Thanks to sensible budget restraints enacted by both political parties over the years, Colorado has been spared the binge-and-purge budget calamities that have made national headlines in places like New York and California of late. You know the routine: big budget increases during good economic times, followed by a budget free fall and fiscal crisis when the economy and government revenue turn south.
Budget times have been tough in Colorado, to be sure, but nothing like in those states. Regrettably, that is about to change.
Gov. Bill Ritter's decision last week to sign a bill that blows away a long-standing cap on growth of Colorado's operating budget is an open invitation to rapid growth in the state's operating budget. It also paves the way for the Legislature to divert vital funding away from highways, spending those infrastructure dollars instead on more and expanded programs.
You read that right: in the same year the governor signed a $250 million hike in car taxes as a means of increasing funding for roads and bridges, he also signed what amounts to the largest cut to transportation funding in the history of Colorado. Hiking fees to fund roads and bridges while jerking existing funding from those same transportation systems is disingenuous - especially during a recession.
Still, the governor and Democratic legislative leaders did just that. In making their case, they would have us believe that spending limits are unreasonable, indefensible, even Neanderthal. One supporter of blowing the budget caps compared support for restrained spending to believing the "earth was flat." Such comments would no doubt come as a surprise to former Democratic Gov. Roy Romer, who gave life to the spending limit with the stroke of his gubernatorial pen, just as it would to former Gov. Bill Owens and the many Republican and Democratic legislatures that found a way to meet the basic needs of government with this limit in place in the many years since.
It's true. For more than 15 years, Colorado's state budget was reined in by a sensible spending cap that limited annual growth in the operating budget to 6 percent. (For more than a decade before that, it was capped at 7 percent.)
Two other related laws required the next several hundred million dollars in government revenue collected above that limit to flow toward funding critical road and bridge needs. These policies not only have shored up key infrastructure, but they also have ensured that our state government doesn't irresponsibly grow permanent programs during periods of go-go economic growth.
The alternative to our more-disciplined approach has been vividly illustrated in the fiscal meltdown of New York and California. Those two states, like a number of others, have a long history of running up their budgets to unsustainable levels when the economy is humming, only to have to raise taxes or borrow money to balance their budgets when the economy and tax receipts decline. Their insatiable appetite for increased government spending, and lack of meaningful caps on government expenditures, have left both the Empire State and the Golden State swimming in red ink. New York faced a shortfall of some $15 billion this year. Cash-strapped California-which took the unprecedented step of sending taxpayers "I.O.U's" in place of tax-refund checks - was grappling with a gap of some $40 billion.
In the wake of this budgetary collapse, the Democratic governor of New York suggested an interesting concept to prevent this budget mess from repeating itself - he called for spending limits.
Leaders in both parties in California have urged the creation of a more meaningful spending limit of their own.
Lay those actions alongside Ritter's last week, and what emerges is a troubling picture: Colorado is actually moving to the left of New York and California on fiscal policy.
In a day and age when trillion-dollar spending bills and blank-check bailouts are becoming the norm at the federal level, Colorado has distinguished itself by demonstrating restraint. Our system isn't perfect and could use some reforms, but it is far preferable to the reckless approach taken on America's West and East Coasts.
The truth is, governors Romer and Owens thought this spending limit made good sense. So did many legislators in both parties that they worked with. But not this Democratic legislature. Not Bill Ritter.
Instead, they've set us on a pathway to bigger budgets, and with it bigger budget crises, too. It's the wrong direction for Colorado's budget. California, here we come.
Penry, of Grand Junction, is Republican leader in the Colorado Senate.