Mental health policies in America have changed radically over the past 60 years. A one-time emphasis on caring for patients in large institutions has shifted to treating them in outpatient settings in the community. The ways mental disorders are diagnosed and categorized have changed. And the use of psychotropic medications is more prevalent than it used to be.

But throughout the decades, one thing has remained the same. States have taken the lead role in publicly funded care for the mentally ill, and paid the majority of the expenses. Even through recessions, the states have steadily increased their mental health budgets every year to meet increasing demand.

Now, as states face their biggest fiscal challenge in modern history, the trend has reversed. For the first time in more than three decades, mental health funding is declining. The drop-off is translating into a reduction in the number of psychiatric hospital beds, as well as fewer services for mental health emergencies and longer waiting lists for housing for the chronically mentally ill. The cuts are coming just as some experts say economic pressures are creating an increase in mental illness.

Although no national numbers are available, hospital emergency rooms, juvenile courts, child welfare agencies, local jails and homeless shelters are reporting bulges in the number of mentally ill people who end up on their doorsteps after failing to get help elsewhere.

In addition, a recent national survey showed that the weak economy is taking a toll on the mental health of Americans, with unemployed people four times as likely as those with jobs to report symptoms of severe mental illness.

“States are chipping away at their already very fragile mental health system,” says Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness, which advocates for improved mental health care. “More people will be unable to find even basic services that allow them to stay out of the hospital or involvement with police. It’s a dire situation that we’ve never seen before.”

Funding fluctuations

Since the 1950s, when states cared for more than 500,000 people in psychiatric hospitals, state mental health programs have included more and more community-based services. Those include a wide array of services, such as suicide prevention and 24-hour crisis centers, treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, housing and work supports, counseling and violence-prevention programs. Although advocates maintain that only half of those in need are receiving public mental health services, states have made progress by serving more people in the community at about half the price of committing them to institutions — and with better outcomes. Today, only 50,000 people reside in state mental hospitals while millions are served on an outpatient basis.

Still, states have had to increase their budgets to keep pace with demand. Despite fluctuations in funding for nearly every other social service, state mental health budgets have increased nationally by about 6 percent per year for the past 30 years.

Now, for the first time, states are pulling back mental health spending. These unprecedented cuts — nearly 4 percent as a national average between 2008 and 2009 — come at a time when other public agencies such as child welfare, law enforcement and housing also are experiencing budget cuts and can ill afford to handle the overflow.

According to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, 2010 spending appears to have fallen nearly 5 percent compared to 2009. Early indications are that 2011 mental health budgets may sink by 8 percent or more.

Exacerbating the mental health budget crisis is uncertainty over whether Congress will decide to extend an increase in the federal match for Medicaid services under the stimulus program, which a majority of states have counted on to stretch their overall health care budgets.

In 2008, states spent $36 billion on mental health services to care for 6.4 million people, about half the number of people advocates say are in need of care. Of the total, about $17 billion came from Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, $500 million came from federal grants and the balance was funded through state general revenues. Not counted in the total is funding from county and local budgets, much of which also sits on the chopping block.

Where the cuts are

Although a few states have minimized mental health cuts and targeted less essential services, many states are closing psychiatric hospitals, eliminating 24-hour crisis centers and tightening eligibility for subsidized medications and services that affect thousands of adults and children with severe mental illness.

Here are some examples of states that have made big cuts:

To fill a $1 billion hole in its 2011 budget, Arizona slashed this year’s budget for mental health services by $36 million — a 37 percent cut. As a result, advocates say 3,800 people who do not qualify for Medicaid are at risk of losing services such as counseling and employment preparation. In addition, more than 12,000 adults and 2,000 children will no longer receive the name-brand medications they take to keep their illnesses in check. Other services such as supportive housing and transportation to doctor’s appointments also will be eliminated.

Arizona has been considered a progressive state because it provides the vast majority of mental health services through cost-effective outpatient community programs. By slashing these programs, experts say the state will force more people to use emergency rooms or end up in the criminal justice system, which will cost the state more.

In Illinois, where Democratic Governor Pat Quinn is trying to bridge a $13 billion budget gap, a proposed mental-health budget cut of $91 million was reduced to $35 million after patients and practitioners protested at the governor’s mansion earlier this month. Even so, advocates say more than 70,000 people, including 4,200 children, are in danger of losing basic community services, which may result in more instances of hospitalization. The cuts come on the heels of a court settlement requiring the state to transfer 4,500 severely mentally disabled patients out of nursing homes and into community residential facilities following a string of rapes and assaults on elderly residents.

Mississippi has cut its mental health budget by about 8 percent for three consecutive years, resulting in the closure of a residential mental health facility for adolescents, elimination of 184 beds in one of the state’s biggest psychiatric hospitals and consolidation of six crisis centers with existing community mental health centers. In the fiscal year that started July 1, the state plans to further cut funding to localities for mental health services. Prior to the recession, Mississippi lagged far behind most states in funding community services and housed the highest percentage of people with mental illness in state institutions.

This story was filed by Stateline reporter Christine Vestal.

BOOTSTRAP: WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY
Mental Health America offers resources to find care in your community, insurance guides and a 24/7 crisis hotline.

Operation Healthy Reunions provides educational materials for service members, military families and health care providers.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness is encouraging the public to contact Congress to urge passage of H.R. 4213 American Workers, State and Business Relief Act of 2010. The bill is in conference committee to reconcile differences between the two chambers.

Right now, it’s nothing more than 275 square miles of desert on the eastern periphery of metropolitan Phoenix. But one day, Superstition Vistas — named after the mountain range that looms over the scrubby land — could be home to a new city of 1 million people, almost as big as Phoenix itself.

That’s the plan of the Arizona State Land Department, which owns the land. The department, an agency of 122 people, is responsible for 9.3 million acres scattered throughout the state. Not long ago, it was an easily overlooked corner of the bureaucracy that mostly leased land to ranchers and miners. Over the past decade, however, the agency became a real estate juggernaut by selling thousands of acres to developers. For a while, sales poured hundreds of millions of dollars a year into a trust fund dedicated to schools.

Now, with the boom gone bust, the land department is hoping to catch its breath long enough to learn a few lessons. Superstition Vistas is a test case of sorts, to see if an agency that minted money by auctioning land to the highest bidder can take a more deliberate approach when the market rebounds. In Superstition’s early planning stages, the land department is delving into the nitty-gritty of land use planning — something it has never attempted on such a scale. It’s also seeking to reform the rules governing state trust lands, which have not been substantially updated since Arizona became a state in 1912.

In the wake of the housing meltdown, similar conversations are taking place in other states across the West. Some 48 million acres in the West are in state hands. And while the bulk of it lies in remote places where ranching, forestry and mining will dominate for the foreseeable future, thousands of acres lie near growing metro areas where strip mines are giving way to strip malls. In the sun-baked Interior West, the next round of growth — whenever it comes — likely will take place on state lands. Jon Souder, an expert on state trusts lands who works as executive director of the Coos Watershed Association in Oregon, calls this phenomenon “the last land rush.”

In the early 2000’s, state land agencies saw revenue from land sales and development spike. The housing crash caused those numbers to fall off.

Managing this growth will be a challenge for state governments. Most of them had almost no experience in real estate development until about a decade ago. In Arizona, for example, environmentalists want to see more land sealed off from developers, while developers want to cut through the red tape that tends to tie up state land sales. The state and local governments want more flexibility in deciding how to dispose of the land, while school advocates are hesitant to sign off on any change that will reduce their trust fund revenues. All the while, ranchers, some from families that have been working state lands for generations, want to protect their leases.

“There’s a nice pause,” says Dave Richins, Arizona policy director for the nonprofit Sonoran Institute, which studies land use patterns in the West. The market slowdown, Richins says, “allows us to look at 9.3 million acres of state trust lands and plan where we want development and growth to be, plan where we want conservation to be, plan where we want transmission lines and roads to be and lock that in.”

The question is: Will Arizona and other Western states be ready when the market turns back up?

A rite of statehood

When territories achieved statehood, the federal government gave them millions of acres of lands, often in small parcels scattered across the state in a checkerboard pattern. Although the enabling legislation differed from state to state, they were required to create a trust to manage the land, put it to its “highest and best use,” and use the revenues to finance public education.

Some states, such as Nevada and California, sold off most of their land almost immediately. Others leased it out to ranchers and farmers, or struck agreements with timber and mining companies. Today, 23 states, including most states west of the Mississippi River, plus Wisconsin and Mississippi, maintain some land in trust. Texas has the most state land, with 20.3 million acres, much of it leased for oil drilling.

During the housing boom of the past decade, new suitors began to approach state governments. Raw land — once only valued for what could be mined, grazed or harvested from it — became valuable in its own right, as a place to put houses on the fringes of ever-expanding metro areas.

Arizona led the way. Although only a tiny fraction of its state trust land was attractive to developers, the Arizona State Land Department was able to wring eye-popping revenues from sales to developers thanks to the breakneck pace of Phoenix-area growth.

In 2003, then-Governor Janet Napolitano appointed Mark Winkleman to lead the department. Winkleman, who left in 2009, was the first director to come from a real estate background. “We worked pretty hard in my time there to put ourselves in a position to take advantage,” Winkleman says. Revenue from land sales rose from almost $127 million in 2003 to $544 million three years later.

In Utah, the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration struck deals with developers to build on thousands of acres, mostly in Washington County in the Southwestern corner of the state. Development revenue jumped from $15 million in 2003 to $45 million in 2007. In Idaho, revenue from the sale of land increased by more than 600 percent between 2002 and 2007, from $1.1 million to $7 million. “These lands have really been in many ways undervalued,” Souder says. “The trust beneficiaries didn’t pay much attention to them, although that has changed in the last 10 years or so.”

As the pace of development grew faster — and states made more money for their schools — conflicts arose. Environmentalists worried that fragile land was being gobbled up with no regard for conservation. Their opponents weren’t just developers but also school advocates, who were hungry for more revenues. And local governments sometimes sparred with the state over the impact all the new development was having on local services.

Brian Boyle, a former land commissioner in Washington State, where commissioners are elected, says politics goes with the job. “There’s always a political furor that you run into with local legislators about a little parcel of land that some constituency wants to hang on to or when a subdivision doesn’t want the next parcel to be developed or they want the forest not to be cut.”

By law, the agencies have to earn as much money as they possibly can for schools, which makes it very difficult to legally set land aside for conservation.

In Arizona, a ballot measure in 2006 to carve out conservation areas from the state’s land holdings went down after ranchers and home builders opposed it. Another attempt, in 2008, failed for lack of signatures.

Then the housing bust did what the ballot efforts couldn’t: It sucked the momentum out of development. By last year, land-department sales in Arizona dropped to $72 million. What’s more, developers who purchased state lands during the peak of the rush have defaulted on about half a billion dollars’ worth of those sales, according to an analysis by the East Valley Tribune. When that happens, the land reverts to state ownership, although some of the cases are entangled in lawsuits.

One of the more dramatic tales from the bust happened in Utah. In Washington County, the developer of Coral Canyon, an upscale but unfinished 2,600-acre subdivision, put the half-built development on the market last year. Hedge funds circled around the sale but stayed away. Finally, the state decided to buy back the development itself for $3.4 million and sit on it until the market bounces back.

Hopes for reform

While bailouts like the one Utah is making are rare, the housing crash has given land trust officials across the West reason to reevaluate what they’re trying to accomplish. Says Doug Buchi, assistant director for real estate development at the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration: “We need to be a lot more prudent and cautious and not get caught up in the feeding frenzy of when there’s the big land rush going on and everybody wants to jump in and take advantage of rapidly escalating prices only to have what happened happen.”

In Arizona, land department officials made another attempt at land reform last year, but the package got bogged down by colliding interests and sidetracked by the state’s collapsing budget. A central feature of reform would do away with the requirement that the state sell its land by auction. Doing so would give state officials more flexibility to guide what ultimately happens on the land. They could work with local governments, conservationists, builders, ranchers and school officials to find compromises among their various interests, rather than being beholden to selling the land to the highest bidder. In the case of Superstition Vistas, advocates of reform say the land would be worth more with careful planning than if the state auctioned off the 275 square miles piece by piece.

Nevertheless, prospects are dim for trust land reform in the near future. Conservationists, developers, ranchers, school administrators and state officials and others are gathering once again this year to draft an agreement, but making everybody happy will be difficult. Meanwhile, the land department, like all state agencies, has lost staff and seen its budget cut by 25 percent.

“I’m sure the department is doing the best it absolutely can,” says Winkleman. “But there’s no way it has the resources to do an effective job. I think this downturn is largely being wasted.

This story was reported for Stateline by David Harrison.

Glenn Gustafson can imagine a day when Colorado schools fall apart, prisons close and highways crumble. As chief financial officer for the Colorado Springs school system, Gustafson recently had to cut his budget by 6 percent. But those cuts are nothing compared to the hardship he says the school system would face if voters approve three tax-cutting ballot measures this November. He calls them the “evil triplets.”

If approved, the measures would dramatically hinder the ability of the state and local governments to raise and borrow money. Taxes on income and real estate would be slashed, as would fees on car registration and telecommunications. Strict limits on public borrowing would put future construction projects in doubt. According to some estimates, the state tax cut proposals could hack at least 25 percent out of the state’s general fund, not counting cuts to local governments and school systems.

“Are we really ready for the anarchy of an uneducated population that we can’t lock up in prison?” Gustafson asks.

Even in a year of anti-tax outrage, marked by Tea Party rallies around the country, Colorado stands out. Of the roughly 200 ballot measures that voters will decide on this fall, none would potentially shake the foundations of government as much as Colorado’s Amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101. Freda Poundstone, who sponsored Proposition 101, says the proposals are needed to protect taxpayers at a time when many are hurting financially. “It’s time people start getting their money back. It’s tough out there,” Poundstone says. “People are losing their homes, they’ve lost their jobs and they’ve lost their shirts. Government has not been reduced one iota.”

Over the past few months, voters have been sending mixed signals on taxes. Although voters in Arizona and Oregon recently approved higher taxes, several incumbents lost their primaries this week, suggesting that voters may be restless. Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies ballot measures, says anything is possible in Colorado. “If you look at the type of displeasure with government generally and specifically in Colorado, if you look at the anti-incumbent sentiment, if you look at government spending and problems with balancing state budgets, this environment is probably as opportunistic as any for anti-tax crusaders.”

Billions at stake

The main provision of “>Amendment 60 would make school districts cut property tax rates in half by 2020 and require state funds to backfill those cuts. It also would impose property taxes on so-called “state enterprises” such as universities. Local governments wouldn’t get to keep that windfall — they would have to lower tax rates to offset the extra revenue.

Amendment 61 would ban the state from issuing any kind of debt and impose severe restrictions on the amount of debt that local governments could take on. And Proposition 101 would reduce income taxes, vehicle sale taxes, car title and registration fees and communications fees.

The nonpartisan Bell Policy Center, based in Denver, has calculated that Amendment 60 would cut local property taxes by more than $1 billion and force the state general fund to make up the difference. Proposition 101, meanwhile, would cut state tax revenue by $1.7 billion when fully implemented.

“I think these are very moderate proposals that address tax relief and tax reform,” says Natalie Menten, an anti-tax advocate who helped gather petition signatures. Menten, a longtime activist who often has clipboards sliding around the backseat of her car, says the measures are a way of fending off “unconstitutional tax hikes.”

School officials across the state are worried, however. To balance budgets, they would be forced to rely even more heavily on volatile state funding and would no longer be able to borrow money. Several school boards have come out against the measures and more are scheduled to discuss them in the weeks ahead.

A history of anti-tax sentiment

Arguments over taxes and spending are nothing new in Colorado. While many recession-battered states only recently have begun to ask difficult questions about tax rates and service cuts, Coloradans have been grappling with these issues for almost two decades. Mostly, that’s because it’s relatively easy in Colorado to place constitutional amendments on the ballot.

In 1992, voters approved the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, or TABOR, a sweeping measure that became a national model for anti-tax advocates. Authored by the activist Douglas Bruce, TABOR limited revenue increases to that year’s inflation rate plus population growth. Any revenue exceeding those limits had to be returned to taxpayers. And any new revenue-generating plan had to be approved by voters. In practice, these provisions made it very difficult for government revenues to recover from a recession, even as the economy bounced back.

Almost immediately, local governments began chipping away at the provisions of TABOR by petitioning voters to let them keep tax revenue that exceed the act’s limits — a process colloquially known as “de-Brucing.” In 2005, voters approved Referendum C, which allowed the state government to hold onto tax revenue in excess of TABOR’s limitations for a period of five years. A few years later, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld legislation that brought in more property tax revenue. Many observers see this year’s package of ballot measures as an attempt to undo these watering-down efforts.

Yet the implications of the initiatives are unclear. For instance, school districts routinely borrow money from the state to pay teachers until the spring, when property taxes start rolling in. Under Amendment 61, school districts would have no way to pay to keep schools open until April. Gustafson jokes that to make ends meet, he’s considering changing the school calendar or withholding part of teachers’ paychecks until the spring.

Also, it’s unclear how the state will be able to make up for more than $1 billion in property tax cuts called for under Amendment 60. Education already took a $260 million cut this year to balance Colorado’s budget. “To put more money into education out of the state’s general fund you’d have to do something pretty radical: close all the prisons or take all the mentally disabled kids that are in residential facilities and toss them out on the curb,” says state Rep. Joel Judd, chairman of the House Finance Committee. “It’s unlikely that we’d do anything like that.”

So far, Amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101 have generated little discussion among voters. But opponents are mounting a campaign bringing together such disparate interests as labor groups and chambers of commerce. Lawmakers from both parties have criticized the measures. So have both parties’ front-runners in this year’s governor’s race. Coloradans can expect to be flooded with ads on the initiatives during the summer and fall.

Meanwhile, opponents have filed a lawsuit claiming that the sponsors of the ballot measures have not disclosed their funding sources. They accuse Douglas Bruce of being involved with the petition drives. Bruce, who some view as an anti-government demagogue and others laud as a taxpayers’ hero, has denied any involvement and refused to testify in the court case.

Smith, the University of Florida professor, sees similarities between this year and 1992, when TABOR was approved after being rejected by voters twice. “It was a matter of commitment. A lot of folks were not focused on TABOR in 1992, as they had been in previous cycles,” he says. “If progressive groups and the business community aren’t vigilant, when the public mood shifts to an anti-government, anti-tax sentiment, these measures have a chance of passing in a state like Colorado that has a very strong libertarian streak.”

For his part, Gustafson has been spending a lot of time talking to people about the three measures. “I’m a Republican. I’m very conservative,” he says. “I’m not in favor of taxes, but I am in favor of a fair amount of taxes to provide government services. I want prisoners locked up in jail, I want indigents to get health care and I want children to be educated and I want all our children to get a college education. And we’re taking away all those things because of a frustration that I don’t quite understand.”

This story was reported by Stateline staff writer David Harrison.

Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal shot ahead of the wind-state pack by becoming the first chief executive to back a tax on wind energy.

Maybe he can take that risk because he is barred from seeking a third term and announced Mar. 4 that he will not challenge the term limit as he once had considered. Funny how term limits free politicians to take stands they might not otherwise. Pennsylvania’s Governor Ed Rendell, also a lame duck, has been traveling around the state promoting tax increases to balance the state budget.

Freudenthal, an easygoing lawyer who will have more time next January to return to his hobby restoring sheepwagons and Airstream trailers, says politics does not enter into his thinking. Imposing an excise tax on wind-energy production is a question of fairness, he says, and his Legislature agreed.

“Wyoming has a fairly long history of setting the terms under which companies can extract energy from the state that’s premised on the obligation of the companies to handle the impacts, take care of reclamation and contribute to the well-being of the state, says the Democratic governor. “Wind energy is no different.” He was interviewed recently by Stateline.org while in Washington for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association.

As you would expect, the wind-energy industry opposes the governor’s proposal to charge the $1-per-megawatt-hour tax. But some of Freudenthal’s fellow wind-state governors, including Democrats, say the tax would impede development of a nascent green industry viewed as a key alternate power source. They see an opening to gain a competitive edge on Wyoming regardless of the merits of the tax.

“I think Wyoming should make the tax higher so companies will come to Montana,” says Governor Brian Schweitzer of neighboring Montana, another top wind-energy state. “We need to embrace wind energy and offer incentives, not tax it.”

Another Democratic governor, Washington’s Christine Gregoire, is pushing a package of tax increases and spending cuts, but not on wind energy. “Right now, I’m trying to promote wind energy. If I tax it, I believe it will do the opposite,” she says.

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, a Democrat who is not seeking re-election this fall, says his state is evaluating a wind-energy tax, but stressed that does not mean he supports it. “I’m not ready to talk about it,” says Ritter, who has carved out a reputation nationally as an energy governor because of his forward thinking on renewable energy.

Freudenthal says he is not surprised by the pushback. “I would expect Brian to say that,” he says of Schweitzer. He has had an easier time convincing his own Republican-controlled Legislature of the advantages of a wind-energy tax. Both chambers recently approved it and sent it back to him to sign.

Mineral and farm commodities are the backbone of Wyoming’s economy. A Republican governor, Stan Hathaway, shepherded Wyoming’s first severance tax on minerals in 1969 and headed an initiative to create a permanent trust fund in which severance tax money is invested and put back into state government operations.

Freudenthal’s plan is to split the wind-tax revenues, initially estimated at about $4 million a year, between the counties (60 percent) and the state (40 percent). He first called for a $3-per-megawatt tax and 60 percent to the state, but lawmakers revised the proposal.

“Part of the pitch I made was this is the first opportunity in my lifetime to diversify our tax base,” Freudenthal says.

Critics say the industry’s threat to leave the eighth windiest state for more tax-friendly states is baseless. Why would they be any more special than the oil, natural gas, uranium and coal industries that pay state taxes at a higher percentage?

No one wants those massive turbines in their backyard, the governor says, but if companies are going to put them up, it seems reasonable they should pay for the environmental damage they cause. “Lighten up guys,” Freudenthal says of his industry opponents. “This is business.”

This story was reported by Stateline staff writer Stephen C. Fehr.

Source: Retail Systems Research.

The gig is up, according to an interesting, albeit non-scientific 2009 poll by industry watchers Retail Systems Research.

Given the condition of the U.S. and states’ economies and the loss of tax revenues during this recession, the momentum is building across the country to address this issue. Whether the U.S. Congress will deal with it is an entirely different matter. As long ago as 2001 (when internet sales only represented about 1.5% of total retail sales), 40 State Governors sent a letter to Congress asking that a 1998 moratorium on internet sales tax be lifted. But in October 2007, the House of Representatives voted 405-2 to pass the Internet Tax Freedom Act Amendments Act, extending the moratorium on internet access taxes and other taxes unique to the internet until November 2011.

As promised, RSR ran a “quick take” poll to see what our readers think about the prospect of an Internet Sales Tax (the results are in the chart below). Safe to say, colonial Boston’s Rev. Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 call for “no taxation without representation” still rings in many Americans’ ears! The most interesting data point from this survey is that not one of the 54 people who answered the question had “no opinion.” Twice as many respondents were adamantly opposed to the new tax as those who were in favor of it. If our readers are any indication, this issue is bound to polarize the voting public.

But what does this really mean for the bottom line of cash-strapped states?

By 2012, a staggering $12.65 billion in local and state tax revenues from uncollected e-commerce sales could be left on the table, according to a 2009 study by University of Tennessee researchers.

That could fill an awful lot of pot holes — or in Colorado, blow up a lot of boulders from a rockslide that punched holes in I-70 near Glenwood Springs cutting off the state’s main east-west thoroughfare.

The pushing match between Amazon.com, its Colorado marketing affiliates and the state already has caused some bruises, and now grassroots groups are shoving back.

Amazon fired its marketing affiliates in Colorado earlier this week in what’s being called retaliation for a new e-commerce law signed by Governor Ritter, which seeks to require Amazon and other online retailers to notify customers that they owe state sales tax on their purchases. Now, the drama is heating up with grassroots groups calling for a boycott of the online retailer.

Alec Harris, an analyst with the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, supports the online tax law and the boycott, saying Amazon’s claim the new requirements are “unduly burdensome” is an overstatement.

“This bill is just asking Amazon to inform their consumers — it strikes me that that’s sort of on par with, and maybe even a little bit below, what a lot of the retailers are already doing.”

Other retailers, such as Best Buy and Target, operate both online and retail stores in Colorado and collect sales tax from both types of transactions, Harris points out. Republican lawmakers in Denver have called for a repeal of the law, but supporters say that would amount to appeasing a bully. Harris hopes the boycott will send a simple message to Amazon.

“This is the law; this is what a good majority of retailers already do; we think it’s only fair for Colorado businesses that you do the same.”

An Amazon spokesperson would not comment on the reason for cutting ties with Colorado affiliates, but said they see the new law as a way to pressure online retailers into eventually collecting sales tax voluntarily.

Listen to the Colorado News Connection podcast by Eric Mack.