Colorado Democrats Eye TABOR Refund Money as Budget Patch

The Denver Gazette’s Marianne Goodland reports that buried deep in Colorado’s proposed $46.8 billion 2026-27 budget is a tidy little maneuver to keep $306.1 million that otherwise would have gone back to taxpayers through TABOR refunds. The stated rationale from Gov. Jared Polis’s administration is that the state “overpaid” refunds in 2025-26 because later federal budget changes altered how revenue for 2024-25 should have been calculated. In other words, after the checks went out, the folks in charge decided the people may have gotten too much of their own money.

Goodland lays out the key problem plainly. Joint Budget Committee staff warned in a February memo that treating this as an over-refund is likely not legal, because the timing of the federal changes means the state could not properly book that impact back into the prior fiscal year. Even so, the JBC decided to use half of that amount, $153 million, to help balance the next budget, with the other half penciled in for the following year. Colorado Democrats looked at a constitutional refund obligation and saw a budget patch. That tells you a lot.

The Bullet Point Brief

• Hidden in the budget is a $306.1 million “savings” line item, and that savings just happens to come from canceling TABOR refunds. Government has a funny way of calling it savings when it is your wallet doing the bleeding.
• Polis’ budget team says the state overpaid refunds because federal budget changes altered the revenue picture after the fact. Convenient little twist there. The government sent the money out, then came back later with the political version of “actually, we meant to keep that.”
• JBC staff threw a legal yellow flag and said this move likely does not fit the law governing actual over-refunds. That warning did not exactly kill the idea. Apparently “may not be legal” is now just another speed bump on the road to spending other people’s money.
• The committee still chose to use $153 million of it for budget balancing in 2026-27, with the rest slated for the next year. So yes, before the bill is even introduced, the money is already being eyed like a steak at a coyote convention.
• Forecasts differ on whether future TABOR surpluses will even be big enough to absorb this trick without creating more problems, especially after other obligations like senior and disabled veterans’ property tax refunds. That is what makes this whole thing feel less like sound budgeting and more like fiscal pickpocketing with a calculator.

My Bottom Line

Nobody should be surprised by this. Colorado Democrats have never exactly hidden their contempt for TABOR. They hate the restraint, they hate the refund, and they really hate the idea that taxpayers might get to decide how to spend their own money instead of handing it over to the state so some committee can call it “investment.”

What makes this especially rich is the packaging. They are not out there saying, “We want to keep your refund because we love spending.” No, that would be too honest. Instead, it gets tucked deep into a giant budget document, wrapped in accounting jargon, and floated as a correction to an “over-refund.” That is how the game works under the dome. Dress up the grab in technical language and hope regular people are too busy living actual lives to notice.

And let’s not miss the important detail here: their own budget staff reportedly warned that the legal footing is shaky. Not uncertain in the abstract. Not “debatable among scholars.” Shaky enough to flag the risk in writing. Yet somehow the impulse remains the same. Keep the money first. Sort out the constitutional headache later. That is not prudence. That is appetite.

TABOR exists precisely because Colorado voters understood something the political class still refuses to accept: government does not own every extra dollar that flows through the economy. The refund is not a gift from the Capitol. It is the return of money the state was never entitled to keep in the first place. Democrats see that constitutional limit as an obstacle. The rest of us see it as a guardrail against exactly this kind of nonsense.

Source: The Denver Gazette