Extraordinary. I have no other word to convey the sheer magnitude of the revenue shortfall we faced. The immensity. The expanse. The enormity.
The Joint Budget Committee, of which I am a member, closed out the budget on Friday and will present the "Long Bill" to our colleagues next week for their debate, amendments, and ultimately, approval.
Members of the Joint Budget Committee
(left to right): Rep. McCluskie, Sen. Zenzinger, Sen. Moreno, Rep. Esgar, Sen. Rankin, Rep. Ransom, and JBC Director Kampman (foreground)
I'm not "proud" of this budget. If I were a teacher, senior, disabled person, veteran, farmer, patient, retiree, prison guard, filmmaker, entrepreneur, prosecutor, environmentalist, construction worker, or student, I'd find plenty of dissatisfaction in this budget. No one group was left untouched by the cuts we recommended.
As a budget writer, it's my responsibility to dig into the numbers and understand the full context of each and every line item. We examined the options, weighed their collective benefit, and then determined if our community could handle the changes. I acknowledge this budget contains a series of regrettable choices. However, I believe the six members of the JBC--Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate members, rural and urban legislators--did the very best we could under tough circumstances.
The Colorado Constitution prohibits legislators from raising taxes, borrowing funds, or running a deficit. We can only spend exactly what we have. As a result, for this year's budget in particular, we must make choices. While those choices may be difficult, painful, or even tearful--we cannot "choose" to shirk our responsibility. We must produce a balanced budget.
As a JBC member, I do not have the luxury of debating the "why's" or "how's" we came to face a an unprecedented $3.3 billion hole. It's simply a fact that our three largest sources of state revenue have collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of people are out of work and they have no income on which to pay taxes. Oil and gas prices plummeted to below zero. Our tourism industry has come to a standstill. Simultaneously, the caseload for unemployment and safety net services has gone through the roof. We have never seen a fiscal emergency of this magnitude in our state's history.
The JBC rewrote the budget in three weeks--a process that usually takes five months. We undid every increase, reduced appropriations, voted to introduce bills that reduce appropriations, approved transfers to increase available general fund revenue, utilized the reserve, and took other actions to address the shortfall. These reductions were on top of the funding required for population and inflation-driven increases in Medicaid, K12 Education, Higher Education, Corrections, Judicial, and Human Services--all of which drove up our mandated costs.
The budget is not final. We budget to current law, and therefore to balance we are counting on a number of bills running alongside the budget to pass. We will begin debating the budget next week, and I'm eager to hear my colleagues' ideas on how to make it better. One chamber may disagree with the other chamber on details, and those differences must be hammered out before sending the budget to the Governor for his approval.
Extraordinary, exceptional, astonishing, astounding, stunning, unbelievable, striking, momentous, memorable, unforgettable, unique, out of the ordinary, unusual, uncommon, surprising, unreal--all words that could describe the process and product of this year's state budget, and none of it in a good way.
But, it is what it is, and we now move on to the next step in process.
Rachel Zenzinger
Rachel Zenzinger won election to the Colorado State Senate, representing District 19, in November 2016. She also served as Senator for SD19 in 2014. Sen. Zenzinger is a member of the Joint Budget Committee, the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Vice Chair of the Statutory Revision Committee.
Our last budget motion
When the JBC began balancing the budget this year, we knew the anticipated cuts would have a huge negative effect on K-12 education in particular. This is due in large part to the cumulative effect of under-funding education over the years. Therefore, we sought to minimize the budget cuts to K-12 as best we could.
Unfortunately, K-12 education represents the largest share of our General Fund, so we knew that we couldn't get away with zero cuts to education. Nevertheless, we worked toward closing the $3.3 billion gap with our K-12 goal in mind. We narrowed the gap through weeks of motions on decision items that spanned every sector of the budget, until we were out of options.
Our final motion to the budget was the amount of funding we recommended setting aside for K-12: $3,965,881,419. This represents a $724 million reduction to education. However, $147 million will come through separate legislation that reduces our General Fund obligations, resulting in a $577 million reduction to school finance (also known as per pupil funding). This represents a 6.8% reduction compared to FY 2019-20.
However, after you account for the $510 million of federal CARES Act money that was set aside for schools by Gov. Polis, K-12 funding goes up by +4.7% compared to FY 2019-20, resulting in a $67 million reduction. Then, after you factor in another $37 million Gov. Polis set aside for at-risk students, we are left with a $30 million reduction to education, which could conceivably be put toward the BS Factor.
We set out to minimize the impact to schools, and we came pretty close. This didn't happen, however, without significant cuts to other areas of our budget, including major reductions to higher education. Regardless, when you consider the fact we were facing a 25% reduction in General Fund revenues, we think we did the very best we could have done in protecting K-12 education.
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