Rep. Bob Marshall (D-District 43) came to the Capital Development Committee on March 12 with a number that does most of the arguing for him: Colorado had roughly 2,000 mental health beds in the 1960s and has about 400 today, even after quadrupling in population. His point was that those beds didn't vanish so much as migrate — into places never built to hold them.
"So we are turning the penal system into our default mental health system, and we're trying to turn the schools into the default mental health system for those under 18," Marshall told the committee. "Neither one of those institutions is what they should be doing." He pointed to one person who had waited nearly two years in the Weld County jail for a bed — not for lack of a diagnosis, but for lack of anywhere to send them.
House Bill 1301 was his proposed fix: a long-term civil-commitment mental health facility built on the existing Aurora Mental Health and Recovery Campus in Aurora — the new Colorado Mental Health Institute at Aurora — paid for through a voter-approved increase in alcohol and marijuana excise taxes. Marshall was careful to say he hadn't loaded it up — no 'Christmas tree,' in his words — keeping the measure trained on the acute-need 'base hospital.'
The need wasn't what tripped the bill. The plumbing was. HB-1301 would have carved out a permanent excise-tax stream — Marshall put it at about three cents on a six-pack, on a tax he said hadn't been raised since 1982 — and dedicated it to one or two specific facilities. By the fiscal note's accounting, the bill's actual increase is 7.33 cents per gallon on beer and hard cider, roughly doubling the state's current 8-cent-per-gallon beer excise. That structure is where the committee, whose whole job is capital construction, started shifting in its seats.
Sen. Nick Hinrichsen (D-District 3) named the institutional worry plainly. "And I think that from a Capital Development committee standpoint, creating standalone funding sources for capital development projects isn't something that is a precedent that we want to start either," he said. The chair pressed a related question: whether the state funds a single location with a standing tax anywhere, rather than funding a system.
Vice Chair Tammy Story (D-District 25) offered her own reservation, saying she's "not a huge fan of syntaxes" and describing alcohol as a symptom rather than a cause of the crisis the bill aimed at. Marshall, for his part, said the alcohol industry hadn't drawn a line in the sand over the money itself. As he described it: "they told us, told me, said, if you would send this to the voters and have them vote for it, we would not be upset. We just don't want you to create an enterprise where you have these fees on us and you can just keep increasing them every year without the voters making a decision" — his case that the tax, run through the voters as a referendum, was the version industry could live with.
Rep. Ty Winter (R-District 47) and Story both wanted more runway to work with stakeholders. The calendar didn't offer any: staffer Nina Forbes noted the bill was already set in House Health for the 18th, leaving little room to keep digging.
After a brief recess, Story moved that the committee send the committee of reference a letter recommending the bill not advance — citing the capital-construction structure and framing the whole thing as a matter of clock, not conviction. "An effort of this magnitude, I think just needs more time," she said. Winter said his vote came down to not being able to look into it further. The motion carried without dissent.
What that means in practice: the letter is a recommendation, not a death certificate. HB-1301 still heads to the House Health committee on the 18th, where the underlying question Marshall raised — who houses the people the state stopped housing — arrives without a settled answer on how to pay for it.