The special legislative session is now underway, the assigned task list for which includes measures to deal with the roughly (another) $1 billion hole in the budget.

The reasons offered for the 11-digit deficit depend a great deal on one’s political affiliation: Democrats, rather conveniently, are blaming the One Big Beautiful Bill, the federal budget reconciliation act passed just in time for Fourth of July fireworks. And there is a sliver of truth in this — pro-growth fiscal policy at the federal level does have trickle-down impacts, as us supply-siders like to say. But the state’s structural deficit cannot be blamed on President Donald Trump or the congressional GOP — it is necessarily and directly the cause of policy decisions made at the state level in recent years, policies like the expansion of Medicaid, new programs such as FAMLI and all-day kindergarten, a bevy of climate initiatives, and so on and so on. The state budget has grown every year in the past decade, and that has nothing to do with Trump.

The majority party in Colorado is philosophically committed to the principle of the functionality of government as universal problem solver. So the natural temptation inclines less toward cutting government and more toward finding new and creative ways to keep financing it. One pot of money that would be especially tempting, were it not mercifully cordoned off-limits, is the state’s share of the opioid settlement funds. You will recall Colorado was among the states which accepted a settlement payment from certain manufacturers of opioid-based painkillers for the explicit and limited purpose of mitigating damage from the opioid epidemic.

Colorado has gotten an awful lot wrong in recent years, but one thing the state was correct with was the manner in which it handled the appropriation of those settlement funds. Eighty percent of the money is distributed locally: 60% to regional opioid abatement councils and 20% to local governments. Ten percent is set aside for opioid abatement infrastructure projects, and the state gets the remaining 10%, ostensibly for administrative costs and such.

Why is this important? Well, for one thing, unlike much of the money government touches, it is being spent at the appropriate level. The opioid issue is a complicated one, with unique complications manifesting at different levels. The problem on the national scale is different from the one at the local level; as the problem has undergone its metamorphosis from the abuse of legally prescribed painkillers to complex international drug-trafficking enterprise, the federal government is confronted with the need to address issues like Red China’s role in funneling fentanyl precursor chemicals to Central American drug cartels, and trying to stem the flow of the drug into the country.

But the more intimate issues of addiction — issues the settlement funds are intended to address — are inherently local and require local approaches. The problem is different in La Junta, for instance, than it is in Aurora. Local authorities who are closer to the ground know what they need and how to do it, and possess the ability to do so without strings and interference from Washington D.C. or the State Capitol.

Not every state does this, by the way. In several states where they are more centrally controlled, the opioid settlement funds have been misappropriated, sometimes directed toward backfilling budget problems. In Arizona, for instance, a good chunk of their settlement was shuffled into the Department of Corrections to pay for programs the state already had running, magically freeing up money for new ideas. It’s not just that creative bookkeeping was not the intent of that money, but the governing principle; consider how grand a temptation it would be to use this windfall to bankroll any number of liberal priorities — say, to shore up engorged Medicaid rolls, or backfill expensive new programs, or subsidize climate initiatives. The profligate political mind can enlist a great deal of elasticity in justifying alternate and unintended uses of money.

It is of course prudent to keep an eye on how local governments and councils actually spend the settlement dollars, but another benefit is it is much easier to monitor the crisscross of dollars at that level than it is at the state. And it is comforting to know the state’s share is structurally immune from the sort of budgeting sleight-of-hand other funding pots have been subject to.

It is a good reminder structural protections like this — which also include TABOR (which denies the state the temptation to reflexively raise taxes) and the balanced budget amendment (which denies the state the temptation to rack up the credit card) — occupy an important place in government: defusing temptation, which might, just might, encourage thoughtful prioritization. Hope springs eternal.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.