Budget Transparency - Rocky Mountain Voice

Follow the money: Why every Colorado taxpayer should check their county budget

2Jun

By External OutletNo Comments

Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, Local

Follow the money: Why every Colorado taxpayer should check their county budget

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Check your county’s budget I wanted to offer you an example and some encouragement about checking your county (or city) budget. For my example, I chose to focus in on my home county’s (Logan) Human Services budget. I’ll lead you through the process before looking at an interesting pattern I found. I started, and I recommend you start, by simply inquiring at your county (or through the commissioner’s office) for their budget archives. This was how I arrived at Logan’s archives, the first link at bottom. Budgets are big and complex. You need some way to wrangle the complexity down to size. One way to do that is to do what I did: pick a specific topic and stick to the summaries. You might look at salaries over t...

From $8 Billion to $16 Billion: How Colorado’s Medicaid Budget Doubled in a Decade

24Feb

By Shaina ColeNo Comments

Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

From $8 Billion to $16 Billion: How Colorado’s Medicaid Budget Doubled in a Decade

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice If you ask most Colorado families how they feel about health care right now, the answers aren’t complicated. It’s expensive.It’s confusing.It keeps going up. And for taxpayers helping fund Colorado’s Medicaid program — known as Health First Colorado — another question has started to surface: If enrollment has come back down, why hasn’t spending followed? Ten years ago, Colorado’s Medicaid agency operated on roughly $8 billion. Today it’s closer to $16 billion. The Common Sense Institute (CSI) calculates that as 101 percent growth over the decade. CSI reports that the rest of the state operating budget grew 64 percent during that same period. The story of enrollment is different. ...

Walcher: Want to fix Congress? Break the budget process first

15May

By External OutletNo Comments

Approved, Commentary, GregWalcher.com, National

Walcher: Want to fix Congress? Break the budget process first

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com A popular blogger called Taylor Cone gave some great advice for budding inventors, discussing the process of prototyping: build it, then break it, then fix it. That’s a strategy Congress ought to try. The House Appropriations Committee, Congress’s most powerful panel, has 63 members, only 8 of whom have ever voted to do what the law requires of them, namely, to pass 12 appropriation bills to fund government agencies and programs. In fact, Congress has passed the required bills on time only 4 times in the last 40 years, the last time 26 years ago. Only 25 of the 435 House members and 8 of the 100 Senators were even in Congress then, all of them now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. They may not even remember how it was supposed to work. The b...

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Tag: Budget Transparency

Follow the money: Why every Colorado taxpayer should check their county budget

From $8 Billion to $16 Billion: How Colorado’s Medicaid Budget Doubled in a Decade

Walcher: Want to fix Congress? Break the budget process first

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