The budget is signed, but that doesn’t mean fighting over revenue has ended in the Legislature.

During a budget singing in Gov. John Hickenlooper’s office Tuesday, Senate Pres. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, and Speaker of the House Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, D-Gunbarrel, indicated that the potential of a hospital provider fee reclassification and a transportation bond bill passing were slim to none.

A long awaited Trans Bond bill, SB 210, dropped in the Senate Monday and was assigned to the Senate Finance Committee. Legisltion to switch the hospital provider fee into an enterprise fund, HB 1420, passed out of the House in April but hasn’t been assigned to a committee in the Senate as of early this week.

Cadman, during the budget signing, tried to avoid questions from the Capitol press corp about the future of the bills in the Senate, saying “There’s a couple hundred bills still out there that are being dealt with right now, and those are two of them.”

Later, after the bill-signing ceremony, Cadman opened up about issues with the provider fee bill and talked about the chance of a deal to be made with the trans bond bill, something Republicans have pushed for all session.

“Even if that were done, that’s still complete speculation from what that revenue would be. Period. This year it was anticipated to be $100 million, and it wasn’t. Next year, who knows what it will be … although now there’s estimates that swing widely by tens of million of dollars. Nobody can count on what next year’s revenues will be so to tie the solution to speculation is probably not prudent,” Cadman said. “The question was how much solution it provided if you pass (the hospital provider fee bill). Nobody can even answer that if it did pass.”

When asked about the trans bond bill, Hullinghorst sounded like she would oppose it based on a lack of a dedicated revenue stream.

“I think that the one major concern with that bill. … is that we don’t have a funding source that’s reliable for that and at a time where we’re just stretching as best we can to make sure we fund programs in the state of Colorado that are important priorities to everybody,” Hullinghorst said during the press conference. “The only way you can have that stationary funding source to pay off bonds would probably be to go into the general fund additionally if you don’t have a good funding source, and that just means you take it out of K-12 education. It’s our biggest bucket. And it’s not my goal to leave K-12 education funding in any more jeopardy than it is already. And I think that’s exactly what it does if you don’t have funding source.”

Cadman, in his comments to the media after the press conference, disagreed with Hullinghorst that education would suffer if a transportation bond bill passed.

“To say it can only come from K-12 is not completely accurate when you got an entire budget out there, which a part is K-12 but a massive part is HCPF (Medicaid) with a 350-percent growth compared to 20-percent growth of everything else,” Cadman said. “Nobody ever said, ‘Oh, how are we going to pay for this down the road?’ They passed it knowing there was no funding source.”

Hickenlooper, for his part, toed the line between the two issues and said he wanted to work with the Legislature on bonding and pointed to the hospital provider fee as a possible revenue source to back up that bonding.

“The challenges with transportation is we need a predictable large sum (of funding). My goal ultimately is to work with the General Assembly to get some sort of bonding done that allows us to take on some of the real challenging infrastructure issues that we face in the state,” Hickenlooper said. “At some point we’ll figure out, hopefully it’s in the near future, whether it’s the hospital provider fee or new revenue from another source, some way of getting a significant new source of revenue. … to address the infrastructure needs.”

— Ramsey@coloradostatesman.com