State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Instead of taxes, Colorado gets fees: How lawmakers learned to dodge the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights

The Denver Post: When Colorado voters enshrined the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights into the state constitution in 1992, it had a simple premise: If lawmakers want to raise taxes or issue debt, they should ask voters for permission.

In practice, lawmakers rarely ask. But that hasn’t stopped them from charging Coloradans billions more for government services and borrowing costs anyway.

Designed to impose fiscal discipline on government, the amendment known as TABOR also sets a cap on spending growth each year. But 25 years later, policymakers on both sides of the aisle say Colorado government finance has instead become an increasingly complicated exercise in sidestepping those restraints.

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