It was a tough day to be the new chair of the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee.

Gov. John Hickenlooper and his budget chief Henry Sobanet on Thursday rolled out for the six-member committee a well-worked-over $27 billion plan for the next year that landed with a clang.

It proposed cutting $370 million from state services based on revenue projections for the rest of the fiscal year, despite the Colorado economy’s robust performance and headlines around the country about the tax windfall Colorado is reaping from legalized marijuana.

But weed taxes it turns out, like all taxes in Colorado, don’t necessarily translate into state revenue, due to the “fiscal thicket” of constitutionally mandated tax rebates that has lawmakers often even in good years staring at a bottom line covered in red.

New JBC chair Rep. Millie Hamner, a Democrat from Dillon, didn’t miss a beat. She ran a somehow reeling but also upbeat and spirited meeting.

“This bad news could change,” Hamner later told The Colorado Statesman, which is the same thing people were saying at the hearing. “We still have the December and March forecasts coming in and, hey, they could be better. But, really, I think it’s clear that this will be a challenging budget year.”

There’s something positive about having the numbers and the proposed cuts sitting unadorned on the table for all to see, she said.

“Now we can see the magnitude of the problem, and it’s clear what we have to do,” Hamner said, meaning that it’s at least clear that they have to do something.

Hickenlooper ticked off the top-ticket items on the 2016-2017 budget: education — or, really, the education-budget deficit called the “negative factor” — tax refunds, the depleted state revenue fund and higher Medicaid costs. The four items add up to $830 million, and there’s only $450 million in projected revenue for now.

Rep. Dave Young, D-Greeley, said the plan to put off paying into education was a bad idea.

Hickenlooper turned wry and aphoristic, like a yoga guru over the course of years who has seen the limbs of thousands of students tied into knots.

“The fiscal thicket has many brambles on many branches,” he said.

The response caught a mood at the committee meeting picked up later by Hamner.

Hickenlooper believes that last year lawmakers were presented with at least a partial solution to the fact that Colorado must dole out tax rebates even as the state can’t pay its bills.

Democrats late in the session backed a bill to take the hefty “hospital provider fee” off the books as a tax and classify it instead as an enterprise fund, a move which would lower tax revenue totals and so raise the amount the state could take in before triggering tax refunds mandated by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

“A solution is on the table,” Hamner told The Statesman. “[Reclassifying the provider fee] would mean no tax increases. I think taxpayers would agree that now isn’t the time to be issuing small refunds.”

But she said a new hospital provider fee bill would likely meet the same end as it did last year. The 2015 provider fee bill was passed by the Democratic-controlled House only to be killed by the Republican-controlled Senate.

“Nothing has changed,” she said, “but I’m still hopeful.”

This will be Hamner’s second year on the budget committee, and the committee members are all the same. She said the JBC members work very well together.

“It’s night-and-day from the committee before us,” she said.

In 2013 and 2014, the JBC was the site of heated squabbles and sparring — likened to reality TV fare — between House members Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, and Cheri Gerou, R-Evergreen. Gerou called Duran a bully and said she lacked a sense of humor. Duran countered that Gerou kept things personal and avoided substantive arguments. She also threatened Gerou with an ethics complaint but later said she had been joking.

This budget committee is nothing like that, says Hamner.

“There are times we can’t agree, of course, but last year there were times when someone always came over to the other side and moved the discussion. Most of our votes were unanimous, 6-0. We find compromise on the issues.”

She plans to tap longtime budget committee members like Sens. Pat Steadman, D-Denver and Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, to help find solutions, but added that she doesn’t see any of the typical splashy ideological battles — standoffs in recent years on immigrant driver’s licenses, guns and abortion, for example — clogging up work on committee.

Steadman said the JBC is never completely separate from the larger politics of the Legislature and that choices to balance the budget this year are limited, so he hopes members don’t feel backed into a corner.

“Eyes are always on the committee. I think some members will feel certain interests weighing on them. That’s part of it. The stakes will be high because the choices are bad.”

But Steadman also said Hickenlooper has been much more proactive this year talking about the perennial budget problems that face the state — the “fiscal thicket” — and that may make a difference.

“The governor has been outspoken, and you can see something shifting. Editorial boards around the state have endorsed the provider-fee change. So has the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and Club 20 on the Western Slope,” he said. “There’s more activism, and it’s only November. That’s refreshing compared to years past.”

Hamner said she will look to “find policy interests the committee members care about and work out from there.”

“There’s interest on both sides of the aisle to pay more to our schools and to make sure our rural communities are getting their fair share,” she said.

Interests of some of the members flashed like neon during the budget rollout hearing.

Steadman talked about cannabis taxes. “Why should we use the marijuana sin tax to fund treatment for sins that have nothing to do with Marijuana?” he asked.

Rep. Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, said the governor’s proposal to “sweep $3.8 million in severance tax to the general fund” disproportionately hurts rural Colorado, which needs better transportation and broadband and more primary care physicians.

“We all share interests,” said Hamner. “As I say, I’m hopeful.”

— john.tomasic@gmail.com