The Department of Education projects that enrollments will grow by 0.7 percent in the current fiscal year. The education budget request remarks that “additional funding proposed by the Governor will allow local districts and charter schools to decide how to best improve the education opportunities of their students.” As required by Amendment 23, the inflationary increase to the State Education Fund amounts to $8.9 million. The Department of Education proposed to allocate much of this increase to “categorical programs,” which are educational initiatives tailored to specific groups of students including those with disabilities, ESL students, at-risk students, and gifted and talented students, as well as specialized programs such as technical training, health education, and school transportation. The final budget included funds to support many of these initiatives with a $78.12 million increase in spending from the prior year. This number is below the increase requested in the governor’s budget, hydroponic dutch buckets but does represent an investment in education when many competing priorities exist. In dollar amounts, the proposed increase in higher education funding is similar to that for K-12 education.
Increasing higher education spending by $86.9 million is almost a 10 percent increase from the current fiscal year’s funding level. Among the notable initiatives in the higher education budget are $73.1 million to improve college affordability and outcomes. This includes a $59.1 million allocation to state college governing boards “to address affordability for all students by moderating higher education tuition increases” . Additional funds indirectly distributed to students include $13.9 million for need-based financial aid and work-study programs and $4.0 million for the Colorado Opportunity Scholarship Initiative. The budget also includes lines for new programs such as the $1.5 million proposed for an Emergency Completion and Retention Grant, which is a one-time benefit for students experiencing an unexpected financial hardship, and $5.0 million for a new Occupational Credential Capacity Grant program, which supports “high-demand post-secondary certificate credentials.” The General Assembly elected to fund these college affordability efforts, among other programs, by providing more funding than the governor’s budget requested. The final appropriation for Higher Education was in excess of $1.0 billion, a 12.1 percent increase, which is greater than the governor’s requested increase of 9.7 percent.
In dollar amounts, this increased outlay is among the largest in the approved budget after the $115 million increase approved for Human Services. After K-12 education, health care spending represents the second largest budgetary outlay. Similar to the education budget, legislators approved health care funding at a level slightly less than Governor Hickenlooper’s request. The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing is slated to receive increased General Fund appropriations totaling nearly $100 million, despite an expected decline in the state’s Medicare caseload. Among the new spending initiatives regarding health care include $89.4 million for Medicaid, the Child Health Plan Plus , and the Medicare Modernization Act. Provider rate adjustments proposed in the budget total $10.3 million, which constitute a standard increase of 0.77 percent. The final budget increased health care spending by $81.8 million . In percentage terms, the department with the largest proposed budget increase is Personnel at nearly 17 percent. Funds were also included to hire six full-time employees to assist with the state archives and the address confidentiality program, which assists individuals who have experienced domestic violence. The legislature approved an increase about 12.5 percent, which is the fifth largest increase in the final budget. Departments with an increase in spending in excess of this amount, which were greater than the governor’s proposals, include Treasury, Public Safety, Local Affairs, and Human Services. As seen in Table 3, the largest deviation from the governor’s proposal is the substantial increase in Treasury spending. This increase is primarily attributable to $225 million in approved appropriations from a separate bill as an unfunded liabilities distribution to PERA. Conversely, the department with the largest proposed cut to its budget is Department of Labor and Employment, which the governor’s budget request proposes to reduce by 13.5 percent. The approved budget for Labor and Employment imposes a cut of 8.9 percent, which is the only department’s budget reduced by the General Assembly for this fiscal year.
While not reducing the budget from the prior year, data reported in Table 3 show that legislators ultimately provided less funding than the governor proposed for six departments, while the remaining 13 departments received funding in excess of Governor Hickenlooper’s request. Similar to previous years, other departments with large budgets include Human Services , Corrections , and the courts . The Human Services budget proposed salary increases for staff as well as imposing a 1 percent increase in community provider rates . The budget also proposed nearly $10.0 million in General Fund spending for the Office of Behavioral Health, which provides numerous services including court-ordered health evaluations and outpatient treatment. The proposed correctional budget sought additional funds to address capacity issues since the prison population is projected to increase slightly next year in a modest reversal of an overall downward trend. More than $18.0 million is slated to go toward a variety of health-related programs providing treatment and benefits to current prisoners. Nearly $2 million would be used to hire 14.5 additional full-time employees with the Colorado State Patrol. The department justified the need for additional highway patrol officers in order to reach their goal of equally dividing officer time between reactive and proactive policing. An additional $1.2 million from marijuana tax revenue will fund a special unit within the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to investigate illegal marijuana trafficking.An updated letter from Governor Hickenlooper to the JBC on March 19, 2018 stated that the revised economic forecasting data indicated an additional $548 million available to for state legislators to spend. The governor’s office proposed allocating nearly half of this amount to transportation needs across the state. Transportation funding has been a source of controversy in recent years, as the legislature appeared to have the votes to refer a modest tax increase to voters for consideration in the prior election year. However, a small group of Republicans in the Senate blocked the measure from progressing out of committee. Transportation funding remains one of the key issues on the legislature’s agenda as the session moves toward a close. As in 2017, Governor Hickenlooper’s final State of the State address called for a transportation tax to be placed on the fall ballot. Last year, bato bucket the General Assembly came close to referring a measure to the voters that would increase the state’s sales tax from 2.9 percent to 3.52 percent. This revenue would be used to secure bonds for local and statewide transportation projects. The referendum passed the House with all Democrats voting in favor in addition to four Republicans. Although it appeared likely that the measure would similarly pass in the Senate, it was defeated in committee. Governor Hickenlooper encouraged lawmakers to revisit the transportation tax increase in the current session by arguing, “We need to be even more ambitious. It’s time we look at a long-term solution with a sustainable funding source. There’s broad agreement — across party lines. Coloradans deserve the opportunity to vote on whether we need new resources and where they should come from. It’s time to go to the voters” . The legislature is currently considering a number of alternatives, but it appears likely that the parties will reach some type of funding agreement soon. The current compromise will likely involve a one-time spending allocation to transportation as the governor proposed along with an agreement to defer any ballot measure to increase taxes for transportation funding to 2019 or beyond . However, it is possible that a citizen’s initiative to raise transportation taxes may nonetheless qualify for the ballot. Coloradans are generally not supportive of such proposals. Voters rejected increased cigarette taxes in 2016, and Coloradans twice opposed income and sales tax increases to fund education in 2011 and 2013. Neither outcome was close. In fact, since TABOR was ratified into the state’s constitution in 1992, no proposed tax increase on the statewide ballot has passed with the exception of an increase in cigarette taxes when the electorate approved Amendment 35 in 2004. Voters did, however, approve the tax levels for the new retail marijuana market in 2013.
If the transportation tax initiative is delayed for at least another year, there will be a different governor in office when voters decide whether the addressing state’s transportation problems merit a tax increase. Based upon the party’s positions in the legislature, one would expect that the Republican candidate for governor would oppose a transportation tax increase, while a Democratic candidate would likely campaign in support of the measure. The 2018–2019 state budget provides substantial financial investments in existing and new programs across a wide array of policy areas. Governor Hickenlooper identified education, transportation, and corrections as among the issues worthy of greater funding. A General Fund budget of $11.42 billion exceeds the budget from the prior fiscal year by nearly 8 percent. This increase in spending is made possible by a confluence of factors including a strong economy, federal tax reform, and state budgetary reform from the prior year affecting how the hospital provider fee pertains to the requirements imposed by TABOR. Yet TABOR remains, as its creators intended, a powerful vehicle to limit government revenue and spending. While the state budget increases funding for nearly every state department, a prosperous economy would normally allow for even greater investments in areas of need. Sustained population growth has expanded the tax base, but the state government remains restricted in the amount of revenue it can collect and spend. Citizen initiatives to increase taxes for education and transportation will appear on the ballot in the 2018 midterm election, but Coloradans have rarely demonstrated a willingness to increase taxes. Accordingly, the constraints imposed by TABOR have curtailed even greater investments in state programs that a strong economy and budgetary reform have helped facilitate.A quick history of ecology might begin with the idea that Tansley’s post-WWI botanical surveys ushered in the modern science of ecology, although its basic vision was articulated half a century earlier by Haeckel, in what was a simple statement recognizable even today in its modern manifestation . The application of mathematics to the field was pioneered by the threesome of Lotka, Volterra, and Gausse, in the 1920s and the conceptualization of an ecosystem as a hierarchical energy transfer system by Lindeman in 1942, arguably the foundation on which the Odum brothers successfully launched what we call ecosystems ecology today . The famous Hairston and colleagues paper, perhaps marking the birth of modern community ecology, generated a popular framework that continues generating interesting research questions, all formulated around the central idea that terrestrial communities are regulated by the predators eating the herbivores. Finally, Richard Levins’s lifelong commitment to viewing both ecological communities and ecosystems as complex systems presaged the current popularity of combining recent developments in the field of complex systems with the persistent search for basic framings in community ecology . This is the historical skeleton on which the current essay is built, framed within the Hairston and colleagues hypothesis in the context of Levins’s insistence on a complex systems approach. The most enduring question of Hairston and colleagues remains popular today, indeed takes on new meaning in the context of modern complex systems. Is a community controlled from above or below, from predators or from competition among herbivores for plant resources ? Certainly ecologists have not been credulous to the point of oversimplifying either predator–prey relationships or interspecific competition; however, the simple question “Is control from above or below?” seems a persistent underlying framework for many research programs. The agroecosystem, by its very nature, refuses to entertain this question, at least in its classical form. If the objects of attention are overused by the herbivores , it is not a system that is regarded as one we should allow to persist . Rather, if the system is to persist at all, the herbivores must be regulated from above. Indeed the standard practical agronomic question “How can we control the pests?” if translated into its true ecological meaning would be “How can we cause the system to switch from control from below to control from above?” Control from below has come to mean much more than seems to have been the intent of Hairston and colleagues , especially in light of what we now understand about plant chemistry and its relationship to herbivory .