To our members and all the friends of TABOR, the Colorado Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights:
Once again the Colorado legislature is chipping away at our TABOR rights and your TABOR refunds, counting on their ability to do so without the taxpayers of Colorado noticing or objecting. The Committee reviews bills during the legislative session. We ask you to use this information to object and react according to your interests and abilities. You may want to, for example:
- testify against a bad bill,
- write a letter to your community newspaper, or post something to social media,
- submit a blog for consideration to be posted to our web site,
- bring it up for discussion at a local civic or political club, or to a call-in radio show
The web page for our Bill Tracker will suggest why we think bills are of interest to you and provide a link to the bill on the General Assembly’s web site.
Without full-time paid staff, the TABOR Committee Directors do not have the bandwidth to perform these tasks, but instead leave it up to you, our members, to determine what individual action you want to take. We only ask that you keep the TABOR Committee informed about your activity.
It needs to be restated that TABOR is silent on state spending of taxes.
2026 Proposed legislation that is not favorable to TABOR:
- SB-135 – is the worst to be offered this year. It is a way to effectively end TABOR at the state level. It must obtain voter approval on this fall’s ballot. It would allow the state to spend above the TABOR spending limitation. It appears to be silent on any end date for that lifting of the cap.
For the first 10 years, it would fund a 20% growth (2% each of next 10 years) in the state’s K-12 spending. Even people identifying as liberals should look askance at a leap in spending while enrollment is falling and schools are closing! It will likely repeat the damage to the rest of the budget done by Amendment 23 (10% increase over 10 years).
It would effectively limit any taxpayer refunds, and with a vague funding scheme, prospective TABOR refunds would be redirected to the state General Fund rather than returned to taxpayers. The fiscal note has not been released yet, but this would likely be a tax increase measured in the billions of dollars. -
1059 – If you walk into HB 1059, be prepared to get it all over you—this mess of so-called enterprises collecting so-called fees. The rich irony in this whole sleight of hand is that it’s addressing how the Department of Revenue can retain money to cover its costs for taxing us. It’s striking that in the language of the bill, if there’s a cost to be covered, there’s an enterprise fee for that.If there’s a positive in this legislation, it may be in the creation of a single fund to collect all this “fee” revenue, replacing a list of funds that have been used to this point. Maybe doing so would reduce administrative costs.If one has a bit of knowledge about the proliferation of enterprises since TABOR became law, it’s likely frustrating to notice how blithely the bill refers to this enterprise “fee” for this cost and another enterprise “fee” for that cost. Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of a “tax.”
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SB26-008 – Mental Health Access This bill creates a new enterprise – the mental health services enterprise. The program is to be funded by a surcharge on internet service account holders in Colorado. The bill creates a new enterprise funded by a surcharge much too broadly based and not specifically related to users.
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HB 1221 – A far reaching revision to the tax code. It’s important to understand that the Colorado income tax computation starts from the Adjusted Gross Income calculated on the federal Form 1040 income tax return. This bill reverses the effects of several provisions of the federal tax law passed last summer that reduces taxes, therefore for Colorado purposes adds the reductions back in. Could we sue under the TABOR provision requiring voter approval for a tax policy change that raises taxes? Would our political, partisan and left-leaning judicial system agree?
A large poverty welfare program is funded from the enhanced taxation. Recipients can get money back from the state government if their tax liabilities are too low to use up the credits. The government is not to consider these new benefits in calculating the moneys paid to the recipients from other welfare programs.
It is also important to know that nowhere in TABOR does the concept appear of too small to count (de minimis). Yet the bill baldly states that the net result of all these tax changes is “incidental and de minimis.” The Colorado Supreme Court, acting as if it were a legislative body, had earlier created out of whole cloth the concept of a TABOR de minimis in a ruling, and this bill relies on bad precedent.
2026 Bills we are monitoring:
- HB 1004 – The child care credit reduces taxes for a portion of the citizens. It has been in place since 1998 and this bill would extend the expiration date for another 10 years. It does not violate TABOR, but it also maintains a tax code that is favors certain people, embeds policy that some may dispute, contributes to complexity.
- SB-001 – Establishes new powers for local governments to subsidize “affordable housing” and “workforce housing” by allowing intergovernmental transfers of property and tax credit swaps. It mandates TABOR votes for new taxes and debt, so no violation there, but the exemption of long-term leases from being defined as government debt is concerning.
2026 These bills need more research:
2026 Good bills that are favorable to TABOR
- 1062 This bill does nothing to oppose TABOR that we can see. It clarifies the calculation for state income tax to eliminate Social Security benefits and certain pensions from income taxation.
- HB 1209 Lowers on a temporary basis how much the property tax can grow. Solves the problem of mill levies (tax rates) that have been permitted to grow too high. That permission from the state was granted in a 2024 law that allowed 10.5% over 2-year period and a higher school rate.
Bills that have died during this 2026 legislative session:
It needs to be restated that TABOR is silent on state spending of taxes.