Gov. Jared Polis on Friday officially signed a $46.87 billion spending plan for the Colorado state government in the next fiscal year.

His signature is the culmination of months of work by legislators, who resorted to cuts, transfers and other mechanisms to balance the 2026-27 budget amid a deficit of more than $1 billion.

That spending plan is, in fact, larger than the current budget as approved by lawmakers a year ago. At the time, that budget stood at $43.9 billion. It had changed significantly since.

The new budget goes into effect on July 1.

The governor was flanked by members of the Joint Budget Committee, none of whom was happy about the spending plan, given the cuts to services for some of Colorado’s most vulnerable residents.

“Nobody won in this budget,” said Rep. Rick Taggart, R-Grand Junction.

Taggart recalled listening to testimony from families whose loved ones have intellectual and developmental disabilities. Caretaker pay for those families had been among the hardest hit in the budget.

Polis did not veto any line item appropriation. Nor did he veto any of the bill’s footnotes, which are directives from the legislature on how the dollars should be spent.

They sometimes earn a gubernatorial veto due to a separation of powers issue. The state Supreme Court has supported the governor’s authority on veto actions going back to the administration of Gov. Dick Lamm in 1978.

Polis directed agencies to comply with the footnotes — which notably included directives around the state’s wolf reintroduction program within Colorado Parks and Wildlife — “by the extent practicable and appropriate.”

He did not take questions after signing the budget.

Polis noted the difference between the federal and state budget, pointing out the former budget operates at a deficit at around $2 trillion dollars.

The state, on the other hand, must come up with a balanced budget every year, he said.

Democrats have blamed the congressional budget approved last July for Colorado’s fiscal woes. Republicans, on the other hand, said the state had overspent and the majority in charge of the government refused to make the hard decisions, even when they knew that large deficits loomed ahead.

Medicaid has been driving overspending both in the 2025-26 fiscal year and in next year’s state budget — the result of over-utilization of services. The state program that provides health coverage to low-income residents is beset by allegations of waste, fraud and abuse, while its leadership has been accused of mismanagement.

Congress is investigating the fraud allegations.

The governor said he was proud of the efforts by the Joint Budget Committee to come up with a balanced spending plan. He noted that legislators found a way to fully fund public education.

“We are not returning to the days of underfunding our schools and the budget stabilization factor,” the governor said, noting that the state is also moving forward with the second year of a new school finance formula.

As for the problems in health care, particularly with Medicaid, which was responsible for $1 billion in cost overruns in the past year, Polis said the costs cannot continue to go up by 10% or 11% per year.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not like health outcomes are getting better at 10%-11%. When health outcomes are the same, it’s just idiocy to spend more money.”

Joint Budget Committee Chair Rep. Emily Sirota, D-Denver, also noted that education funds had been spared.

“Even in the midst of making these billion-dollar reductions again and again, I think we can all be proud that we were able to preserve funding for K-12 education this year,” Sirota said.

The challenges will continue in the coming years, she said.

“The cuts that we had to make were unbelievably painful and they kept me up at night and they kept other members of the committee up at night,” added JBC Vice Chair Sen. Jeff Bridges, D-Greenwood Village.

He warned that, next year, policymakers will “probably be having the same kind of conversation about the cuts that we have made to get to a balanced budget.”

He said the committee has “done the least harm possible” through the cuts it made.

Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, also lauded the efforts to fully fund K-12 education and maintain access to health care services throughout the state, not just for Medicaid.

“This is not a budget that we can love, but it’s a budget that got the job done,” Kirkmeyer said.

She noted the urgency of examining Medicaid — the JBC is sponsoring a bill to establish a commission to look at the program’s spending.

“It is tough because we’re still in the same spot we’ve been in for the last five years. We still have a structural deficit,” she said, adding the budget still relies on a lot of one-time spending.

“We protected and we did what we could with regard to education. We protected and did what we could with regard to health care access — and also to maintain public safety,” she said, noting these are the three top priorities for the state.

“This is the way government should work,” Taggart said — not, he added, at the “extremes,” where people are so set in their ideology that “we can’t reach out to one another.”

The governor still needs to decide on the 64 “orbital” bills that will help balance the budget through changes in statutes.