DENVER — The Colorado state budget is moving closer to finalization, but lawmakers have continued grappling over $1.2 billion in proposed cuts — with trims to a community health reimbursement program and to transportation funding among those drawing attention.

Proposed funding cuts for community health workers led to amendments and pleas from lawmakers looking to boost a workforce that one senator called a “lynchpin” for his rural district. Meanwhile, the proposed delay of tens of millions of dollars in highway funding has outside organizations worried about road conditions in coming years.

In both cases, critics warned that the proposed cuts and delays would cause more harm than savings. But the fiscal math doesn’t lie, budget writers counter — no matter how painful it makes the decisions.

Members of the Joint Budget Committee, which wrote the state’s spending document for the 2025-26 fiscal year, faced the deep budget hole this year because of the constitutional spending limit set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. The cap resulted in cuts big and small across the government as lawmakers sought — successfully — to protect funding for education and Medicaid.

“It is heartbreaking,” said Rep. Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat on the budget committee. “When you’re cutting $1.2 billion out of the budget, it’s impossible to fund all the things we would like to fund as a Joint Budget Committee. … This breaks our heart as well. It’s not a decision we would make in a different fiscal situation.”

The House passed the budget 44-21 on Thursday. It would authorize about $44 billion in total spending and $16.7 billion in general fund spending for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. The Senate passed the budget in early April.

Now, the Joint Budget Committee will need to reconcile the two versions before the budget goes to Gov. Jared Polis for approval.

The budget isn’t all cuts, however. Budget writers also tout another $150 million for education and a 1.6% boost to how much most medical providers would be reimbursed under Medicaid — both areas of early worry when lawmakers faced such a massive shortfall.

And not all proposed cuts have gotten as much heat, including a $1 million cut to bullying prevention in the Education Department, caused by sagging marijuana revenue; a $4.2 million reduction for peer services in the Health Care Policy and Financing Department; and $4 million in total cuts to the Behavioral Health Administration. A troubled Medicaid transportation program was slashed by more than $13 million, and jail-based competency programs took a $2.3 million hit.

In one of the several dozen budget orbital bills, so called because of their close relation to the budget bill itself, lawmakers also formally killed an eating disorder prevention program launched amid an increase in diagnoses and concern about treatment centers. That program had been pared back even before it was passed two years ago — also for budget reasons — and lawmakers this week swept away what remained.

“They have a really difficult, almost impossible, job to do,” said Zach Zaslow, the vice president of community health and advocacy for Children’s Hospital Colorado. “There are a lot of worthy causes out there.”

Fight over community health workers

But he’s among those concerned by a proposal to cut Medicaid reimbursement for community health workers, which has drawn particular consternation.

The measure, an orbital bill, would kill a program established by a 2023 law, though it hasn’t taken full effect yet. The program would cost an estimated $2.8 million, though its elimination would also lead to the loss of more than $8 million in federal matching funds.

Community health workers help people connect with and navigate complicated health care systems. Advocates said the use of the workers leads to immediate and long-term savings by helping patients get care before they wind up in costly emergency rooms.

This program would have bolstered existing networks throughout the state. But, budget writers argued, it wasn’t going to launch until July 1. They saw it as a place to save money without harming existing services, even as they lauded its intent.

“This cut was not one that was easy to make,” Bird said.

Earlier in the budget process, the Senate amended the bill that would defund the program to halve the cut, to $1.4 million. That change did not make it into the House version.

The chambers still need to reconcile the two versions of the bill — one with some funding, one without any — before the budget goes to Polis. It’s an open question whether the funding survives and, if it does, where the money might come from.

Patti Valverde, the director of the Colorado School of Public Health’s programs at the University of Northern Colorado, said community health workers are a “bridge” between their communities and health care, with decades of research backing up their efficacy.

They proved vital during the COVID-19 pandemic to helping people who didn’t trust the public health departments or speak English as their first language, she said. She also warned that cuts would disproportionately affect rural areas.

“It really would be a huge loss and we would be going backwards” without the program, Valverde said. “And we would lose (community health care workers) because without reimbursements, we’ll lose grant funds … we just won’t see return on investment with the ways this workforce can really reduce costs.”

Valverde said she’s been working to implement the Medicaid reimbursement program for two years. Hundreds of workers have been trained already under the expectation that Medicaid will soon start helping to pay their wages, she said.

Zaslow, from Children’s Hospital Colorado, said it’s one of the rare programs where not only does it pay off down the road, but it would pay off in health care savings the year it’s implemented.

In the Senate, a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushed the funding through, over the objections from the budget committee members. Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat who pushed to soften the cut, said the state sees more than $2 in return for every $1 spent on the program. Sen. Marc Catlin, a Montrose Republican, called community health workers a “lynchpin” in his community.

But the state needs to find cuts somewhere when it’s facing a $1 billion hole this year and projecting similar cuts next year, Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican on the budget committee, said.

“While I appreciate this, and understand the need, this program has not started,” Kirkmeyer said. “It doesn’t start until July 1. And starting on July 1, next (fiscal) year — probably even before next year — we’ll have to start deciding what cuts we’re going to make.”

Slow-rolling transportation funding

A separate budget move has been roiling other elected leaders, though it doesn’t seem to be gaining traction among lawmakers: slow-rolling some transportation funding to save $70 million this upcoming budget year and $56.5 million next year. The proposed changes would boost planned funding in the early 2030s, however.

While budget writers finalized the spending proposal last month, a coalition of rural county commissioners and business groups signed a public letter asking to keep transportation funding in place. The state already has a massive backlog of roadwork that needs to be done, they said, and delays in funding will only slow the state’s response to the need for highway maintenance, construction and safety improvements.

A lack of funding is “jeopardizing the safety of our citizens and impeding our state’s economic progress and competitiveness,” they warned.

During debate, the budget-writing lawmakers countered that the proposal wasn’t a cut, just a delay. Transportation projects don’t materialize based on yearly budgets, but based on long-term funding windows, said Kirkmeyer, who spent two decades on a transportation advisory committee.

She said the committee worked with the Colorado Department of Transportation to ensure there would be no “hiccup in funding transportation projects.”

“This is one of those items that I think all of us would prefer not to have to do to balance the budget,” said state Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican on the budget committee. “There’s no question about it.”

Bad road conditions, whether due to snow or the potholes it causes, are a consistent concern throughout the state. A recent study by the Common Sense Institute, a think tank focused on the economy and free enterprise, found that new transportation fees passed in recent years have largely gone to multimodal projects, such as mass transit, and environmental mitigation, while money for base infrastructure hasn’t kept up.

“CDOT resources do not meet demand,” the study found. “Over the long term, the resources available simply are insufficient to operate, maintain, and expand the state’s highway system to maintain appropriate service levels.”

Ben Stein, a former chief financial officer for CDOT and author of the CSI study, warned that delaying repairs can result in more urgent, costlier repairs down the road. Today’s postponed repaving project can easily become tomorrow’s road reconstruction problem, for example.

“The legislature says it’s in a bind today … so they’re going to put it on a back end in 2032 or 2033,” Stein said. “Who’s to say the legislature in 2032 or 2033 won’t say they’re also in a bind, so they’re going to push that money off another 10 years?”

But he, like everyone else wary of the cuts who spoke for this story, also struck a conciliatory tone. The size of the budget gap backed lawmakers into a corner, giving them the unenviable task of cutting their way out.

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