Don, again an excellent summary, complete with attendant scary-for-C&TS conclusions. I hope you don’t mind if I add something, however. I’ll keep this as politically neutral as possible. I DON'T want to discuss the merits of any of the below-mentioned spending ammendments, I just want to present additional information.
You’ve done a good job of explaining the “ratchet effect”, which is indeed the “glitch in TABOR” that those of us subjected to endless C&D ads hear about constantly. However, the budget woes are compounded by another amendment, and to fully understand the squeeze created by this second amendment, you have to know about yet a third one which is a bit older.
Amendment 23 mandates yearly increases in K-12 spending. The funding model for this is a bit complex, but the net result is that in down years, general fund moneys are increasingly relied on to fund the mandated increases. A reserve fund (the State Education Fund) exists to help buffer things, but that fund is predicted to become insolvent as early as this year (if it hasn’t already – I don’t have recent numbers). This decreases the amount of general fund moneys available for everything else, and will get worse if/when the SEF goes broke.
The third amendment I mentioned, the Gallagher Amendment, relates to personal property taxes and has driven down the amount of property tax revenue collected. Property taxes are the local source of funding for schools, thus with reduced property tax revenues, more funding must come from the state. In the two decades Gallagher has been in place, the state’s share has increased from ~40% to ~60%. And so the problem grows.
BTW, since Dick Cowles comments, I’ve been trying to research TABOR exceptions. So far, the only one I’ve discovered which allows some funding out of TABOR excesses is the aforementioned State Education Fund, and that only by constitutional amendment. 23 came after TABOR.
I know this stuff is pretty far a-field from Narrow Gauge, but it’s central to any discussion of C&TS funding from Colorado.
Scott
