Colorado’s state budget is structurally unsustainable, which majority Democrats say could be fixed by ending voter consent over new taxation or by increasing taxes on Colorado residents through a progressive income tax.
While those suggestions would certainly increase state revenue, they are unlikely to fix Colorado’s ongoing budget deficits.
Meanwhile, taxpayers often learn too late that programs are vastly exceeding costs; programs like Cover all Coloradans, Healthy School Meals for All, and the wolf reintroduction scheme were all revealed to be more expensive than initially advertised to voters.
Why do programs end up being so much more expensive than advertised?
Fiscal note shenanigans
Ideally, the first line of defense against unsustainable spending should be the fiscal notes created by nonpartisan legislative staff; these reports summarize and forecast the financial impacts of given legislation and are updated as bills move through the legislative process.
However, especially during tight budget years, lawmakers work with legislative staff to maneuver their fiscal notes around the Joint Budget Committee’s “no fiscal impacts in order to pass” rhetoric to give their bills a better chance of passage.
By digging through the published fiscal note reports, one can track how expected fiscal impacts changed as bills moved through the session.
Mind you, most bills’ fiscal notes did not change at all, and lower-impact, low-controversy legislation is often unlikely to take priority in receiving updated fiscal notes, given that staff only have so much bandwidth during a 120-day session and hundreds of bills to analyze.
However, for some bills passed during the 2026 legislative session, their impacts on expenditures and state employment decreased from their first to their last fiscal notes in both the fiscal years 2026-27 and 2027-28.
What does that mean? Let’s look at Full-Time Equivalent (FTE), the state’s proxy for new government employees, as an example.
Of all the bills that had any fiscal impact passed in the 2026 session, when they were first introduced, they were expected to increase total FTE by 282.9 in 2026-27.
However, in their final forms (after being amended in committees or on the floor in either chamber, or after changed economic forecasts), the total expected FTE impact was only 195.1.
In other words, legislative staff reduced its FTE expectations by nearly 88 full-time employees for the same bills, resulting in a significantly smaller fiscal impact than initially projected.
Conveniently, whether intentional or not, most bills with fiscal impacts became significantly less expensive in terms of spending and employment needs from their introduction to their final versions.
Taxpayers on the hook
Believe it or not, economic forecasting is not an exact science, and it is very difficult to be accurate.
Thus, it is even more concerning that the changes to the fiscal notes throughout the session often appear to aid the passage of bills that would not likely pass muster based on initial estimates.
Given this, it should come as no surprise that so many state programs end up exceeding cost expectations, with the revenue limits imposed by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) tagged as the main culprit by tax and spend progressives
Legislators consistently over-promise, under-estimate, under-deliver, and then expect Coloradans to foot the bill.
Eroding TABOR or increasing taxes by billions of dollars with a progressive tax will not solve the state’s runaway spending, but will only dig deeper into Coloradans’ pockets when costs (almost inevitably) continue to exceed expectations.
Nash Herman is a fiscal policy analyst at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver
