The political tension around the state budget that has flared intermittently this legislative session will grow hot and steady at the end of March.

House Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they plan in March to team debate on the budget “long bill” with a push to to avoid more than $350 million in cuts by recasting the state’s hospital provider fee as an enterprise fund. The move would strip out money collected through the hospital fee from the general fund to, in effect, raise state constitutional spending limits imposed by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

Republicans oppose the plan as an accounting trick that undercuts the constitution and a temporary solution to the “spending problem” the state has experienced under Democratic governance.

They voted against a similar proposal last year and this year have clashed with dueling legal opinions over the constitutionality of the the proposal.

At a news conference Tuesday, House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, D-Gunbarrel, and House Majority Leader Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, touted bipartisan legal opinions released last week that argued the plan was constitutional.

The opinion was written by Jon Anderson, former counsel to Republican Gov. Bill Owens, and Trey Rogers, former counsel to Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter, for Fix the Glitch, an organization of businesses and education groups advocating for the plan. The legal argument was endorsed by former Attorney General John Suthers, now mayor of Colorado Springs.

But Senate President Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, was not moved. He has been an adamant opponent of the plan, and he told reporters that the opinion was less reliable than one he has embraced, written by a nonpartisan staffer in the Capitol’s Office of Legislative Legal Services.

“The opinion we looked at I’d call objective,” he said. “The opinion they paid for I’d call subjective. (Those lawyers) were obviously told to negate something.”

Rogers and Anderson wrote that the Office of Legislative Legal Services memo “was likely a helpful primer for the legislators who requested it, but it did not provide an in-depth analysis of how our courts would resolve a constitutional challenge to a provider fee enterprise created by the legislature, nor does it appear to have been intended to do so.”

Hullinghorst and Duran said the knock against Rogers and Anderson as paid mouthpieces was unfair. The Democratic leaders pointed to the opinion of Suthers as another example of bipartisan legal support for hospital fee plan.

“I think that’s sort of an unfortunate hit on a couple of highly respected attorneys in this state who are paid to write opinions all the time, as most lawyers are,” Hullinghorst said. “I think it is quite amazing that a counsel for Gov. Owens, who is a strong, conservative Republican, and a counsel for Gov. Ritter, who is a very strong Democrat — probably you could call him a liberal Democrat — have come up with the same opinion. To accuse them of coming up with an opinion just because they’re paid for it, I think is a pretty usual charge. Attorneys are paid for their hours all the time.”

Duran said the back-and-forths about the plan are clouding the fact that state residents are demanding leadership on the issue.

“It seems like there’s a lot of tap dancing going around in regard to this issue,” she said. “We have a responsibility to lead and if we do not lead on this issue, the budget, as the speaker said, will be a mess.”

With reporting by Kara Mason.

The original version of this article reported that Democrats planned to unveil their hospital provider fee proposal in a formal way in March, but, for now, the hospital fee plan remains informal.

— ramsey@coloradostatesman.com