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Colorado’s contract reports were off by as much as $2.1 billion. The next is due Sept. 30
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado’s contract reports were off by as much as $2.1 billion. The next is due Sept. 30

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice By Sept. 30, Colorado's Department of Personnel and Administration is due to produce its annual tally of contracts covered by the state Procurement Code — the number awarded, the initial dollar amounts recorded, and the share that went to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses.  The last three tallies were wrong by hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, the state auditor has found. And this year, the department has said it does not plan to send the report to lawmakers at all. The Office of the State Auditor laid it out in Report 2556P, a performance audit of the state's contracting goal for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, released in May.  The audit's stated purpose was to f...
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Colorado made registration more expensive. Now it punishes drivers who fall behind.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Colorado made registration more expensive. Now it punishes drivers who fall behind.

By C. J. Garbo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice There is something almost perfectly governmental about Colorado's growing obsession with expired license plates. First, make an unavoidable part of ordinary life increasingly expensive. Then act surprised when more people struggle to pay for it. Then impose late fees on the people who fall behind. Then send police out to fine them again. And finally, call the whole thing "compliance." Across Colorado, law enforcement agencies have been escalating their efforts against motorists with expired registrations. Denver has conducted repeated enforcement campaigns. Colorado Springs and surrounding agencies have organized regional crackdowns. Police departments speak of zero tolerance. Drivers can face registration cos...
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Weiser’s Blueprint: The costs the plan leaves out
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Weiser’s Blueprint: The costs the plan leaves out

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 ...
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Untangling Colorado’s home care Medicaid, one waiver at a time
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Untangling Colorado’s home care Medicaid, one waiver at a time

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Untangling a (rather hefty) reader statement about Medicaid. Be forewarned, the government programs and acronyms pile up fast here. I'll try my best to get around that, but read carefully and slowly.It's been a while because it's taken a while to learn it, but this post is in response to a reader comment about combining some of Colorado's Medicaid services under one banner. Before we can touch on that, however, we have to do some prerequisite work first. A Medicaid waiver seems at first to have no connection to what it actually is, but if you stop and reason it out, the word makes sense. Remember that Medicaid is a program that is run by states, and the states partly fund it. The feds also fund Medicaid via matching dol...
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Weiser’s Blueprint: More offices, in the name of streamlining
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Weiser’s Blueprint: More offices, in the name of streamlining

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Phil Weiser's plan for Colorado runs 109 pages. It promises, throughout the document, to make state government simpler, faster, and less tangled in its own rules. It also proposes a new set of offices, officers, and coordinating teams to carry it out. The Colorado Blueprint, the platform Weiser is running on for governor, tells voters he will cut red tape and streamline how the state operates.  Alongside those promises, he would appoint a Chief Innovation Officer, a Chief Housing Officer, a Chief Resilience Officer, a Director of Rural Affairs and Collaboration, and a new Office for Safe Communities to coordinate the agencies that already handle public safety.  Reading the document, the same theme shows up...
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A four-year-old is worth more than a fifth grader to Colorado schools
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State, Uncategorized

A four-year-old is worth more than a fifth grader to Colorado schools

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project The incentive structure hiding in Colorado’s UPK I recently shared a video that went into (among other important things to know about school finance) how Colorado’s public school enrollment is dropping. That video is linked below if you missed it before; it’s great and cheap education on school enrollment and funding. Not too long after I put up the newsletter with that video, I had a reader send me something I thought interesting enough to share. There is a marked disparity between how much money someone gets from our Universal Pre K program for a child vs. how much they get for educating a child in K - 12. The second link below is to the state’s UPK rate sheet. It lists the 2026-27 rate the UPK progra...
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Colorado cut some kinship payments July 1 and told families to get certified. Some can’t.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado cut some kinship payments July 1 and told families to get certified. Some can’t.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Jody Fountain testified before the Colorado Senate Appropriations Committee on April 14 with a story about a two-year-old boy. The boy had been placed with his mother's boyfriend. It was a kinship placement, the arrangement the state prefers when a child cannot stay with a parent. The boyfriend could not get certified as a foster parent. Something in his distant past disqualified him. Years later, after Fountain adopted the boy, she read the disclosure file. Two weeks before the child was removed and put into foster care, the grandmother had called. The family had no money for food. "I can't help but think about all the children that are going to be placed in this situation as the support disappears for non-certifie...
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Colorado’s Medicaid debate: Should lawmakers fix spending before seeking more federal dollars?
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado’s Medicaid debate: Should lawmakers fix spending before seeking more federal dollars?

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Drawing down more Federal money as the solution to Colorado’s Medicaid problem? Have you ever heard the saying, “the first step is admitting you have a problem”? Nash Herman’s piece on the Colorado Medicaid Commission (linked first below) made me think of that. The reason being that, per what he writes about their first meeting, the commission seems to largely be focused on wringing more money out of the Feds than dealing with the bloat that Colorado lawmakers have heaped upon the program since 2014 and Obamacare. Quoting from the piece with embedded links left intact: “The most recent Commission meeting raised questions about the government’s priorities in addressing Medicaid and the state budget. A re...
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Colorado non-citizen households used welfare at a far higher rate than the U.S.-born.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado non-citizen households used welfare at a far higher rate than the U.S.-born.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Half of Colorado households headed by a non-citizen, regardless of legal status, either used a traditional welfare program or qualified for federal tax credits aimed at low-wage workers. That is the finding of a new national report the Center for Immigration Studies released June 11. It is built on five years of Census Bureau survey data, pooled to get state samples large enough to be meaningful. The numbers come at a moment when Colorado is still absorbing the fiscal fallout from its own immigrant health coverage program, one that was projected to cost $27 million and enrolled more than eight times as many people as the legislature anticipated. And they arrive just weeks after Colorado began implementing federal food-sta...
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Colorado’s budget keeps growing. Florida just cut spending again
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Complete Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado’s budget keeps growing. Florida just cut spending again

By Nash Herman | Commentary, Complete Colorado While Colorado’s majority Democrats lament the state’s persistent budget challenges, Florida’s Republican majority just celebrated reducing spending for a second consecutive year in another business-as-usual state budget.  Colorado legislators have plenty of lessons they could learn from Florida, instead, they are more likely to double down on more tax and spend, economy-wrecking policies.  How the states compare  Governor Jared Polis recently signed a $46.8 billion state budget, an almost 7 percent increase over last year’s $43.9 billion in spending, this despite legislators’ constant catastrophizing about Colorado’s “budget shortfall.”  That amounts to approximately $7,800 for every Color...
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