The Rise of The Phoenix - Colorado State Senate Takes Step in Right Direction

Opinion by Martin

At this time, when the government, at all levels, appears to be running amuck, spending money that the taxpayers don’t have, the Colorado State Senate has apparently decided that enough is enough and has started taking steps to remedy the problem.

Senate Joint Resolution 12-026 is putting the Federal Government on notice that unfunded mandates are no longer acceptable.  Unfunded mandates are those pieces of legislature where the President and Congress make promises to a specific group of people, find out that they don’t have the money to keep those promises, so they dump them on the various states.  This causes the states to have to figure out how to pay for the programs out of D.C. and generally, that means higher taxes for the residents of the states.

The following excerpt is from SJR 12-026.

Be It Resolved by the Senate of the Sixty-eighth General Assembly of the State of Colorado, the House of Representatives concurring herein:

(1) That we, the General Assembly, call on the federal government to refrain from creating any new unfunded mandates to be passed down to state or local governments; and

(2) That we, the General Assembly, will not create new mandates on local governments without providing adequate funding.

Be It Further Resolved, That copies of this Joint Resolution be sent to President Barack Obama, the chair of each congressional committee, Governor John Hickenlooper, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado Counties Inc., and Colorado's congressional delegation.

This Joint Resolution addresses unfunded mandates from both State and Federal level and requires that no mandates be sent to the state, counties, or cities without the money to finance those requirements.

I wish to congratulate the Colorado State Senate on taking one of the first steps forward in salvaging the pocketbooks of State Taxpayers.