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House gives budget-makers more leeway
Measure will tie state general fund to personal income of all Coloradans
Herald Denver Bureau
Legislature at a glance
Also during Monday’s session of the Colorado General Assembly:
•The community college merger in Southwest Colorado is back on track. The merger of San Juan Basin Technical College and Pueblo Community College is just a vote away.
The House gave its initial approval Monday to Senate Bill 43, which creates Southwest Colorado Community College out of the two institutions.
The bill by Rep. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, now needs just one more House vote to pass the Legislature. It has waited on the calendar for two months as lawmakers worked on the state budget.
•The Senate passed “Katie’s Law.” Senators voted 28-7 for Senate Bill 241, which requires people arrested for a felony to submit a DNA sample.
The bill now goes to the House, where Cortez Republican Scott Tipton is a sponsor.
Opponents fought the bill on constitutional grounds. Sen. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, called it “state-sponsored constitutional terrorism right here in Colorado.”
The sponsor, Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, said the bill is a good trade-off between privacy rights and public safety.
Sen. Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus, voted for SB 241.
– Joe Hanel
The state general fund is limited to 6 percent growth per year. Senate Bill 228 repeals that limit and replaces it with one keyed to the personal income of all Coloradans.
Just last week, the Legislature approved a $7.5 billion general fund. If SB 228 had been in effect, the limit on the general fund would be more than $10 billion.
In reality, though, the budget couldn't grow nearly that big for many years because tax revenues are down, and SB 228 does not raise taxes.
Final House approval for the bill could come as early as today.
Republicans tried unsuccessfully Monday to subvert Gov. Bill Ritter's plan for the bill. Last week, Ritter backed a plan to remove the 6 percent limit and dedicate 2 percent of the state general fund to highways between 2012 and 2017, as long as the economy is good enough.
Rep. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs, wanted to take the money away from transportation and send it to K-12 education. The House initially approved Massey's plan, but later in the day, four Democrats voted the opposite way in a second vote on Massey's idea. It failed 34-29.
A recorded vote on the full bill wasn't taken.
The negotiations brokered by Ritter got Colorado's highway construction industry to back the bill. But without the funding for transportation, the influential group could have pulled its support.
Rep. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, said she tried to get sponsors to accept a different plan that would have kept the 6 percent cap in place except for recession years. Sponsors say the 6 percent cap will keep the state down at recessionary levels even when the rest of the nation recovers. Roberts thought her plan would have addressed that problem.
But sponsors rejected Roberts' idea in behind-the-scenes negotiations, and she never brought it to the full House for a vote.
jhanel@durangoherald.com
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