← Hearings

Joint Budget Committee

Wednesday, April 22, 2026·▶ Watch / Listen

In a long post-adjournment session, Colorado's Joint Budget Committee cleaned up the long bill with a string of unanimous technical fixes while zeroing in on two flashpoints: taxpayer-funded ski passes and canyoneering flowing through a part-time enrichment loophole, and a $30 million request to build competency beds amid active litigation over the state's mental-health consent decree.

Key Actions

·Severance tax refinance TABOR fixPassed

+ 6 more actions

Notable Quotes

How in the, how in the world can they with a straight face ask us to not cut funding for this?

Jeff BridgesBridges' incredulity over BOCES defending 2x per-pupil funding for part-time students in enrichment programs like ski lessons while districts plead poverty.

+ 5 more quotes

Unlock the full summary

Subscribe to see every key action, the full discussion, amendments, and notable quotes.

Sign in to subscribe
TranscriptPreview
Sure. We're going to go a little bit out of order for the moment. We'll return to our tab one with the bill drafts as soon as we have all six. But for now, we'll start, I think, with Tab four admission. Sounds good. Thank you, Madam Chair. KELLY Shen, JVC STAFF so I have, I think, on tab 4, I'm assuming, is severance tax refinance. And so this is just a proposed adjustment. So the long bill, during that whole big sub tax refinance, refinanced $2 million for the species Conservation Trust Fund, originally funded from the operational fund, and you all swapped it to the Wildlife Cash Fund. But just the way it was done, there is has been identified a $2 million TABOR revenue impact, because basically, if you appropriate directly the Wildlife Cash Fund to the Species Conservation Trust Fund, it leaves the enterprise and then counts towards the TABOR cap. So just to mitigate that, we're proposing a long bill amendment. I've talked with the department ospb, our legal folks, and basically, instead of appropriating the money to the Species Conservation Trust Fund, it would just be spent directly out of wildlife operations and then
Continue reading

Subscribe to unlock the full transcript, summary, and search across all Colorado committee hearings.

Sign in to subscribe