Dear Sundance Film Festival:
Welcome to Colorado! We hope you enjoy your stay. And congratulations on your negotiating skills that led Colorado’s state, city and county governments to provide $70 million in relocation incentives when our competition offered $3.5 million (Utah) and $5 million (Ohio).
As we both know, Colorado did not need to hand you millions of tax dollars to relocate here. Apples to apples, Boulder outclassed the competition. Cincinnati has cheaper lodging, but attendance would plummet under grey Ohio winters. Utah could no longer accommodate the festival size in Park City, while the state had become less welcoming to your community.
As the LA Times confirmed, there was no question Sundance would choose Boulder. Ohio and Utah needed to offer tens of millions more than the competition. Colorado did not. We wildly overpaid.
So congratulations on fleecing our state, and the city and the county of Boulder for more than $70 million when the deal could have been closed for $3 million to $5 million!
But circumstances have changed. Colorado has a constitutional amendment called the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR). This limits the amount of revenue the state may retain each year. If revenue exceeds the limit, we must return the surplus to taxpayers. When lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis promised you $34 million in tax credits to come to Colorado, we had sufficient surpluses to give you those tax credits instead of refunding the money back to Colorado’s taxpayers without cutting into the general fund.
Since then, our state has suffered a billion-dollar-per-year revenue reduction. We are one of four states that has “rolling conformity” with the federal tax code. When Congress passed H.R. 1 in July 2025, it immediately slashed Colorado’s tax revenue, blasting a billion-dollar hole in our budget.
We are now making difficult choices. Among the worst is slashing Medicaid by hundreds of millions of dollars, hitting our Intellectually and Developmentally Delayed (IDD) community particularly hard. We made promises to that community that we cannot keep.
Even worse, we receive federal matching dollars for every penny we put into the IDD program. When I ran a recent budget amendment to take $742,000 from Colorado’s film office to reappropriate that money to our IDD community, it would have doubled the investment to almost $1.5 million. Unfortunately, this amendment was reversed by claims that the film industry in Colorado would collapse and Sundance would not come to Colorado if those funds were revoked.
It’s difficult to believe a $742,000 cut could be so catastrophic to a hundred-million-dollar-plus festival. And while your attendees will generate substantial economic activity when they come here, the state cannot retain revenue from sales taxes and income taxes above TABOR limits. Your economic presence will not compensate for the funding loss caused by your millions of dollars in tax credits eating into our spending cap.
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When we are slashing Medicaid provider rates and IDD support by 15% and 40%, asking our new guest to give up 3% to 5% of the lucrative deal struck in better times is not unreasonable. This request is only for years when we do not have TABOR surpluses to cover your credits without impacting the general fund. It is extremely rare that we have no surplus.
When it returns, taking the credits has no impact on our general fund or upon the most vulnerable in our state. I hope that you will choose to be as good a guest as Colorado plans to be a host and share the pain we are experiencing currently which is significantly worse for our most vulnerable. Thanks!
Colorado state Rep. Bob Marshall is a Democrat from Highlands Ranch.
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