Colorado legislators on Tuesday adopted a $46.8 billion plan to pay for state operations and programs next year after a joint panel reconciled differences between the House and Senate versions.

A small group of lawmakers had resolved those differences.

Lawmakers adopted what is called the conference committee report on House Bill 1410 — the budget measure — mostly along party lines. Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, a member of the Joint Budget Committee, was the only Republican to vote in favor of the bill in the Senate.

In the House, fellow JBC member Rep. Rick Taggart, R-Grand Junction, was the only Republican to vote “yes,” while Rep. Bob Marshall, D-Highlands Ranch was the only Democrat to vote “no.”

The six-member JBC acts as a conference committee once both chambers approved the budget. The chambers often make tweaks that need to be reconciled. The panel reviews amendments and decides which ones to adopt, often based on how much support those changes hold among legislators. It also makes other necessary changes, such as to fix technical issues.

What changed in the state budget?

The governor got back $300,000 in general fund money for the office of film, TV and media, and tourism promotion, reversing a House amendment sponsored by Marshall.

The amendment would have put those dollars into veterans’ treatment courts. In the end, the courts got their funding — from an offenders services fund.

On the issue of wolves, both the House and Senate adopted amendments to put footnotes in the Department of Natural Resources section of the bill, which would prohibit Colorado Parks and Wildlife from using its general fund money to acquire more and use only statutorily-allowable cash funds, as well as gifts, grants and donations to do so.

There were actually three amendments on the subject, one in the House and two in the Senate, but the Senate amendments were not compatible.

One amendment, offered by Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, blocked the state agency from using $272,867 of its budget to acquire wolves. A second one from Sen. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, hiked that restriction to CPW’s entire budget of $2.1 million for wolves, which would not only prevent the use of general fund money to acquire the animals but also block other aspects of the wolf management program, including such efforts as hiring range riders and using conflict minimization tools. 

The conference committee report is aligned with the Roberts amendment.

The conference committee received permission to make changes beyond the scope of differences between the House and Senate versions, which is customary.

One change that never surfaced during the budget debate is that the conference committee added a footnote to specify the Colorado General Assembly’s intent that department and agency marketing, advertising and outreach plans prioritize Colorado-based media serving local communities.

Another change is to provide funding to state agencies for compliance with Senate Bill 24-205, the artificial intelligence law that will go into effect on June 30.

The governor’s office of information technology asked for $5.2 million total funds, including an estimated $3.4 million in general fund dollars and 33.8 FTEs, according to a March 5 JBC staff memo.

The conference committee also made changes to address the crisis in corrections by adding a footnote to direct the department to use $10.2 million in its general fund appropriation to increase the number of correctional officers in the Canon City area, reduce the use of non-security staff in security positions and avoid overtime. 

The shortage in security officers has meant that educators, case managers and other auxiliary staff have been pulled from their duties to work security posts, although the corrections department said in a statement in February that, “while we do ask our case managers and educational staff to support operations, we are doing so strategically to ensure they can still fulfill their primary missions and minimize strain on their facility.”

“We are working every day to provide relief to our teams by bridging the staffing gap, allowing our specialists to focus exclusively on their transformative work,” the department said.

Lawmakers focus on health care, court competency

Lawmakers, including Sen. Lisa Frizell, R-Castle Rock, have pressed to reduce the seven-year caregiver waitlist for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Frizell had earlier won approval for an amendment to put $7.1 million into the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing to fully fund family caregiver hours at the current level and eliminate the wait list. 

What the conference committee did instead was to put $3.85 million in general funds and a matching amount from federal funds to implement a policy to help youth aging out of two programs tied to those waivers.

Frizell wasn’t satisfied with that move, although she thanked the JBC for allocating the money for the youth transition waivers.

She told Colorado Politics the $7.1 million she and others earlier sought was instead directed toward the issue of competency. While she didn’t get everything she wanted, she said the aging out program is part of that waitlist.

“It’s unconscionable that we don’t prioritize these people more,” she said. 

Sen. Judy Amabile, D-Boulder, told her Senate colleagues the conversation around the intellectual and developmental disabilities community was “incredibly difficult.”

She was frustrated, she said, that the JBC didn’t have the information it needed.

“We had to act with the information we had,” she said.

Amabile pledged to the Senate to work on the issue over the interim and make sure that, when lawmakers come back next year, they will have better information upon which to base better decisions and revisit the issue if they got it wrong.

The biggest dollar change is for $29.8 million for the Department of Human Services to pay for a competency consent decree, under which the state agreed to reduce wait times for individuals in jail waiting for competency services. The JBC had put a placeholder in the budget to cover for that cost. 

Of that funding, $10.3 million will go to competency restoration beds, $16.1 million for civil beds, $2.8 million for mental health transition living homes and $600,000 to open an additional competency restoration unit at the PUeblo mental health hospital. 

What’s next for the state budget?

With both chambers now doing their final votes, the bill heads to Gov. Jared Polis, but time is growing short.

That’s because the clock starts ticking on Monday toward the session’s end date of May 13.

Any bills that reach the governor by Friday gives him 10 days to sign, veto or allow to become law without his signature. On Monday, that changes to 30 days for the governor to act on legislation.

What that means for the budget bill is largely tied to the footnotes. The governor can veto any line item in the bill, which governors haven’t done in decades. It is, however, relatively common for governors to veto footnotes.

Still, the governor and his predecessors have usually directed state agencies to comply with those footnotes anyway.