By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Phil Weiser’s Colorado Blueprint is full of numbers.
It reports the almost $900 million his office recovered in opioid settlements. It counts the more than $184 million in AmeriCorps funding he sued to recover, and the nearly $32 million his office won from the e-cigarette maker JUUL.
It measures the problems he wants to solve down to the dollar, from the $11.4 billion it says Coloradans lose each year to congested highways and deteriorating roads to the $36.5 billion it credits to outdoor recreation and the adjacent hospitality and travel industries.
What the 109-page plan almost never does is say what Weiser’s own proposals would cost.
The Democrat attorney general, running for governor, proposes a long list of program expansions, new funds, and additional public investments.
He would expand Universal Preschool. He would launch a Childcare Solutions Fund and a service program called ColoradoCorps. He would scale up a zero-interest loan fund, expand down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, add teacher loan forgiveness, and fund the Colorado Water Plan.
Across all of it, the closest the Blueprint comes to pricing any of it is water.
One number for the whole agenda
The Blueprint says the Colorado Water Plan needs “up to $3 billion, at a pace of $100 million annually.” The plan then notes the figure comes from a document “when released in 2015,” more than a decade ago, and offers no updated estimate.
Every other proposal is unpriced.
The preschool expansion, the childcare fund, ColoradoCorps, the loan programs, the down payment help — none carries a total cost or an estimate of how many people it would serve at what price.
The document that tallies Weiser’s record to the dollar leaves his platform blank.
Even his separate health care plan, which the Blueprint links to for specifics, contains no cost figures at all.
This is a hard gap to explain away, because Weiser’s own plan concedes the state cannot easily afford new commitments right now.
A shortfall the plan acknowledges
Near the end of the Blueprint, Weiser writes about the state’s finances.
He notes the General Assembly and current administration built the General Fund reserve up to 15 percent “prior to the recent special session,” and warns against draining reserves to balance the budget.
He is candid that the state is under strain. He also assigns the cause.
The pressure, he writes, comes from “Congress-induced budgetary pressures (and not from recession-caused revenue shortfalls),” attributing the immediate pressure to federal action rather than a recession-driven drop in revenue.
Readers can weigh that framing for themselves. What is not in dispute is that the plan proposes new spending in a year its own author describes as fiscally tight.
The word the plan does not use
That leaves the question of how any of it gets paid for.
Here the Blueprint turns to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the constitutional limit on how much revenue the state may keep and spend without voter approval, with the surplus otherwise refunded to taxpayers.
In 109 pages, the plan never uses the word “refund.” What it says instead is that he will “work to build support, in a grassroots, bottom-up effort to change our constitutional limits on how we fund our core priorities.”
Among the options he would “consider and evaluate” is “allowing the state to keep and transparently invest excess dollars we collect in good economic times.”
The state constitution requires that revenue collected above the cap be refunded to taxpayers. Keeping them means the state retains money it would otherwise be required to refund unless voters authorize it to keep the surplus.
Weiser does not spell out that consequence, and his campaign did not answer questions about it.
He lists other revenue ideas in the energy chapter.
There, he says he is “considering all options, including TABOR reform, cap and invest constructs, ensuring polluters pay their fair share,” while adding that he is “not jumping to the first solution that sounds expedient.”
A few sentences later he sets a limit. Any funding solution, he writes, “must not be regressive or unduly increase short term costs for working families.”
Both approaches can affect what households pay or receive.
Keeping the TABOR surplus means the state holds money it would otherwise refund to taxpayers through several mechanisms, one of which is an income-based, six-tier sales-tax refund.
Cap-and-invest programs put a price on covered emissions, which can raise gross energy costs, though how much households ultimately pay depends on the program’s design and what is done with the revenue.
Whether either approach would satisfy his pledge that a funding solution not be regressive or unduly increase short-term costs for working families, the Blueprint does not explain.
Asked and unanswered
RMV sent the Weiser campaign questions on August 9 about the plan’s total cost, the TABOR language, and how the revenue ideas fit the pledge to protect working families. The campaign did not answer.
That silence leaves the Blueprint to speak for itself.
It is a document precise about the money Weiser has recovered and vague about the money he would spend.
It concedes a tight budget, then proposes to loosen the constitutional limit that returns surplus dollars to taxpayers, without using the word the state constitution uses for what those dollars are.
It says a funding solution must not “unduly” increase costs for “working families,” then points toward keeping the refunds those families now receive and toward a cap-and-invest program that could raise their energy bills.
The plan counts what it wants to. What the agenda itself would cost is left for later.
Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a series examining Phil Weiser’s Colorado Blueprint. The first, “Weiser’s Blueprint: More offices, in the name of streamlining,” published Aug. 12.