Senate Democrats and their Republican colleagues are poised to drop their own budget bill Monday after a week of fruitless negotiations with House Speaker Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch.
“I think the Senate Republicans are just as frustrated with Frank McNulty as the Senate Democrats,” said Senate President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont. “This is more of a Senate vs. House thing than it is a Democrat vs. Republican thing.”
McNulty essentially shrugged off the development, saying the negotiations would still continue even if a budget bill is introduced with no deal in place.
“If the Senate Democrats want to introduce their own bill, we’ll have the debate,” McNulty said. “House Republicans will have our opportunity to put our stamp on the budget.”
But what about the fact that Senate Republicans agreed to the budget as well?
“They’re at a five-seat minority in the Senate, so I wouldn’t expect that they would be able to get as fair a deal as our House Republicans might,” McNulty said. “So, I don’t view it as the Senate Repubicans going off the reservation.”
By introducing their own bill Monday, Senate Democrats and Republicans would bypass the normal process where the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee would send the bill to the Senate. The Senate-only budget has the blessing of Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp, R-Littleton, and other Senate GOP leaders and also drew the support of Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, a staunch fiscal conservative and a former House member.
“It seemed like there was sort of an impasse where the speaker didn’t quite come to any kind of understanding with the president of the Senate,” Lambert said, “but I think we have enough common ground in the Senate itself to move forward.
“We felt that we needed to put something on the table, and we’ve got quite a bit of common ground.”
Because Republicans control the House this year while Democrats still hold the Senate, the Joint Budget Committee has a 3-3 partisan split.
With no compromise between the two chambers emerging, the budget is now a week late, and talks broke down Friday. McNulty has said any budget deal should include an agreement to take an amendment from Rep. Brian DelGrosso, R-Loveland, to a bill dealing with public employee pensions.
Senate Bill 76 would require that state employees continue to contribute an additional 2.5 percent of their salaries to their pensions on top of the 8 percent they already put in, decreasing the state’s contribution by an equivalent amount to help balance the budget. State workers were required to do this last year, and have complained that another year of the increased pension contributions is squeezing their salaries – which haven’t been raised for three years – too much.
But DelGrosso’s amendment to the bill, added in the House, would permanently allow school districts and local governments to require their employees to increase their pension contributions by up to an additional 2 percent. Some school districts and local governments have expressed support for the proposal, though a unions have called the amendment an effort to “Wisconsinize” the state budget.
The amendment does not actually help balance the state budget and would only provide relief to school districts and local governments. Still, McNulty said, it would soften the blow of state budget cuts to K-12 education and transfers of funds that benefit local governments.
In fact, the amendment actually could cost the state money, since additional employee pension contributions are tax deductible and thus would lower state income tax collections. If every school district and local government required the full 2 percentage point contribution increase, it would cost the state an estimated $6 million in lost income tax collections.
Shaffer said Gov. John Hickenlooper’s office has been involved in the budget talks, which have continued through the weekend, and there was still a chance the budget could be introduced through the normal process if a compromise is reached.
“Monday, we will probably take a deep breath,” Shaffer said, and see if things have changed.
But if there’s no compromise with McNulty, Shaffer said, the Senate won’t be waiting to exhale.