Joint Budget Committee

Thursday, January 29, 2026·8h 32m·▶ Watch / Listen

Key Actions

·JBC/JTC Joint Meeting – IT Capital Budget OverviewNo Vote

+ 14 more actions

Controversies

Caregiver hours soft cap — fiscal sustainability vs. impact on single parents and rural families

Director Bonnie Silva argued the policy is fiscally necessary, citing examples of families earning 'over $200,000 a year plus' for 112 hours per week caring for a single child, and stated 'our job is to make sure that we have the benefits in place to support people to live the lives that they want to live and not necessarily to make sure that families have the incomes they need to survive.' Representative Taggart countered with the case of a single father in rural Colorado who concluded he was 'the best to do this full time for my child' after being unable to find professional caregivers, and Senator [UNCLEAR SPELLING — 'Mobley'] argued that combining rate cuts with hours reductions was 'a little bit of shooting ourselves in the foot.'

Notable Quotes

“I mean, that's why I think people have an issue. Providers end up having an issue with the department because it just, I mean, to go through all of this, I mean, to say, yep, we made it, we had an oops, we made the mistake. Fine, I can appreciate that. I appreciate people coming forward and say, we made a mistake, but then say, yeah, but now we're going to check to make sure nobody was intentionally up coding after we gave them incorrect guidance.”
Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer — Senator Kirkmeyer challenged the department's decision to simultaneously acknowledge it gave incorrect guidance to providers on XL wheelchair transport rates and announce an investigation into intentional upcoding by those same providers.

+ 3 more quotes

Votes

HCPF S6.30 – HCBS Soft Cap FTE comeback request with term limit as described by Tom Dermody and authority to work with department on proper prorationPassed

No (2)Kirkmeyer, Taggart

HCPF S6.34 – Community Connector Units FTE comeback requestFailed

No (3)Kirkmeyer, Taggart, Amabile

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TranscriptPreview

All right, a joint gathering of the joint Budget Committee and joint Technology Committee will commence. So who would like to share with us? No represent Senator Marchman. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for having the joint to Technology committee in front of you today. We usually get together after we make our recommendations. Statutorily we have to come if there's some sort of a disagreement between JVC and jtc. But we decided to come now because last year we were able to claw back a couple million dollars from the original asks of departments. And that's what's in this table. I want to first start with this table. This is just me. Okay. So I don't want. This is like I woke up, put some numbers together, but we're looking at it. But this is basically what the OSPB budget was for last year. It's what, how we prioritized it and it's how we appropriated it. So if you look through those first three columns, you can see that you followed our. Thank you. You followed kind of what we said, what we wanted you to do. If you flip to the. Oh, if you look on…

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