Colorado
Colorado Democrats want to use TABOR refund money to fight child poverty, help care workers with new credits
Colorado Democrats are eying a large portion of the state’s $1.8 billion-plus surplus this year to provide child tax credits targeted to help lower-income families — along with another slice devoted to helping people working in health- and child-care fields.
The proposals are costly policy moves that could put state lawmakers on a path for conflict with Gov. Jared Polis, a fellow Democrat, over what to do with the surplus and broader tax policy. The legislators, including a top member of the House, argue the money — which normally would be refunded to taxpayers — gives Colorado an opportunity to help the people most in need.
The child tax credits bill, introduced Friday afternoon, would direct up to $3,200 per child younger than 6 to the lowest-income families in the state. That credit would taper down as qualifying families’ incomes increase, up to a limit of $85,000 for single filers and $95,000 for joint filers. Those families would receive a $120 credit.
Another credit would apply for families with children ages 6 to 16 — starting at $2,400 and tapering down to $90 for single and joint filers at the same income limits.
Rep. Chris deGruy Kennedy, a Lakewood Democrat, said the proposal could cut the state’s child poverty rates in half. Some 133,000 Colorado children currently live in poverty, according to the Colorado Children’s Campaign.
“When you pump this money into those families at that level, it can be a game changer for their lives,” deGruy Kennedy said.
He said the child tax credits would cost roughly $800 million per year, though an official estimate was still pending.
The proposal was modeled largely after the pandemic-era federal child tax credit expansion championed by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, he said. The federal program gave families direct cash assistance in 2021 and was credited with slashing the national childhood poverty rate, but Congress allowed the expansion to lapse after a year.
Bennet has tried to resurrect it, and a bipartisan tax bill recently passed by the U.S. House contained a new expansion of the credit; that bill is now pending in the Senate.
DeGruy Kennedy’s state proposal is still in its beginning stages, and he expects it to change as the bill moves through the legislative process — and as it’s negotiated with the governor’s office. That includes determining if a direct monthly payment, or an annual refund like what the state sends now, would be more practical.
He identified the bill’s co-sponsors as Rep. Jenny Willford of Northglenn and Sens. Faith Winter of Westminster and James Coleman of Denver. All are Democrats.
The proposed child tax credits would be permanent but would depend on the availability of surplus tax revenue above the limit set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR.
Democrats have drawn on surplus money for other relief
The measure joins a suite of other pitches by the majority Democrats to direct tax dollars collected over the TABOR cap toward lower-income Coloradans, including a further expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and a bill to provide additional tax relief to people 65 and older.
But as a consequence, the approach would chew into the tax refunds Coloradans have come to expect in recent years.
It also pits legislative Democrats against Polis, who wants an income tax cut to be part of any broader tax reform package. That desire — reiterated in Polis’ January State of the State address — is a nonstarter for some Democratic lawmakers, who argue that such a reduction would mostly benefit the state’s wealthiest earners.
Earlier this week, a committee controlled by Democrats killed a Republican-backed income tax cut proposal.
In a statement Friday, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman said the governor “looks forward to a conversation on the child tax credit and other important tax policies — including his priority of a temporary rate cut to the income tax — during this legislative session to provide relief to all Coloradans and to help our economy grow.”
DeGruy Kennedy said he’s working with the governor’s office on a compromise that would include cuts to the state’s income and sales tax rates in conjunction with the expanded tax credits for families.
He said this effort was “very much about planting the flag” to establish the view that the state can use TABOR surplus money to tackle societal issues. He expects a fight over tapping into the surplus, especially since it has become a political tripwire following the failure of Proposition HH, which voters soundly defeated in November.
Proposition HH would have raised the TABOR revenue cap to pay for education and cut property taxes. Republicans in particular have taken HH’s defeat to mean voters don’t want lawmakers to touch TABOR surpluses — or their refunds.
DeGruy Kennedy, though, framed a rhetorical question for Colorado voters: “Are you willing to give up a little bit of that (TABOR surplus) if this could be a transformational policy change for families in Colorado who are really living on the edge?”
Credit for health, early childhood workers
Also included in the tax credit package was a second bill introduced by House Democrats on Friday, which would direct a $1,500 annual tax credit to certain care workers, including those working in home health, early childhood and personal health.
The credit would be targeted to lower-income workers, which includes most of the people in those fields, said Rep. Lorena Garcia, an Adams County Democrat sponsoring the bill.
Like the child tax credit, the care workers credit would be permanent but dependent upon a TABOR surplus. It would cost more than $100 million per year, Garcia said, and would benefit as many as 70,000 lower-income workers.
“We’re able to help folks for whom $1,500 really is the difference between getting evicted or getting your car repossessed,” said Garcia, who’s backing the bill with Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat. “Whereas (for) other folks in higher-income brackets, $1,500 is something nice to add to your savings account.”
Her bill is part of the negotiations with the governor’s office, Garcia said. But including an across-the-board cut to the state’s income tax rate as part of that deal would be a “nonstarter,” she said.
“Having a flat rate income tax (cut) — while everyone benefits, it disproportionately benefits the rich,” she said, adding that lawmakers “would be happy” to discuss referring a ballot measure to voters that would cut the income tax rate for lower- and middle-income earners.
After she introduced two of the tax credit bills Friday, House Speaker Julie McCluskie said Democratic legislators had worked to “make sure that we are supporting the hard-working families of our state.”
“These are seasoned lawmakers who have brought forward some pretty big ideas,” she said, “and I look forward to the ongoing conversations.”
McCluskie demurred when asked about disagreements between Polis and Democratic legislators over an income tax cut, though she said that she hoped Polis “is thoughtful about just pushing one idea.”
Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.
The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse.
The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.
This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the “Upper Basin” states led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico) and the “Lower Basin” states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.
Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew on projects that could increase supply, a reversal of Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.
Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river
“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”
During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators of both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.
The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of the Biden administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry.
The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants to desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.
Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.
Desalination
As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015, and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to Interior requests as much as $6 billion to build one in Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.
The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.
But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.
Taming tech and power
Nevada uses less water than any state on the river, and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries — power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but dominate usage in The Silver State.
The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in its airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.
CN-STR / AFP via Getty Images
Squeezing rain from the clouds
Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it.
These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding — spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain — has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.
In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.
Mining a hoard of desert groundwater
The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.
This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.
The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.
“This isn’t a competition, it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the “wish list” sent the Interior Department.
Impacts from Colorado’s extreme drought conditions are hitting several state parks in the state’s northwest corner.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced emergency water conservation measures and boating restrictions at both Sylvan Lake State Park in Eagle County and Rifle Gap State Park in Garfield County, according to a Monday, June 22 news release.
Both parks are located within some of the more extreme drought conditions in Colorado. According to the June 18 U.S. Drought Monitor, Eagle County and western Garfield County are experiencing exceptional drought conditions — the worst measured by the monitor.
Sylvan Lake State Park
At Sylvan Lake State Park outside of Eagle, the park’s main source and well, Zurcher Spring, has run completely dry and shows no signs of recovery due to the extreme drought conditions in the region.
To maintain basic operations at the park, Parks and Wildlife has transitioned to using a secondary water source, Cowboy Spring. This spring is producing 2,000 gallons of water per day, and with park usage ranging between 2,500 and 3,000 gallons daily, park staff shut off all 17 public water spigots in the state park.
“We are using more water than we can currently produce, and are on track to run out,” said Sylvan Lake State Park Manager Matt Westerberg in the news release. “We know turning off the water spigots isn’t ideal, but our hope is this will save enough water to keep the main campground shower building operational for visitors.”
Despite having a workaround, Parks and Wildlife is asking visitors to help out by bringing their own water. Visitors can fill their tanks at the visitor center, which operates on a separate, functioning well system.
Rifle Gap State Park
A little further west in Garfield County, Rifle Gap State Park is experiencing impacts brought on by the winter’s historically low snowpack and early snowmelt. While the park typically experiences water declines in the late summer, they are hitting the state park months ahead of schedule, Parks and Wildlife reported.
To combat this, Parks and Wildlife is reducing motorized boat launching to a single lane and has pulled all courtesy docks from the water. Access for hand-launched vessels like kayaks, canoes and stand-up paddleboards will remain unaffected by the closure.
“With our boat ramp down to a single lane, launching and loading will take significantly longer than usual,” said Rifle Gap State Park Manager Brian Palcer in the release. “We are asking all boaters to practice patience, pack an extra dose of courtesy for their fellow recreators at the ramp, and expect delays. We want everyone to have a safe, enjoyable day on the water despite these challenging conditions.”
Parks and Wildlife encourages boaters to exercise caution as low water levels have also exposed shallow, unmarked hazards across the reservoir, including uneven bottom topography, fish habitat structures, rocks and tree stumps. With these conditions, the agency also issued a reminder that life jackets are required on all vessels.
If the reservoir continues to recede at its current rate, Parks and Wildlife said the water levels will drop entirely below the concrete boat ramp, forcing a complete closure of the ramp to motorized watercraft for the remainder of the season in early July.
At both parks, the most current information can be found on their individual Facebook pages and websites on CPW.State.CO.US/state-parks.
From the Times-Call photo archive via Longmont Museum: “The modern front of Colorado Creamery at 526 Main St. makes a background, above with two of the firm’s trucks parked at the right of the picture and two of the sales representatives standing at center of photo.” Originally published June 22, 1960.
For more historic photos, visit timescall.com/tag/historic-photos. We are adding new photos every week.
Click here to get Longmont news directly to your inbox.
-
Indiana4 minutes agoMadam Walker Legacy Fest brings back Indiana Avenue’s Black history
-
Iowa11 minutes agoState officials continue to recommend no swimming at one Iowa lake
-
Kansas14 minutes ago
Kansas City police bring in extra help for World Cup events
-
Kentucky19 minutes agoKentucky’s schematic changes on defense in 2026
-
Louisiana26 minutes agoThe Supreme Court’s campaign to expand religious liberty now has a glaring exception
-
Maine26 minutes ago
Rains bring relief to drought in Maine
-
Maryland34 minutes agoSCOTUS holds the fates of 20,000 Haitian TPS recipients on Maryland’s Eastern Shore
-
Michigan41 minutes ago5 Michigan-themed coffee mugs to browse during Prime Day 2026
