Tag: Tabor
Morse’s ‘6 percent solution’ budget bill clears first hurdle
On Wednesday, the Colorado Senate Finance Committee approved Senate Bill 228 — legislation that seeks to provide greater flexibility to lawmakers in deciding where to spend the state's shrinking revenues.
Sponsored by Democratic Sen. John Morse, the bill would eliminate the so-called Arveschoug-Bird provision, which restricts the state's General Fund to 6 percent growth per year and allocates any surplus specifically to transportation and construction projects. Morse's bill and the problem it seeks to address are tongue-twisting and arcane, yet the small corner room of the Capitol where the hearing took place was filled with laptop jockeys, community leaders, a webcast crew and a buzz that hung in the air when it became clear that SB228 was going to clear its first public hurdle.
Marostica set to weather Republican storm over budget legislation
Even in these catastrophic economic times, it's difficult to imagine the kind of fresh politics it would take to successfully loosen the corseted Colorado budget.
Yet that's what we were treated to Thursday in Denver.
Tax protester slips stealth comments into Jeffco ballot measure booklet
An opponent of a school district mill levy increase slipped sarcastic arguments about retraining senior citizens to live in more "modest accommodations" and "progress toward the Socialist utopia" into an election notice sent by the Jefferson County clerk to every household in the county this week.
UPDATE: The author of the ballot book comments responds and TABOR expert Wade Buchanan weighs in.
‘O’ say can this save Colorado’s constitutional mayhem?
Of all the items on Colorado's leviathan ballot this year, Referendum O is the only one that seeks to save the state's voters from contending with similarly massive ballots in the future.
Schools asking for stop-gap funds, not improvements
Colorado voters will be asked to approve almost $2.5 billion in school bonds and mill levies this fall to shore up crumbling infrastructure, address safety issues posed by aging school buildings and cover the increasing costs of educating the state’s more than 800,000 students.
Colorado’s monster ballot longest in the nation
With a record 18 proposals on everything from oil and gas taxes to unions to the developmentally disabled to gambling, Colorado voters will be weighing in on the longest ballot in Colorado since 1912 — and the largest in the United States this year.
On the ballot: Romanoff’s SAFE reroutes TABOR money to education
The battle to undo one of Colorado’s most famous and controversial citizen-led constitutional amendments — 1992's Taxpayer Bill of Rights — is underway and it’s gaining bipartisan support. Known as the “Savings Account for Education,” or SAFE, the ballot initiative would do away with tax refunds created under TABOR and instead reroute the money toward public education.
Romanoff Gathers Support to Gut TABOR, Change School Funding
Gov. Bill Ritter threw his support today behind a proposed ballot question to change two financial mandates in the Colorado Constitution - the Taxpayer's...
Bruce Kicks Himself Out of Legislative Clout
I was wrong.
Colorado Rep. Doug Bruce's apparent inability to utter those three words after kicking a newspaper photographer could cost him most of his...
TABOR Still Haunts the State
Nothing has been scarier than working under the TABOR Amendment to meet the needs for human services, funding state highway improvements and subsidizing higher...