Senate Dems vote to erase state's 30-year-old spending limits--citing children in wheelchairs

Ruling Senate Democrats put their official stamp today on a measure that blows away the decades-old spending cap on the state's operating budget and siphons off billions of dollars in future highway funding that Republicans say will now be used to grow government.

The controversial proposal's sponsor, Democrat Sen. John Morse of Colorado Springs, came out swinging prior to the Senate's final vote on Senate Bill 228, accusing the GOP of insensitivity to the need for social programs that he hopes to fund through the "flexibility" lawmakers would be granted under the bill.

The charge drew a furious response from Republicans, who denounced it as an attempt to play politics and divert public and business-community attention from the fact that the bill will cost the state's overburdened transportation system dearly--and is fiscally reckless in general.

"I'm sure (former Democrat Gov.) Roy Romer will be surprised to learn he doesn't care about kids in wheelchairs," shot back Senate GOP leader Josh Penry.

"Sen. Morse, give me a break. If governors named Lamm, Romer and Owens could live with a 6 or 7 percent spending limit in place, why in the world can't (Democrat Gov.) Bill Ritter and this legislature do the same in 2009?" said Penry, of Grand Junction

The GOP's Sen. Bill Cadman, of Colorado Springs, drove the point home, contending it was Democrats who have failed to set spending priorities that match the expectations of most taxpayers.

"Transportation gets shortchanged going back 10, 20, 30 years," Cadman said.

He also raised a point his party has pressed repeatedly--that the spending limit is actually part of the state constitution and cannot be repealed without a statewide vote of the people. Cadman said Morse and his fellow Democrats are flirting with a potential lawsuit by irate taxpayers.

"Spending money to defend another lawsuit is not a risk we should take," he said. "It's pretty painless to play poker when you're using someone else's hand."

Sen. Keith King, a Colorado Springs Republican, echoed the sentiment, noting that ruling Democrats just weathered another taxpayer lawsuit against a property-tax hike they pushed through the legislature two years ago.

"Here we go. We're going to start the process to go back to court," King said.

Alongside Senate Republicans' full-frontal assault on the bill, business and community leaders from across the state have been issuing statements denouncing the measure--principally because of the hundreds of millions of dollars a year in would cost the state's highway system beginning in just a few years.

Highlands Ranch Republican Sen. Ted Harvey read the litany of business and civic groups that have come out against the measure, punctuating the list with the observation, "Is there anybody in the state who is not against Senate Bill 228?"

The hit that highways will take prompted Broomfield Republican Sen. Shawn Mitchell to note that Ritter administration transportation chief Russell George has been silent on the subject.

"Bill Ritter's supposedly against the death penalty," Mitchell, an attorney, said. "But I'd like to know where he buried Russ Goerge's body because I haven't heard his view of how these cuts will hurt our roads and bridges."

The bill would end a long-standing policy that caps the growth of the state's operating budget at 6 percent a year. The legislation would amount to a dramatic shift--shorting highways untold billions of dollars in the years to come--because of a formula that directs all revenue in excess of the cap to transportation and other critical capital projects. Without the cap, the highway-funding formula is moot.

A recent analysis by the nonpartisan office of Legislative Council shows that if the 6-percent limit and the highway-funding formula had been eliminated just five years ago, it would have cost Colorado's highways some $1.6 billion by now.

New numbers released by nonpartisan legislative staff show 228 would cost the state's highways hundreds of millions of dollars a year beginning in just a few years. As soon as the 2011-12 budget year, doing away with the cap would short transportation by well over $300 million, the figures from the Legislative Council office show.

Republicans, led by Penry, also attempted unsucessfully to amend the bill to create a "rainy-day fund" that could be used to help the state out of such fiscal straits in the future. However, GOP members pointed out that the current spending limit not only has served transportation well in good times but also has kept the state's overall budget on the straight and narrow.

"The fiscal guardrails we have put in place have worked," the GOP's Sen. Kevin Lundberg, of Berthoud, told members just before the vote.