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Colorado lawmakers begin special session — here’s what’s at stake

By 08/21/2025 | updated 1 day ago
Hickenlooper submits his final state budget, but it may not last long
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Colorado legislators will officially convene in a special session this morning to plug an $800 million budget deficit that Democrats insist is the result of the congressional budget but which Republicans argue is the state’s own making after failing to heed warnings and years of overspending.

Here’s what’s at stake. 

Analysts said Colorado will lose $1.2 billion in income tax revenue, mainly on the corporate side. The state has enough in surplus to cover about a third of that. The question is: Where to find the rest?

Proposals have been introduced to tackle as much as $300 million of that shortfall by making changes to corporate taxes in a variety of ways.

Meanwhile, legislative leaders are coalescing around the idea that, ultimately, it is up to Gov. Jared Polis to figure out where to make cuts, rather than having legislators review each agency’s budget to impose reductions.

Two bills in the special session package deal with the governor’s authority to make spending reductions. While the bills do not aim to change his authority, they require the governor to meet with the Joint Budget Committee to share his plans for closing the budget gap. 

The idea that Polis will need to solve the deficit as he sees fit, while informing lawmakers of his plans, wasn’t how the governor and legislative leaders characterized the special session when it was announced earlier this month.

Polis said he set the parameters of what the legislators would discuss in the special session, but it will be up to the latter to decide the details of the fiscal remedy.

“The legislators decide what bills to pass and what to do, and the specifics,” Polis said in an interview several days ago. 

Lawmakers, he said, will also need to decide how long the session will last.

Meanwhile, business and labor groups are closely watching how legislators will tackle artificial intelligence, specifically what’s anticipated to be a round of fixes being proposed to last year’s law that imposed new regulations.

Senate Bill 24-205 made Colorado the first in the nation to deal with consumer issues around what sponsors see as discrimination in artificial intelligence. While Gov. Jared Polis signed the measure last year, he did so with a long list of misgivings. He also asked for changes.

Both sides have begun to frame the issue. For business, last year’s bill had been rushed, creating more problems than it sought to solve, and any measure this year should avoid those shortcomings. For labor, any changes should adhere to the intent of the original measure — root out “discrimination” in AI algorithms and protect consumers. 

Bills introduced so far for the special session can be found here.

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Luige Del Puerto

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