State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer (R-Weld County) had quite the busy week. In addition to officially making the Republican gubernatorial primary ballot last Monday, she also led her party’s input into the state budget bill, known at the Capitol as the “long bill.”
In preparation for the Senate’s debate of the long bill, the Republican caucus held two meetings to discuss proposed amendments. After taking the unprecedented step of leaving the Capitol for the friendly confines of the Independence Institute on Tuesday, where they were free from publicly accessible cameras and microphones, Senate Republicans returned to the dome on Wednesday for their last caucus meeting before the long bill came up for debate. Caucus Chair Sen. Byron Pelton (R-Sterling) technically led the meeting, but as the caucus’ lone member of the Joint Budget Committee, Kirkmeyer took charge of the conversation
Given the GOP’s decidedly minority status at the statehouse, most Republican amendments to the budget bill failed with no recorded vote. Prefacing the caucus discussion, Kirkmeyer noted that as a JBC member “generally speaking I will not be supporting your amendments,” before explaining the unwritten rule of the JBC members agreeing unanimously on the budget they present. As the caucus members read through their proposed amendments, Kirkmeyer mentioned that she would probably vote for an amendment that proposed cuts she had already attempted in committee, which prompted Sen. Larry Liston (R-Colo. Springs) to joke, “so you’re breaking the blood pact?”
It was the caucus’ discussion of the next amendment, however, that revealed Kirkmeyer’s preference for drastic, even draconian cuts.
State Sen. Lisa Frizell (R-Castle Rock) proposed simply defunding ten state offices she doesn’t like, including the Office of Just Transition, which helps coal power and mining industry workers move into new well-paying jobs; the Office of Climate Preparedness & Disaster Recovery, from which the state coordinates natural disaster recovery efforts, and the Office of Cardiac Arrest Management, which funds data-sharing on heart attack incidents among the state’s emergency response providers.
Here’s an exchange among Frizell, Liston, Pelton, and Kirkmeyer about Frizell’s proposed cuts:
Lisa Frizell: Amendment 24- so this is a wide sweeping bill eliminating almost 17 million dollars of kind of fraud, — well not fraud — waste in our state. We have, as you are all well aware, over the last eight years increased the size of Colorado government extraordinarily. So this is my amendment kind of swinging for the fences, eliminating the Office of Climate Preparedness, the Colorado Energy Office, the Employee Ownership Office, the Office for the Ombudsman for Behavioral Health Access to Care, Office of Future Work, Office of Just Transition, Colorado Equity Office, Office of Health Equity and Environmental Justice, Office of Gun Violence Prevention and last but not least, the Office of Cardiac Arrest, which after reading all of those offices that are completely unnecessary, gives me a heart attack.
Larry Liston: This will give us cardiac arrest.
Byron Pelton: Senator Kirkmeyer?
Barb Kirkmeyer: Yeah, I like it too.
Pelton: Okay. Ha ha ha ha! All right, any questions?
Kirkmeyer: We tried to eliminate some of these things, so yes, see what we can do.
Kirkmeyer did not respond to an email inquiry as to which of these offices she says she previously tried to cut or what her specific objections to any of them might be. This article will be updated with any response received.
