By Brian Eason | The Colorado Sun
Over and over last week, Colorado budget writers kept getting mired in the same debates.
Is a $21 million program that allows recent high school graduates to enroll in free college-level classes worth the cost?
Can the state afford to continue paying bonuses to nurses at its understaffed mental health facilities? What about in jails, where the state has a long backlog of inmates awaiting mental health evaluations in order to stand trial?
Should the state keep providing free lunches to school kids, whether or not their parents are truly in financial need? What if doing so means less money for their classroom teachers — over 1,000 of whom were just across the street Thursday to protest proposed cuts to public education?
Across an agonizing five days of meetings and dozens of votes, Colorado’s six-member Joint Budget Committee voted to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on social services, transportation and state employee benefits — only to end the week facing many of the same dilemmas as when it started.