State budget questions, public Christian school, primary elections explained
The top stories from Colorado this week
🤑 I spent much of this week doing research and talking to experts about Colorado’s state budget in preparation for a series of explainers about how the government is spending our tax money.
Taxes are one of the issues Coloradans care about the most, and if you know where to look, it’s not that hard to find the data.
What’s not so easy is digging into that data and finding out what it really means.
But that’s my job. So if you’ve got a question about the state budget or about how our tax dollars are spent, let me know and I’ll look into it.
Stay tuned for the budget explainers starting next week!
🏫 Colorado’s first “public Christian school” is dropping a discrimination lawsuit against the state and it could be forced to shut down under new rules lawmakers passed this year.
The school is called Riverstone Academy and it opened last August in Pueblo county.
The founders hoped they could provoke a lawsuit that would end up at the U.S. Supreme Court, and force the state to provide funding even though the school is explicitly religious.
But that didn’t go as planned. Right after the school opened, the county cited it for health and safety issues and the kids had to move into a nearby church.
The school did eventually sue the state over the funding issue, but now that lawsuit is over.
It’s probably not the end of the broader fight over public funding for religious schools – but it is the end of this particular battle.
📮 Voters in Colorado’s primary elections next month will choose among candidates largely selected by a small group of highly engaged political party actors, according to a new report from the progressive advocacy group Courageous Colorado.
The primaries are important because they decide which candidates will be on the final ballot this fall. And in heavily Democratic or Republican areas, the winner of the dominant party’s primary almost always wins the general election too.
But Colorado actually makes it way more complicated and difficult for candidates to get on the primary ballot than most other states.
Here, a lot of candidates qualify for the primaries by participating in a process called a caucus or assembly, which tend to be controlled by political party insiders.
And that could be making our politics more polarized. Even though most Colorado voters are independent, the candidates that end up on the primary ballots are often chosen by a small group of highly-engaged, political party actors.
The report calls this Colorado’s “democracy paradox” – the state makes it easy to vote, but it gives voters really narrow choices about who to vote for.