$27 billion state spending plan<\/a> passed an initial vote in the House of Representatives on Thursday after a shorter-than-usual five-hour debate. The bill is expected to receive a final recorded vote Friday before advancing to the Senate.<\/p>\nBrown had the support of Republican leadership, who often teamed with him to push for the amendments.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no other higher priority in this budget than our kids,\u201d said House Minority Leader Brian DelGrosso, R-Loveland, who often thanked Brown for taking the lead.<\/p>\n
Brown is up for re-election this year, facing off against Democrat Barbara McLachlan, an award-winning retired Durango teacher and the wife of former Rep. Mike McLachlan.<\/p>\n
Education policy is expected to play a key role in the race.<\/p>\n
Budget writers \u2013 both Republicans and Democrats \u2013 pointed out that it took significant maneuvering to balance the budget proposal, which closes the gap in education funding by $24.5 million. Per-pupil spending would increase by $112 to $7,425.<\/p>\n
In terms of transportation, budget writers underscored that they proposed investing $150 million in the upcoming fiscal year, which begins in July. Still, roads and highways would see an overall cut of $50 million.<\/p>\n
Lawmakers also wrangled over federal air pollution standards. Republicans attempted to strip money from state health officials in an effort to block implementation of new carbon standards required by the Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Supreme Court in February halted implementation of the Clean Power Plan pending resolution of legal challenges.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got a Clean Power Plan that the governor is going forward with that we didn\u2019t vote on that is taking money away from doing what CDPHE is supposed to be doing,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n
Democrats, however, killed the amendments, stating that they did not want to take resources away from a department that works on overall air quality controls, not just those required under the Clean Power Plan.<\/p>\n
Other wedge issues that crept into the budget debate were abortion and family values.<\/p>\n
Some Republicans attempted to block funding for a survey given to students on a range of topics, including drug use and sexual activity. The GOP lawmakers felt the questions were inappropriate for a young audience.<\/p>\n
Those same GOP lawmakers \u2013 Reps. Patrick Neville of Franktown and Kim Ransom of Littleton \u2013 also attempted to prohibit state universities from participating in fetal tissue research programs and to block funding for state-sponsored birth control programs.<\/p>\n
When Democrats blocked the fetal tissue amendment from being heard over legal concerns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
J. Paul Brown fights for schools and roads<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":105903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[94,13,12,722],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-105902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-colorado-state-government","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-state-budget-and-tax","tag-state-rep-j-paul-brown"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105902"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=105902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}