The Colorado House on Thursday gave final approval to the $38.5 billion bill that will fund state government beginning July 1. 

Senate Bill 214 won a bipartisan 47-16 vote from the House, with two Republican adding their “yes” votes. It now heads back to the Joint Budget Committee, which as a conference committee will come up with a resolution of the differences between the two chambers.

The state Senate added $85.5 million, almost all in general fund spending, to the budget when it was in that chamber last week. The House restored most of the changes made by the Senate and in the end added more than $105 million in general fund spending.

The budget is required by the state constitution to be balanced, and with those additions it is at least temporarily out of balance, and that is the task ahead of the Joint Budget Committee, the six-member bipartisan panel that crafted the budget over the past five months.

All eyes were on House GOP members Thursday, and whether they would stick to a deal they made on Tuesday after weeks of delays and obstruction. Republicans, on multiple occasions, requested bills be read at length, and the prospect of that request on a 622-page bill, and one that could have been made twice, weighed on lawmakers in the House who have had only one day off in the last three weeks.

Democrats, in response to those multiple delays, brought down a House rule that has not been invoked in at least 25 years: Rule 14, which upon a majority vote limits debate on bills to an hour each. That rule was invoked six times over gun bills and measures dealing with reproductive rights during the past two weeks.

House Majority Leader Monica Duran, D-Wheat Ridge, made it clear on Monday: Ask for a reading of the long bill at length, and the House will be working on Good Friday and through Easter weekend. 

Republicans caucused twice on Tuesday, once prior to the beginning of debate on the Long Bill and once after the 73 amendments had been decided.

In the first caucus, Minority Leader Mike Lynch, R-Wellington, asked his members if they intended to ask for the bill to be read at length. All but five said they would not. That left concerns that some members, most of them on the far right of the caucus, were considering it. 

In the later caucus, Lynch announced the deal, but with a warning. 

“We have pushed [the Democratic leaders] as far as we can push them,” he said. “I’ve seen the look on those two ladies’ faces before, and it’s not a place I want to revisit … They’re done negotiating with us, so we need to walk out of here with what we can, as Republicans, stand behind, and that’s not reading the bill at length.”  

The deal was that the GOP wouldn’t ask, would get seven priority amendments added to the budget, and everyone would go home to spend the Easter weekend with families and in church for those who celebrate the holiday.

The carrot, or stick, worked. While GOP members spoke at length about the budget prior to its final vote, the bill passed without drama Thursday.

It did, however, come with a moment of humor, when Lynch, as the last to speak from his caucus, went to the microphone.

“This is what we’re supposed to do here, this is the hard work,” he began. He spoke admiringly of the long hours spent by the Joint Budget Committee, and that the caucuses had put the best and brightest on the committee, a nod to the fact that the JBC has five new members out of six.

To the Democrats, Lynch said: “Thank you for letting us be heard, with some concessions we got, and some of our voice being heard on this. That doesn’t go unnoticed. We need more of that, more working together and more seeing each others viewpoints.”

With that in mind, he said: “It’s a complex document. Madame speaker, I would respectfully ask that we read…” with a pregnant pause that had some holding their breaths. He continued: “that we read the Constitution this weekend and have a long weekend,” which drew relieved laughs from throughout the chamber. 

Speaker of the House Julie MccCuskie joked her heart beat way too fast. 

The little plastic pigs that GOP lawmakers have on their desks gently squealed during the final vote. And then the House adjourned for the three-day weekend.

The $38.5 billion 2023-24 budget is $1.2 billion more and an 8.9% increase over the current year budget. General fund spending, which comes from individual and corporate income taxes and sales taxes, and represents the most fungible part of the budget, is at $14.7 billion. The rest comes from cash funds required to cover specific purposes – college tuition is the largest share of that – and federal dollars. 

The largest portion of the budget increase is for the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, about $822 million, to handle the expiration of the enhanced federal Medicaid match tied to COVID-19. During COVID, the federal government increased the Medicaid match to states from 50/50 to 60/40. The state wasn’t allowed to disenroll people during the federal government’s declared public health emergency, but that declaration is expected to end next month. That means the match goes back to 50/50.

It also means the state will have to start looking at its Medicaid rolls as anniversary dates for those additional enrollments come along.

The budget sets aside a total of $469 million in general fund dollars for one-time investments to address workforce-related needs, housing affordability demands, economic development initiatives and wildfire mitigation and response resources. 

It maintains a 15% ($2.3 billion) general fund reserve to bolster state services and operations in the event of an economic downturn, and designates $543 million in cash assets for the State Emergency Reserve to help Colorado respond to disasters like wildfires and floods.

While the budget adds $900 per student for K-12 public school funding, the biggest discussion around K-12 will take place when the School Finance Act is introduced in the coming weeks. That measure will take money from the State Education Fund, which has a $1 billion pot, to pay down the budget stabilization factor, currently at $321.2 million. That’s the longstanding debt to K-12 that began during the Great Recession. Gov. Jared Polis has pledged to pay it off within the next two years. 

All six members of the Joint Budget Committee voted in favor of the budget, the first time all six have done so since 2018. Between 2019 and 2022, the House GOP representative to the budget panel, Rep. Kim Ransom of Littleton, never voted in favor of the document despite being part of the group that wrote it, in part because she said the budget reflected only Democratic priorities.

Once both chambers agree on the final version, which should happen by mid-April, the budget bill and about 30 additional measures intended to help balance the budget head to the governor, who will have 10 days to sign or veto it. The budget bill is the only legislation where the governor has the authority to veto line items, although that hasn’t happened in at least 25 years.

Governors, however, do veto headnotes and footnotes, which are directives, usually on spending priorities from the legislature, to state agencies. While governors have in the past vetoed those directives as violations of the separation of powers, they usually tell the state agencies to comply nonetheless.