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Joint Budget Committee

Tuesday, March 3, 2026·▶ Watch / Listen

Facing what the chair repeatedly called a structural deficit, the Joint Budget Committee spent the afternoon absorbing cut after cut across Military and Veterans Affairs, Public Health and Labor — clearing many requests but deadlocking on a proposed cut to local public health dollars and fighting over what members branded mismanagement at the state lab.

Key Actions

·DMVA R1 general fund reductionPassed

+ 18 more actions

Notable Quotes

when I look at our veterans that are afflicted with mental health, have medical health problems, unfortunately have unhoused situations, these are tiny expenditures in comparison with a population that have gone and beyond, gone beyond what we could have expected from a standpoint of supporting this nation and this state.

Rick TaggartTaggart's rationale for refusing further cuts to the Veterans Trust Fund, which drove the committee to hold the item.

+ 2 more quotes

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TranscriptPreview
The Joint Budget Committee will come to order. We are figure setting on the Department of Military and Veterans affairs with Mr. Catlett. Take us away. Bless you. I'm ready. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning, Committee. John Catlett, JBC Staff Here to figure set for the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. On page one of your document you can see an overview of staff recommendations. As you can see, there are two decision items submitted by the department. R1 request, which is general fund reduction, and R2 request, which is budget neutral for a cemetery cash fund transfer to support the veterans cemetery in Grand Junction. At the bottom of the table you can see year over year, it is about a 4.3% increase in total funds. However, that is a little bit misleading. That is entirely driven by informational. Federal funds are what driving that. So if you move across that table, you can see that general fund actually reflects a year over year decrease of about 2.1% as well as a decrease in cash funds of about 8%. I'm going to move ahead to the R1 decision item, which is on page five. So R1 is
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