Mile high turnover: Democrats, controlling both chambers for the first time in 44 years, try to dig Colorado out of a budget mess.

• Author: Frates, Chris

Republican lawmakers watching a small group of jubilant Democrats saunter into the Colorado House of Representatives singing and strumming "When the Saints Go Marching In," may have looked out the window onto that snowy January morning and wondered if hell had frozen over.

But on that first day of the 2005 legislative session, the only thing on ice was more than four decades of Republican power. Democrats had taken control of both legislative chambers for the first time since 1961. In fact, Colorado was the only state to flip control of both chambers in the 2004 elections, despite voting for George W. Bush.

The unexpected upset stunned the state's political establishment. Reverberations from the seismic shift have been felt unevenly through state policy. Solving the state's budget crisis, the epicenter of the Democratic agenda, saw huge movement while worker protections were pushed but largely unmoved. And that was by design.

Democrats swept into power, many say, on the promise to solve the state's budget crisis. Keeping that promise meant swearing off some of their more liberal causes and, by doing so, angering many of the people who helped give them control. Observers said Democrats were steering clear of controversial liberal bills to focus on solving the state's budget problems and win a major political victory in this conservative state.

"Our job is not to indulge every liberal fantasy our supporters may have nurtured for the last 44 years," said Democratic House Speaker Andrew Romanoff in January.

Longtime Capitol observer and Colorado State University political science professor John Straayer summed up the session this way: "It was dominated by the overpowering issue of the budget crisis. There was the normal partisan bickering and bantering back and forth. In the end, it was a triumph of pragmatism across party lines and across institutions--executive, legislative institutions."

Here's how it went down.

DEALING WITH TABOR

Colorado has cut more than $l billion in programs over the last four years. The cuts to Medicaid, state colleges and other major programs have been severe. By the fall of 2004, economists were predicting another $263 million funding slash. Lawmakers faced what they called draconian cuts: booting the elderly out of nursing homes, closing state parks and privatizing state colleges. Or they could have employed more duct-tape measures that temporarily held the budget together while leaving the underlying causes for the shortfall untouched.

Exacerbating the situation were predictions by state economists that showed enough revenue returning to avoid those choices--but the state couldn't keep that money. The Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, TABOR, a constitutional spending limit, said the money--hundreds of millions of dollars-must be refunded to taxpayers.

Romanoff had been working for more than a year to solve the bind. Lawmakers had failed to find a constitutional fix, which required two-thirds approval from each chamber, in 2004 when Republicans controlled both branches of government. Now with his party in control, the young speaker proposed a statutory solution that required only a majority vote to pass. Even so, it would still need voter approval in November.

Democrats realized early on that jamming through a partisan solution would doom the measure at the polls. They needed Republican support. They needed Governor Bill Owens. But Owens wasn't an easy sell. As a legislator, Owens helped pass TABOR in 1992 and has become one of the amendment's strongest national supporters. But the governor had shown some willingness to solve the budget bind when, in December, he announced a plan to help put the state back on better financial footing.

The principles of that plan--namely asking voters to allow the state to keep about $500 million that would otherwise be refunded to them--became Owens' bargaining position. Owens also suggested cutting the tax rate, an idea he took from an earlier Romanoff plan. But in Romanoff's proposal, which eventually became the main legislative vehicle, the House speaker...