June 12, 2009 05:27 PM UTC

Brother can you spare 300 million

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• by: DavidThi808

from the Denver Post

Just when it seemed Colorado’s economy was improving, tax collections are backsliding and there are new worries the state budget will be $150 million to $300 million deeper in the hole than expected, a top lawmaker warned Thursday.

And that means goodbye to prisons & colleges

“Do we close some community colleges?” Keller pondered during a meeting of Senate Democrats at the Capitol on Thursday.

Rep. Don Marostica, R-Loveland, another member of the JBC, agreed that cuts to higher education and corrections could be on the table.

“That’s the only place you can take it from,” he said. “You try to go after all the little stuff, and you’re only going to produce $30 million. You have to go after the big stuff, and that’s higher ed and corrections.”

So just now they starting to look at maybe fixing things…

The Long-Term Fiscal Stability Commission, a 16-member panel of lawmakers and citizens, is scheduled to hold meetings this summer to examine how the state can get itself out of budget problems. Solutions could include tax-hike proposals or amendments to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Gee, it’s nice to see that they are going to wait till we are totally screwed before starting to look at how to fix things. Nothing like waiting until after we are totally screwed.

Attention legislators & Gov – you need to take a serious look today at:

1) Not putting low-level drug user in prison. That alone could drastically reduce the number of prison beds needed.

2) Decriminalizing drugs. The state spends an incredible amount of money criminalizing mental health issues and in the course of that making it a much more expensive problem.

3) Unscrewing the budget mess in the constitution (which is much more than just TABOR). And that will probably require a constitutional convention, which means timing wise that they need to start now to get step 1 of the convention process on the ’09 ballot.

4) Have the state support small & medium business in this state (at present, outside of green, the state’s actions to small business run the gamut from neglect to hostility). Why? Because that will increase sales & income tax revenue.