April 10, 2009 06:49 PM UTC

"Josh Penry First...All The Lemmings Will Follow"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Yesterday’s unprecedented move by (outgoing) Senate President Peter Groff to reject and send the budget back to the Joint Budget Committee, in hopes of finding alternatives to nasty proposed cuts…didn’t work out the way he planned, as Politics West reports:

Several JBC members…said they believed they were being made scapegoats for this year’s budget.

Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge and the chairwoman of the panel, said the committee had to work on two budget years at the same time, the budget year that ends in June and the other that begins in July. There have been multiple revisions to revenue forecasts in the last six months, and the JBC had re-opened the current year’s budget twice to balance to ever-lower revenue figures.

Keller said it was “extremely frustrating and exasperating” for JBC members to hear senators from both parties say the committee hadn’t looked hard enough at the budget.

Rep. Don Marostica, R-Loveland, went further.

“Nuts to them,” an angry Marostica said. “Tell them to go jump in a lake. Josh Penry first, and then all the lemmings will follow.

“We did look hard enough.”

And in the end, attempts by a distracted Sen. Groff at the behest of Minority Leader Josh Penry to punt the budget back to the JBC failed. Like it or not, the budget will be balanced by a transfer of “excess” reserves from the state’s chartered workman’s comp insurance entity, or calamitously–from the Colorado Springs Gazette:

Legislative leaders from both parties said it was unacceptable to pass a budget with a $300 million hole in funding for the state’s public colleges and universities, which could only have been repaired by closing schools or freeing them to charge market rates for tuition.

By taking the $300 million from a surplus held by the insurance fund, the Senate made campus closures less likely, and it voted to prevent tuition increases from exceeding 9 percent on average.

But the Senate action was preceded by a scorching debate over whether the move is legal, and even its supporters acknowledged that it could be struck down in court…

“It is a state asset. It is a state agency,” said Sen. Al White, R-Hayden, who, as a member of the Joint Budget Committee, incurred the wrath of Republican leaders by incorporating the Pinnacol raid into the budget package.

Republican attacks on the Pinnacol asset transfer seem to be losing traction–evidence of this was all over their debate speeches yesterday, insistently referring to Pinnacol as a “profitable company” about to be “plundered” Hugo Chavez socialista-style. However you feel about this proposed transfer, you have to admit that comparing a state-chartered entity with a board appointed by the Governor, sitting on its “excess” hundreds of millions, to Chavez nationalizing Chevron’s oil rigs is more than a little over the top. We keep warning about substituting hyperbolic bombast for facts, but some people just don’t listen. That’s a pity, because people stop listening to them, too.

Either way there’s reason to be hopeful for resolution that will avoid massive cuts to higher ed, since consensus is growing with people we talk to that the Pinnacol “raid” is in fact perfectly legal; which is in turn motivating Pinnacol to approach key Senators about things they might be willing to make happen “voluntarily.” It’s a fluid situation, we’ll update as things get confirmed to our satisfaction–that didn’t happen for most of yesterday.