A win for taxpayers: Colorado Senate committee kills employer fee bill

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Per the Sum and Substance article linked first below, HB26-1327 (linked second) made it out of the House but died in committee in the Senate. Quoting:

“Senate Finance Committee members voted down HB 1327 by a 7-2 margin on Thursday, with four Democrats joining the committee’s three Republicans in opposing it. Sen. Cathy Kipp, D-Fort Collins, said she was for the idea before groups like CCLP convinced her of its faults, and Sen. Adrienne Benavidez, D-Adams County, joined with several Republicans in arguing that it would violate TABOR.”

However it needed to be, I’m glad it didn’t pass. A look at the bill helps explain why in part. The bill would have been yet another enterprise run by yet another unelected board. Screenshot 1, from the bill’s fiscal note, spells out the purpose and who would have had to pay fees to this enterprise.

Screenshot 2, from the same fiscal note, shows where the money would have gone.

The other part of the reason I’m grateful for its demise is how it would have messed around with what enterprises are.

I’ll set it up with a quote from the article:

“Trey Rogers, the legal counsel for former Gov. Bill Ritter now representing the Colorado Retail Council, argued the structure of the enterprise violated the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Enterprises must provide services to payors in exchange for fees, and the boost in funding for Medicaid wouldn’t benefit payors directly, nor was it a required voluntary transaction, as companies who did not pay the fees could have been fined, he said.”

As I noted in a recent newsletter, see the third link below if you need or want to revisit it, as time goes on it seems our state legislature has grown more and more creative with enterprises. We’ve gone from the speculative benefits about air quality to justify fees on rental cars to a (now-failed) bill on childcare financing, to this bill.

While part of me would like the Democrats running this state to trample down the fence and start running free with enterprises, another part of me recognizes the risks.

The boundaries circumscribing an enterprise, what is deemed okay with regard to TABOR and what isn’t, are something defined by judicial rulings. Given our Colorado Supreme Court’s fraught history with TABOR, I’m afraid of giving them yet another opportunity to expand what the government can do; if someone sues based on the contention that they don’t benefit from an enterprise despite paying, if they sue saying that they shouldn’t have to pay a fine if they choose not to participate, there’s always a chance our justices say it’s fine. Enterprises can expand to encompass that behavior.

As things sit now, the legislature has held back and not pulled the trigger.

Will they in the future? I can’t help but think that they might. I’ll end with one last quote:

“Mullica acknowledged just before the vote [at the Senate committee] that one of his biggest aims was to get a conversation going about new ways to fund Medicaid and to make sure that Colorado taxpayers aren’t subsidizing the ‘largest and most profitable employers.’ And the amount of support that HB 1327 gathered this session indicates that conversation likely isn’t done.”

Reading this and putting it next to the decidedly non-TABOR related objections by some of the Democrats who helped kill this bill tells me that my concerns about expanding what an enterprise can do has little to do with why it failed.

**Easily-overlooked but important note: See the last sentence in screenshot 2. This is a common occurrence with enterprises. They take a minute to become revenue neutral. As I have noted with transportation enterprises, they’re taking your money and adding layers to the bureaucratic onion for sometimes a year or two before actually DOING anything.

https://tsscolorado.com/legislators-kill-effort-to-force-employers-to-help-fund-medicaid-benefits/
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb26-1327
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/only-co-could-claim-that-tacking

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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