The Colorado Joint Budget Committee spent a full day on FY 2026-27 statewide compensation figure setting, advancing several mechanical and technical items unanimously while holding the most consequential salary decisions — ATB COLA, step pay, and step-like increases — for future action. The committee also authorized drafting of PERA legislation projected to save the state $2.15 billion in contributions and, over objection from Senator Jeff Bridges, approved drafting of statutory amendments to the Partnership Agreement Act.
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Representative Taggart argued the staff recommendation to restrict POTS transfers 'is standard practice in business, and I stress it is standard practice,' while Madam Chair countered 'Respectfully, I'm not discounting any of your expertise here... But this is state government. It's not a business. And we are one branch of government talking about governing another branch of government.' Representative Brown also noted departments are stakeholders and the committee needs 'to make sure that this, that we can come up with a system that works for us, that also works for them.' No action was taken.
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“What are they spending it on? We don't know. We can't really see that clearly. That's part of what the spending flexibility provides is they get to take care of problems. That this was. This was the authority granted through this flexibility. Take care of your problems, don't bring them to us.”
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Sign in to subscribeTo order. We are now onto figure setting and we are starting off with Mr. Kem and statewide compensation. Mike is yours. Thank you, Madam Chair. Alfredo Kem, JBC Staff and yes, presenting staff figure setting for fiscal year 2627 for statewide compensation. I want to go over the table of contents real quick to give you how I'm going to go through this. As you may know, I included an addendum memo that I sent out yesterday. It is attached to the online document released and it mostly just includes additional analysis related to health, life dental pieces. However, there is one additional staff recommendation. I am planning to throw that in after that list that first sequence of three decision points related to staff initiated policy recommendations, that first section in the document. So I will jump into that at that point. Aside from that, as you can see in the document, really the big piece is going to be salary increase components. I've basically broken this down for the committee into six decision points for salary increase pieces. Health, life, dental includes three decision points. Para unfunded liability payments includes five decision points. And then we have…
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