Behind the zero: What Colorado’s opening day didn’t say about the true cost of lawmaking

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

“Governor Polis told us we should please work together,” Sen. Janice Rich said Wednesday, recounting a recent exchange as she stood on the Senate floor during opening session.

Inside the chamber, legislative leaders spoke about shared goals and economic pressure on families. What didn’t make it into the speeches, according to Rich, was where many of the real financial consequences of those bills are already hiding.

Rich, the Senate Minority Whip and vice chair of the Statutory Revision Committee, said the optimistic tone often masks how legislation actually moves once the gavels come down—particularly in how costs are presented, debated and ultimately shifted onto taxpayers and local governments.

“They say they want to work together, but nobody’s really sharing anything,” Rich said in an opening-day interview. “They make it real clear to us they don’t need us because they have such a big majority.”

In a chamber where supermajorities set the agenda, Rich said the minority often has little leverage once bills start moving.

Why Rich’s warning matters on day one

Rich is entering her eighth consecutive year in the minority. She serves on the Legislative Council, the Local Government and Housing Committee and the Education Committee—positions that place her at the intersection of fiscal notes, agency oversight and on-the-ground implementation.

“I’m going into my eighth year as a legislator always being in the minority,” she said. “We haven’t had one-party rule like this since the late 1960s. We’ve had balance before, but now we have no balance.”

That vantage point shapes how she watches bills from the moment they are introduced—especially the documents attached to them that most voters never read.

The illusion of ‘zero cost’

At the center of Rich’s concern is the fiscal note, the official document lawmakers rely on to assess whether a bill costs money.

“They’ll say zero cost on the front page, but you have to get into pages two, three, four and five,” Rich said. “It is misleading.”

She said she noticed a shift in how fiscal notes were formatted as the state slipped into a structural deficit, making it easier to declare no immediate cost while deferring the real financial impact.

“I noticed the format of fiscal notes changed, and I wondered about that,” she said.

Two narratives in the same bill

The deeper problem, Rich said, is that fiscal notes can contain two competing cost narratives—one from budget analysts and another from the agencies that actually implement the law.

“You’ll see a title called ‘departmental difference,’ and the department says, ‘We disagree. This will cost five or six million dollars,’” Rich said. “That’s going to be found on page six.”

“The one-party rule is taking the word of the budget analyst instead of the department that actually does the job,” she added. “This is not right.”

Those costs, Rich said, rarely disappear. They resurface months later during budget hearings as new line items, after the bill has already passed.

From ‘minimal impact’ to real county costs

For local governments, Rich said, the consequences are immediate.

Fiscal notes frequently include standardized language claiming “minimal impact” to counties and municipalities—language she says does not reflect reality.

“Having worked in local government, I know that’s not true,” she said.

Mesa County alone now absorbs roughly $10 million a year complying with state mandates that were never fully funded.

“You don’t want to put ‘unfunded mandate’ in a fiscal note because that bill won’t pass,” Rich said.

Her comments come as the Fix It or Fund It coalition—a bipartisan group of counties demanding relief from unfunded mandates—has grown to 50 counties.

“Even Boulder County jumped in immediately,” she said.

Local government experience informs the warning

Before serving in the legislature, Rich worked in local government, a background she said makes it impossible to ignore the gap between theory and execution.

“If I know what it costs to run a department on the ground, I can prove what it’s going to cost,” she said. “That’s at a much lower level, but it scales up the same way.”

She said lawmakers often pass policies based on ideal outcomes without grappling with staffing, compliance or enforcement costs that fall to counties and cities.

Bills introduced on opening day include housing measures that authorize counties to appropriate local funds and expand tax credit transfers—an example of the types of policies that, according to Rich, can carry downstream costs for local governments that don’t appear on the front page of a fiscal note.

A budget crisis years in the making

Rich’s concerns come as Colorado faces a projected $1.2 billion structural deficit following years of expanded spending after the pandemic.

“After COVID, when we got that one-time funding of $3.6 billion, all these programs were created,” she said. “They added 4,000 full-time employees with no plan to sustain it.”

“We never hear whether they’re successful,” Rich added. “If they’re not successful, we need to eliminate them instead of continuing to throw money at them.”

She rejected claims that federal policy shifts are to blame.

“The state did this to themselves,” she said.

TABOR as the last restraint

As lawmakers talk about affordability and budget discipline, Rich said one of the most consequential fights of the session may unfold quietly: renewed efforts to weaken or eliminate the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

TABOR, Rich said, is not a separate debate but the last structural check on the spending practices she sees embedded in fiscal notes and mandates.

“If they eliminate TABOR, they will never have to ask voters to raise taxes,” she said. “They will never have to ask you about putting this state in debt.”

“That money belongs to the taxpayers,” she added. “It does not belong to the government.”

Opening day optics vs. session reality

Rich said there’s a big difference between the tone set on opening day and everything that comes after. With supermajority control, there’s little incentive to slow things down or revisit assumptions.

“On these big-ticket items, they just get bulldozed through,” she said. 

For Rich, constituent engagement is one of the few remaining checks on a process she says often moves faster than voters realize.

“I really appreciate how engaged people in Mesa and Delta counties are,” she said. “I love hearing from people. If something’s on their mind, I want to hear it.”

“This job is not about me,” Rich added. “I am here to represent the people. Government wouldn’t exist without taxpayers.”

As the session moves forward, Rich said, the fiscal notes will continue to tell a story—one she believes Coloradans should be paying close attention to, especially as debates over TABOR and state spending unfold.