Colorado's battle over tax limits could shape future growth

The state's Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper, is trying to find ways to squeeze more revenue for roads from the budget, while Republicans don't want to tamper with the fabled 1992 constitutional amendment known as TABOR that keeps a tight limit on those taxes.

"The budget battle here plays to people everywhere who don't want politicians to decide for them the easiest way to get more revenue," said Michael Fields, director of Americans for Prosperity Colorado, which has urged GOP lawmakers to sign a pledge to defend TABOR.

"What we have to stop doing is pitting necessary priorities like roads against other necessary priorities like schools and colleges," said Tim Hoover, spokesman for the Colorado Fiscal Institute, which favors dismantling the amendment.

Even Hickenlooper acknowledges there isn't a popular appetite to raise taxes, and his hopes of changing the classification of an arcane fee in the budget to free up revenue are opposed by Republicans who vow it won't make it out of the State Senate, which they control.

The Colorado Contractors Association, whose members employ more than 40,000 people, has been sampling the public mood about ways to pay for roads, which it and other business chambers around the state say is a top voter concern.

In swaths of northern and southern Colorado, two-lane rural roads built in the Depression era are deteriorating under the load of agricultural tractor-trailers and oil and natural gas tankers.