The chairman of the powerful Joint Budget Committee has acknowledged on the record that a sweeping statewide property-tax hike pushed through last year by his fellow Democrats will subsidize new social programs--not just schools, as originally promised.

Democrat Bernie Buescher, of Grand Junction, said in a JBC meeting this week that some of the millions raised by the controversial tax hike will be used on Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter's "Building Blocks" program expanding low-income health care coverage.

Buescher was responding to a challenge moments earlier from Republican Rep. Al White, the House GOP's member on the committee, who had expressed frustration that

the new tax revenue was being diverted from statewide education funding. White was the only Republican to support the tax hike, which Ritter and his legislative allies call a "mill-levy freeze." It will cost taxpayers $3.8 billion over the next 10 years. 

"I personally did not vote for the mill-levy freeze for that purpose--to be able to free up $25 million for new programs," White, of Hayden, told fellow committee members.

Other legislative Republicans said they were dismayed but not surprised.

"This is turning into more and more of a shell game," said Senate GOP chief Andy McElhany, of Colorado Springs.

"The ultimate victims are the taxpayers in local school districts across Colorado who were led to believe the increase in their tax bills somehow would benefit their kids' public education," McElhany said. "Some of us knew all along that this money could wind up anywhere once it was sucked into the black hole of the state budget."

Sen. Steve Johnson, the Senate GOP's representative on the budget-writing committee, agreed. 

"It was bad enough that the money never was intended to benefit local schools, and it was worse still that the public didn't get to vote on the issue," the Fort Collins lawmaker said. "Now, the Democrats are admitting they are going to use the money on whatever they want, even programs that have nothing to do with education." 

The Democrat measure freezes the property mill levy in almost all school districts statewide. That has resulted in rising tax bills for home and business owners in most school districts as property values rise.

The Ritter administration and Democrat legislative leaders originally pitched the tax hike to the 2007 legislature as a boon to public education. The administration and leading legislative Democrats had told lawmakers that the proceeds from the massive tax hike would be used for things like expanding full-day kindergarten and shoring up the State Education Fund. That continued to be the administration's theme throughout much of last year.

"The governor's plan averted a crisis and will keep the education fund from going broke in a few short years," Ritter's spokesman, Evan Dreyer, told the Rocky Mountain News as recently as last fall.

Buescher's remarks earlier this week to the JBC suggested a big policy shift.

"Part of the dollars that would be used here are the result of the mill-levy freeze. I don't think there's any doubt of that," he said. 

Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, of Yuma, said he found Buescher's words "remarkable." 

"Nobody has ever explicitly admitted the money raised by the tax hike will foot the bill for unrelated programs," Gardner said. "Nobody until now."

Despite an opinion from Attorney General John Suthers that said the tax hike should be submitted to voters on the statewide ballot to comply with the state's constitution, the hike's proponents had claimed they did not need to go that route because voters in the affected local school districts had previously approved mill-levy changes--underscoring again that the extra revenue from the tax hike would be used on education.

The Democrats' failure to send the issue to the ballot has since resulted in a lawsuit by citizens seeking to enforce the constitutional Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, which requires a popular vote on all tax-policy changes. That lawsuit is pending. Also pending is legislation by Republican Sen. Mike Kopp, of Littleton, and Gardner, referring the whole matter back to voters. 

In January, an economic forecast released by the legislature's nonpartisan research staff revealed that the tax hike would cost the public more than double the original projection of $1.7 billion over the next 10 years.