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Joint Budget Committee

Tuesday, February 17, 2026·1h 2m·▶ Watch / Listen

The Joint Budget Committee advanced most Department of Revenue budget items, including a half-funded request for Taxation Services staffing to address federal HR1 impacts and a post-hoc DMV reorganization approval over staff objections — but deadlocked 3-3 on the State Lottery Division's base appropriation over a disputed $18.2 million marketing budget, leaving that item unresolved.

Key Actions

·R1 – General Fund Reductions (Department of Revenue)Passed

+ 10 more actions

Controversies

R3 – Block call technology at the Taxation Services call center

Representative Rick Taggart stated that 'just blocking a call when it gets to a certain volume is very customer service insensitive. It's very troubling,' and asked about alternatives such as online options or chat functions. No department representative was present to respond.

Notable Quotes

“Staff take no joy and not recommend. There is clearly a need for the these resources. HR1 will have significant impacts across the Taxation Services Division. It will stress resources and if you look at page 31, the call center metrics that they've worked to bring down and have been trending down now for the last few fiscal, last fiscal year, those will likely be negatively impacted.”

John Catlett, JBC staff — Catlett explained JBC staff's recommendation to deny the R3 Taxation Services Resources request for $2.1 million and 23 FTE, which the department requested to handle increased workload from federal HR1 implementation.

+ 4 more quotes

Votes

Staff rec on R1 (General Fund Reductions)Passed
Base appropriation and line item detail for Executive Director's OfficePassed
Half of department request on R3 Taxation Services ResourcesPassed
Line item detail and base appropriation for Taxation Business GroupPassed
Staff rec R2A (DMV small general fund reduction)Passed
Staff rec R2B DMV reorganization (first vote)Passed
No (2)Emily Sirota, Barbara Kirkmeyer
Department request R2B DMV reorganization (second vote, after reconsideration)Passed
No (1)Jeff Bridges
Base appropriation and line item detail for Division of Motor VehiclesPassed
Base appropriation and line item detail for Specialized Business GroupPassed
No (1)Jeff Bridges
Base appropriation and line item detail for State Lottery DivisionFailed
No (3)Jeff Bridges, Judy Amabile, Kyle Brown
Long bill footnotes and requests for informationPassed
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TranscriptPreview
Revenue today. Mr. Catlett. Thank you, Madam Chair. John Catlett, JBC staff here to figure set for the Department of Revenue. In page two of your document you will see a summary of staff recommendations. You'll notice there are three decision items submitted by the Governor's office. Staff saw the R2 request as distinct decision items, so have separated that into a 2a and 2b request. You can see the R1 and R2 request result in a general fund savings of about $1.3 million overall. However, general fund increases by about 4.6% year over year driven by employee compensation common policies and a significant amount of technical adjustments across the department. So a net staff recommendation is about $2.1 million less than the governor's request and about $2.2 million total fund. Moving ahead to page three, I'm going to move past the decision items because we'll go into each of those individually. But you can see again employee comp common policies, a 6.5 million general fund impact driven by HLD salary survey and step plan. And then on page four, you can see the technical adjustments across the department. These are primarily driven by contract escalators across three of the…
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