rate has slowed, said Park, with Georgetown University.

No one is sure what will happen in the broader economy, he said, but if it were to hit a downturn, people who lost their jobs would newly qualify for Medicaid, requiring states to spend even more.

“All those things mean greater fiscal pressures on the state budget,” Park said.

Members of the budget committee shares the concerns that next year’s budget will mean another round of deep cuts. The committee was able to cut the Medicaid growth rate overall with its proposed cuts this year, but not enough to get it below the growth allowed by TABOR. Meaning: it will be up to next year’s budget committee to make more changes, including cuts, to the program to bring it in line with the growth cap.

Unless voters decide on a course change, that is.

Two proposed ballot measures, one from the legislature and one being led by the progressive Bell Policy Center, seek to remake how Colorado’s tax system works. The legislative proposal would remove education spending from the state spending cap’s formula. The Bell Policy Center’s proposal would tax higher-income Coloradans at a higher rate than the rest of workers.

Either measure, or both, would force a fundamental shift in Colorado’s budgeting by allowing the state to keep more of the tax money it collects, versus refunding whatever is collected over the TABOR cap.

“There’s some structural things we need to address if we’re really going to get at this budget thing,” said Amabile, a committee member. “… I think Coloradans expect, when they pay their taxes, that that money is actually going to get spent on things that benefit Coloradans.”

 is disingenuous and is not a serious education plan. It is a backdoor attack on TABOR dressed up in the language of helping kids.

Without raising taxes, I have spent six years fighting to increase education funding by more than $1.3 billion. Governing the right way by setting priorities, making hard choices, and funding schools without breaking faith with taxpayers.

Now compare my success with the Democrats’ plan in SB 135. SB 135 asks voters to get rid of their TABOR refund forever in order to grow state spending by up to $5 billion annually. While possibly giving a paltry $200 million a year for 10 years to education.

Over the last ten years, this scheme would have brought in only about $1.4 billion for education. At the same time, it would have allowed the state to spend roughly $8.2 billion out of your pocket in TABOR refund dollars without ever asking voters for permission. Democrats’ deal on the table: give the government a blank check, wipe out taxpayer refunds, and in return get an amount for education that barely exceeds what we already secured through discipline and priorities. A terrible trade for Colorado families.

And let����ap be honest about what they are really taking. When refunds required by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) hit $750 and $800, people felt it. For many households, they got back as much as $1,600 in the family budget. That is not extra money lying around. That is the grocery bill for the month, new tires, a couple of car payments, back-to-school clothes, help with the property tax bill, or just enough breathing room to catch up when everything keeps getting more expensive.

TABOR exists for a reason. It protects taxpayers from a government that will always find a new excuse to take more. It forces the legislature to live within its means, just like every family in this state has to do. SB-135 blows a hole through that protection. Once the state is allowed to keep and spend the revenue from your TABOR refund, taxpayers do not get that money back. It is gone. And history tells us that when politicians get a new stream of money, they never give it up.

The biggest insult is that supporters want to pretend this is  “for the kids” when the record says otherwise. If the legislature truly wanted to prioritize schools, it could. The money has been there. The problem is not TABOR. The problem is that too many politicians under the dome would rather fund their pet project first, then run to voters claiming schools are underfunded. They created this problem with their lack of priorities. And now they want taxpayers to bail them out.

And the consequences go far beyond refunds. Once TABOR is gutted, every other promise built on the state budget gets thrown into uncertainty. That includes the homestead exemption. If the state intends to keep funding protections like that, where is the guarantee? Where is the money? Once you open the door to unlimited retention and spending, nothing is truly protected. Everything becomes subject to whatever deal gets cut at the Capitol next year.

Colorado voters should not fall for this bait-and-switch. We can fund education without a tax increase. We have already done it. What SB-135 offers is not reform. It is surrender: surrender of TABOR, surrender of taxpayer refunds, and surrender of any confidence that the state will keep its word when it comes to protections like the homestead exemption.

This is not about the children. It is about control. It is about whether hardworking Coloradans keep more of what they earn, or whether politicians in Denver get a permanent blank check. Colorado has already shown there is a better way. We should reject SB-135 and keep fighting for schools without selling out taxpayers.

State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer represents Senate District 23 in Weld and Larimer counties. She is running for governor in 2026.

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Lawmakers walked into Thursday’s key economic forecasts pessimistic about what the reports would tell them about the state budget. They walked out of it with one forecast warning they now needed to close a $1.5 billion deficit in the next week or so, an increase over the $1 billion prediction from just a few days earlier. That does not account for some cuts the committee has proposed but not yet finalized.

“We’re doing our best to minimize harm, but the truth is it����ap impossible to cut hundreds of millions of dollars year after year without impacting the priorities that Coloradans care about and core services for vulnerable people,” Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat on the Joint Budget Committee, said in a statement.

The economic forecasts released Thursday, one from and the other from , are key documents for the Joint Budget Committee as it finalizes the state’s spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year. The forecasts give the committee the dollar figure it must budget to, with the legislators deciding which one to go with. These forecasts have massive divides on how much money the economists expect the state will pull in this current fiscal year and in the upcoming fiscal year.

Both forecasts agree that state revenue remains below the cap set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights this fiscal year, which began in July and ends June 30. But the depth of the hole is an open question. The governor’s economists predict state revenue to fall $229 million below the cap; the legislative economists predict it is $914 million.

They both expect a rebound in the upcoming fiscal year, with state revenue exceeding the cap set by TABOR. The governor’s team expects a $711 million surplus. The legislative economists have it at $276 million. The forecasters noted large amounts of uncertainty from the still-evolving effects of the massive tax package that Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed last summer, particularly its effect on tax collections.

The legislative forecast, which is the only one to account for the committee’s current actions, established the $1.5 billion deficit. The governor’s forecast doesn’t include an estimated budget deficit.

The legislative economists predict the state will have an $18.2 billion general fund next year, while the governor’s office expects an $18.4 billion general fund budget.

“The good news is you’ll know who was right in the June forecast,” Greg Sobetski, chief economists for the legislature, told the budget committee Thursday. “The bad news is you have to write the budget right now.”

The budget deficit comes from the state grappling with rocketing increases in must-spend areas — chiefly Medicaid — eating up an ever larger chunk of the general fund. Lawmakers have expanded the program over the years, seeking to cover more people and give them more robust coverage, while the costs of medical services overall have also outpaced the spending cap formula set by TABOR.

The Joint Budget Committee has been wrestling with where to pare those expansions back, and it has been toiling for months to find some $1 billion in savings.

The forecasts set the stage for the committee’s final push to finalize its budget proposal. The spending plan should be introduced in late March or early April. The budget and its related bills will then go to the full House of Representatives for consideration before repeating the process in the Senate.

Earlier in the day, Speaker Julie McCluskie called the budget forecasts “the most critical moment in the finalizing of our annual budget.”

‘We’ve got some very hefty decisions ahead,” McCluskie, a Democrat, said, listing state priorities in Medicaid, education and human services — all expensive pieces of the budget, and all likely to be trimmed down. “We’re in a very, very tough budget moment.”

The committee will now pick which forecast to budget to for the upcoming fiscal year. And already, members are openly mulling the merits of taking the more pessimistic estimates, and cutting programs unnecessarily, or being too optimistic and digging future legislatures into an even deeper hole.

“If we are balancing to a number that is too low, then we are hurting Coloradans in that we are cutting programs that help people that do not need to be cut,” said Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat on the committee.

“But if you balance to the high number, and it’s wrong, it would just exacerbate the structural deficit,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican on the committee.

A surprise push for more prisons

Earlier in the week, Mark Ferrandino, head of the governor’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting, threw another costly request at the budget committee: to consider spending another $150 million to $200 million on another prison.

A drop in early releases for parole and a steady uptick of new prisoners led analysts in December to predict the state would see next fiscal year one of its largest annual increases in the prison population in the past 15 years. Colorado can house 15,077 men across state and privately run prisons. The male population averaged about 15,006 people in November — and was expected to jump to 16,200 in the next fiscal year, and 16,600 the year after.

“Eventually it gets to a breaking point where there’s not capacity, or not a willingness to house the offenders at the county level,” Ferrandino told the budget committee Wednesday.

He proposed that the legislature work on a swap of marijuana tax money against the state reserves and other budgeting maneuvers to start the process to renovate and open a prison in Huerfano County in southern Colorado, a region that already contains a cluster of prisons.

But the request also came at an odd time. Lawmakers are already working to close the budget, and Ferrandino’s request came after new spending requests are typically made.

“No one wanted to be in this conversation,” Ferrandino said, but the new projections spurred the request.

Adding another wrinkle to the request, the Joint Budget Committee had earlier in the year denied a funding request for more prison beds to protest what members characterized as a lack of a plan from the governor’s office to lower the overall prison population. Members have since said they are making progress with the governor’s team on that, along with lingering concerns about what overcrowding means for employee and inmate safety.

Amabile, a Democrat on the committee, immediately criticized the request. She said she’d rather pay for ways to get more people out of prison, such as nursing homes for elderly and ill inmates, and transitional housing. She said there are hundreds of inmates right now who qualify for release, but haven’t been because there’s nowhere for them to go.

“I feel like it would be an obscene misuse of public funds to buy and build out a prison when we have hundreds of people waiting in our jails to get to a hospital, people who are criminal justice involved, when we have families that are relying on Medicaid, who we are cutting their services,” Amabile said. “We have, in (the Department of Corrections) right now, hundreds of people who… have been approved by parole to be released but, because we haven’t been able to find them a place to go or because we haven’t delivered the treatment that they need, they are just sitting in prison.”