Some have argued this was a do-nothing legislative session. While some of the bigger, flashier items did not get through both chambers, with less fanfare, we did in fact achieve a great deal.

Our bipartisan workforce development package included a paradigm-shifting program to get industries more involved in classroom education, a program to incentivize school districts to produce high school grads with workplace-specific certifications or training, and an extension of the ReHire Colorado training program for the chronically unemployed or underemployed. And we passed two important bills addressing the shortage of affordable housing in Colorado.

The Colorado Water Plan took 10 years to put together. This year, we began to implement it with four bills to promote water conservation and protect water rights. After this session, Coloradans are now finally allowed to collect and use rainwater.

In addition to increasing the annual per-pupil funding in this year’s budget when we were expecting major cuts, we passed one of the first and most ambitious bills in the nation to protect student privacy and ensured that homeless Colorado youth can attend our universities with in-state tuition. We invested in the Safe2Tell school violence hotline program by passing a law to provide educational materials and training to schools across the state and expanded the ability of school officials and law enforcement to take action if a patient makes a specific and significant threat against a school.

To keep hard-working Coloradans healthy, we secured $2.5 million in the state budget for family planning services, passed a bill that ensured that employers make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers so women don’t have to choose between a paycheck and a healthy pregnancy, and established a program for rural Coloradans to prevent youth substance abuse.

Criminal justice is always an important legislative priority. Several important bills were passed including legislation to expand prohibitions on police profiling, to make sure that a police officer with a poor record doesn’t get hired in other communities, and to ensure that only licensed attorneys or persons authorized under federal law are allowed to provide legal services in an immigration issue – cracking down on those who take advantage of immigrants, claiming to have legal expertise.

But it’s our state budget that is the cornerstone of every legislative session. The heaviest lift of the session was the budget we produced for the 2016-17 fiscal year, which begins July 1. Difficult tradeoffs had to be made to keep state spending under the revenue limit written into our state constitution, but we did balance the budget.

We reduced the so-called “negative factor” by 2.8 percent – a small victory for our schools – but it still stands at a daunting $830.7 million. And other priorities had to take a reduction: We lowered general fund transfers to the state’s highway fund by 25 percent, to $150 million. We had to reduce support for hospitals by $73 million, with the impact doubled by the loss of federal matching funds, which has a major negative impact on rural hospitals. And we had to freeze investment in higher education, payment rates for medical providers and state employee salaries.

Colorado’s revenues are up because our economy is surging, and our 3.1 percent unemployment rate is the fourth best in the nation. This is a time when we should be making big investments in our long-term prosperity. Instead, our 2016-17 state budget looked as if we’re headed toward recession.

And unless we act to make some room under the general fund revenue limit in the future, the vise will tighten further in the 2017-18 budget and beyond. There will be no new money for transportation; toll lanes will be the only new road construction we can afford. We’ll have to reduce our support for higher education, putting a college degree out of reach for more and more Coloradans. We’ll even have to cut K-12 education, pushing the “negative factor” beyond the billion-dollar level.

We have to begin preparing for the future now. From planning to completion, road projects take several years. Investments in education often take more than a decade to produce results. These are long-term investments, and we have not been making them. We’re falling farther and farther behind.

The cuts and freezes in this year’s budget, and those that will most assuredly have to happen in future budgets, were avoidable. The hospital provider fee legislation I introduced this session was a workable, constitutional, bipartisan, multi-year solution to the state’s structural budget problem that would have allowed us to invest in priority services such as transportation and education at a level that will support Colorado’s growth and economic vitality. By 2020, my bipartisan legislative package would have invested $2 billion in our state’s highest priorities without raising the tax rate of a single Coloradan.

I am very disappointed we did not get there on the provider fee in this legislative session. I am hopeful that citizens recognize the importance of making these critical investments, and will continue to push lawmakers to solve our long-range budget conundrum, or tackle the issue themselves at the ballot.

I do believe, however, that we did accomplish a great deal for the citizens of Colorado. And while the work certainly isn’t done, I am fundamentally hopeful for our state.