DENVER – Gov. John Hickenlooper signed next year’s budget for Colorado on Monday, a spending plan that includes more funding for public schools, pay raises for state workers and money to expand mental-health services.
Improving tax receipts allowed state lawmakers to fund areas of the budget they had cut during the recession, including public schools and colleges.
Still, the governor and budget writers have remained cautious, noting that a lot of the revenue growth is driven by one-time money, such as taxes on stock sales. Hickenlooper has also repeatedly noted that state revenue is still about $1 billion lower than 2007 when adjusted for inflation and population growth.
“But we are beginning to come back, and beginning to catch up in a number of places,” Hickenlooper said.
Per-pupil spending at public schools will increase by $172 next year. Currently, per-pupil spending is about $6,500. Colleges are also getting about $31 million more in funding next year.
State employees will also get a pay increase of 2 percent – the first in four years. And lawmakers are using $2.8 million to pay victims of last year’s Lower North Fork Fire, which grew out of a state prescribed burn.
General fund expenditures, which lawmakers control, were expected to be about $8.2 billion next year, compared with $7.6 billion in the current budget year. The state’s total budget, which includes federal money and cash funds, would be about $20.5 billion.
The biggest areas of general fund spending would continue to be K-12 schools, at about $3.1 billion, and the department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which administers Medicaid, at nearly $2.1 billion.
Lawmakers are also paying down $140 million in state debt for police and firefighter pensions, and adding $30 million for water storage projects in rural Colorado.
Tuition decreases for immigrants
DENVER – Immigrant students will pay significantly less in tuition at Colorado colleges under legislation signed by Gov. John Hickenlooper on Monday.
Hundreds cheered as the Democratic governor ratified legislation first proposed a decade ago but regularly rejected.
“Holy smokes, are you guys fired up?” he asked the loud, spirited crowd at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Yeah, I thought so.”
Colorado becomes the fourteenth state to allow immigrants who graduate from state high schools to attend colleges at the tuition rate other in-state students pay, rather than a higher rate paid by out-of-state students.
This month, a similar proposal was signed into law in Oregon. Texas was the first pass such a measure in June 2001.
