Thursday, August 29, 2019

Colorado: No Legacy Fund Like That Of North Dakota -- August 29, 2019

From The Denver Post.

Nice to see North Dakota getting the exposure it is getting regarding the Legacy Fund.
In 2010, voters in North Dakota approved the creation of a state-administered fund that would collect hundreds of millions of dollars a year in severance taxes generated by the oil and gas boom ...

As production in the Bakken Formation raced upward from 112 million barrels in 2010 to nearly half a billion barrels last year, the severance taxes feeding the North Dakota Legacy Fund have swelled its balance to $6.2 billion. The fund last year generated $225 million in earnings and interest ...

The trust fund’s balance is expected to more than double over the next decade — to nearly $15 billion ...

Three years before voters in North Dakota went to the polls, a committee of 11 Colorado state lawmakers convened to take a look at how severance taxes were allocated in the Centennial State. After a half dozen meetings and a couple of field trips to mineral-rich Rio Blanco and Garfield counties, the group came to the conclusion that it would behoove Colorado to create a permanent trust fund “as a resource in the future when the mineral extraction industry declines.”

“Interest from a trust fund could also be used to provide additional resources for higher education to educate the state’s workforce,” the committee wrote in its 2007 report.

Fast forward to 2019 … and Colorado still has no permanent trust fund.

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