Coloradans reach their limit with TABOR: in one of the fiercest issue campaigns watched nationwide, Colorado voters chose to give money back to the financially strapped state.

• Author: Frates, Chris
• Position: Taxpayer's Bill of Rights

It is the national anti-tax movement's Foundation Stone--the Colorado constitution's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR). This fall, big-government spenders sweet-talked voters into taking sledgehammers to The Rock. And by doing so, taxpayers chained themselves to more government spending and higher taxes.

Or so the faithful would say.

Their opponents would tell you that assessment is, to put it politely, bunk.

Supporters of November's ballot measures to let the state keep more money and authorize bonding said the measures were necessary to keep the state budget off life support.

The fight united Democrats and Republicans and put business and labor on the same team. It also split the Republican Party, damaged the governor's reputation with his conservative base and brought national anti-tax leaders like Grover Norquist and former U.S. House majority leader Dick Armey to town.

In short, it was like no other issue campaign the state has ever seen. And all the fuss was over two little letters, C and D.

Referendum C successfully asked voters to let the state keep an estimated $3.7 billion over the next five years that would have otherwise been returned to taxpayers under TABOR. Its companion measure, Referendum D, would have used some of that money to borrow $2.1 billion largely for transportation and school improvements, but was narrowly rejected.

Supporters said the money was needed to help the state recover from the more than $1 billion legislators had slashed from the budget over the past four years. A provision of TABOR limited the state's ability to recover quickly from the economic downturn even as more revenue rolled in.

The TABOR revenue limit would have forced lawmakers to return surplus money to taxpayers while making even deeper cuts. Essentially, the state would have been running a surplus and a deficit simultaneously. For next year, that meant almost $500 million in additional cuts and $600 million in TABOR refunds, according to legislative economists.

BIPARTISAN DEAL

The problem pushed Democratic legislative leaders and Republican Governor Bill Owens to the bargaining table last winter where they banged out the details of what eventually became Referendums C and D.

Owens, a fiscal conservative that National Review once named the best governor in America, was an unlikely poster boy for the Vote Yes on C&D campaign. A strong TABOR supporter--he helped campaign for its passage in 1992--Owens was a darling of the conservative right whose name often made the rounds as a possible presidential contender in 2008.

After Democrats took control of the legislature in 2004 for the first time in four decades, Owens drafted a plan to right the state's sinking budget. The state, Owens reasoned, could not afford to refund money to taxpayers while slashing services.

For the first time since it passed 13 years ago, TABOR was about to become the problem, the governor said.

So Owens and Democratic leaders crafted a plan both sides could sell to their constituencies. They used a provision within TABOR that allows elected officials to ask voters whether the state can keep more money than the limit allows. Voters have approved hundreds of similar measures on the...