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Sports betting and lack of water funding.

Turner Chang
Legislative
HItt
12/4/19
Colorado legalized sports betting on November 5 2019 with the intention of having a portion of the revenue from betting going towards the water legislation called the Colorado water plan. This new legislation is  possible because of the Supreme Court's ruling to leaving the legalization of sports betting up to individual states. Since this new bill would have a new tax they had to put the vote up to the general public due to TABOR the taxpayers bill of rights. Proposition DD had 1.3 million people vote on it and only passed by a 1.5% margin(Candee). The proposal had passed without a vote going out to the citizens for a vote and many said that TABOR protocol was not necessary. They eventually decided to put it out for a vote just to make sure that the constituents were satisfied with this new tax.

Chart from Adam Candee article.

The chart pictured above shows each districts decision on the proposal with they green districts having voted no while they blue districts had voted yes. You can see that a majority of yes votes are in the Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins area and this is because  in the rural areas there is a much higher density on conservatives than democrats. The money needed to fund the Colorado water act is estimated at around 3 billion dollars over the next 30 years and with many projects from the Polis administration including all day kindergarten for free(Hazell). With this new revenue they Colorado government is expecting to earn 16 million dollars per year with 10 percent going towards addiction counselling and other businesses. The remaining 90 percent of the revenue would go towards the Colorado water act(Hazell). If the estimates on yearly revenue are correct they still would need to raise another 80 million dollars on average. The bill also limits what this money can be spent on, an example  that Hazell and Clarke discuss is paying farmers to use less water. A large part of Colorado’s revenue comes from the oil and gas industry and lately the have had less contributions to the state due to two main factors. The first being that they are now able to deduct more from their yearly taxes due to the falling prices of oil and natural gas. Secondly the gas companies have lost all good will towards the state government due to bill SB - 181 which was aimed at increasing regulations over the oil and gas industry which also lead to the recall of Governor Jared Polis. Currently they are in talks of new bills that would outline some of the more major projects that would be funded by this new revenue like creating new reservoirs(Hazzel). 

Candee, Adam. “Colorado Sports Betting Now Legal After Referendum Passes.” Legal Sports Report, 15 Nov. 2019, www.legalsportsreport.com/35933/colorado-sports-betting-approved/.

Hazell, Vanessa, and Juanne Clarke. “Race and Gender in the Media: A Content Analysis of Advertisements in Two Mainstream Black Magazines - Vanessa Hazell, Juanne Clarke, 2008.” SAGE Journals, 8 May 2007, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021934706291402.

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