What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope
What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope
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State legislators resumed the 2021 session of the General Assembly Tuesday after a five-week break. While lawmakers weren’t at the Capitol, it didn’t mean they weren’t working: the Joint Budget Committee met throughout the break to work on adjustments to the 2020-21 State budget, known as supplementals and legislative committees held hearings with state agencies to review those agencies’ budgets and programs. It also gave lawmakers, their staff and members of the media who cover the legislature time to get vaccinated so that the return to the...
The Colorado General Assembly held an abbreviated start to its 2021 session, meeting for three days last week to work on time-sensitive legislation that can’t wait until Feb. 16. That’s when the session is expected to resume. Lawmakers recessed on Jan. 15 for a little more than a month, in hopes that COVID-19 vaccines will be well underway and that the pandemic will have started to lessen by then. Lawmakers who want vaccines started getting them last week, under the phased approach that allows them to receive vaccines to ensure continuity of...
The Colorado General Assembly came back to the State Capitol last week for a three-day session in which they passed eight bills tied to COVID-19 relief, worth up to $336 million. The money comes from better-than-expected income tax revenues, revealed in a September 2020 revenue forecast. Governor Jared Polis has already signed a measure that will put $100 million into the State’s disaster emergency fund, designed to help cover State costs of the pandemic. Polis is likely to sign the other seven measures, plus two others lawmakers passed not t...
The 2020 legislature session that ended on June 15 was unlike any other and not in a good way. In the session’s final three weeks, 67 bills were introduced in the House and 20 in the Senate. The House’s list included 42 bills tied to the 2020-21 budget plus the School Finance Act. That meant a lot of rushing and it did not sit well with State Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, Sterling. He pointed out that one measure was introduced at 7:45 p.m. one evening, was through its only committee hearing by 8:15 p.m. and with a preliminary vote by 8:30 p.m...
Colorado’s agricultural center is the State’s Eastern Plains, where whence comes 84 percent of the State’s gross agricultural sales. The Colorado State Fair is among the biggest events every year that celebrates that agricultural impact. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the State Fair’s Board of Directors. The only alleged representative of the Eastern Plains lives in Boulder County. That’s not sitting well with Republican lawmakers at the State Capitol and a fair number of Democratic lawmakers aren’t pleased with it, either. On the last day...
The abbreviated 2020 legislative session drew to a close on Monday, with a flurry of last-minute and substantial bills passed in the closing days. Those final days included approval of a law enforcement accountability bill, a measure tightening the State’s regulations on immunizations, two tax bills, a bill to extend the State’s reinsurance program, and the most important of all, final approval of the 2020-21 budget and the school finance act. Legislators returned to the Capitol just over three weeks ago, after a 73-day recess implemented to av...
The 2020-21 budget is nearing its conclusion, after the House approved the Long Appropriations Bill, House Bill 1360, on June 3. The Senate followed, passing the $30.3 billion budget on June 6, in a rare Saturday session. Both northeastern Colorado lawmakers, Republicans Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, Sterling and Representative Rod Pelton, Cheyenne Wells, voted against the bill. The 2020-21 budget now goes back to the Joint Budget Committee that wrote it, which as a conference committee will resolve differences between the House and Senate...
Former Governor John Hickenlooper violated the State’s ethics law, Amendment 41, when he accepted travel and other expenses in two cases in 2018, according the State’s Independent Ethics Commission. Hickenlooper is a candidate for the United State Senate Democratic primary on June 30. He will face former Democratic Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff of Denver. The winner moves on to challenge Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Cory Gardner, Yuma. Hickenlooper defied a subpoena issued by the ethics commission on Monday, but which was later enf...
The Colorado General Assembly returned after a 10-week hiatus to do the one thing they're required to do every year by the State Constitution: pass a balanced State budget. It got off to a somewhat slow start. After putting the Long Appropriations Bill for 2020-21, as the State budget is known, in front of lawmakers on Tuesday, the process got waylaid by protesters Thursday night, mostly white. That caused Democratic leaders to cancel Friday's session, the day the House was scheduled to begin...
By Marianne Goodland Legislative reporter The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee wrapped up its efforts to balance the 2020-21 budget in the face of a $3.3 billion shortfall on May 22, with the last cut the largest of all: $577 million from K-12 education. The committee’s members said they held off on making cuts to education until the bitter end and it was a bitter pill to swallow. Said Senator Bob Rankin, a Carbondale Republican and the committee’s senior member, that both parties’ priority during the budget-cutting process has been to...
A forecast on how much the State has to spend — or doesn’t — rocked State lawmakers in the past week and showed that the 2020-21 State budget will be short some $3.3 billion. It’s the largest single-year drop in State revenues in history, greater than the Great Recession and the recession that followed 9/11. Members of the Joint Budget Committee, who are writing the State budget in the coming weeks, had little to cheer from an updated May 12 forecast. They sought an updated forecast after one in March showed the State revenues had dropped...
This week, State economists will present an updated forecast on State revenues that are expected to result in major cuts to the State budget. The talk has been that the forecast will show the State short $2 billion to $3 billion for the 2020-21 budget. It will be the largest cut in the State budget in history, easily dwarfing the recession years after 9/11 and the Great Recession. And those cuts will come largely from about one-third of the State budget, the portion known as general fund. That’s revenue from individual corporate and income t...
Monday, May 4 is the day offices could reopen for up to 50 percent of their workforce, according to the Safer at Home order issued by Governor Jared Polis a week prior. It’s also the day that budget writers for the Colorado General Assembly got to work to figure out how to cut $2 billion to $3 billion out of the 2020-21 State budget. At $3 billion, that’s just under 10 percent of the total budget, but that includes federal funds, which make up just under one-third. And that’s in addition to the order Polis gave on April 30 to cut $228.7 milli...
While the General Assembly paused the session for two weeks, due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, lawmakers are still working behind the scenes. That includes the budget writers of the Joint Budget Committee, which on March 16 got some bad news about State revenue projections that they were to use to do final work on the 2020-21 State budget. Instead of an expected $832 million to pay for new programs and mandated cost increases, available revenue increases were estimated at $27.3 million. That’s not even enough to cover mandated i...
The Colorado General Assembly, after a wild week of news conferences and concerns over the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, aka COVID-19, has closed its doors for the next two weeks to protect public health. Lawmakers are tentatively scheduled to return on Monday, March 30, but legislative leaders have said that pausing of the 2020 session could be extended if public health requires it. The best way to keep the public safe is for lawmakers to not be there, eliminating the need for people to come to the building, according to Senate Minority...
In the coming week, House lawmakers are expected to debate and vote on the second of two bills that would add protections for homeowners in mobile home parks across Colorado. The first, House Bill 1201 allows mobile homeowners 90 days to purchase a mobile home park if it goes up for sale. The park owner is not required to accept the offer, according to co-sponsor Representative Edie Hooton, D-Boulder. The 90-day period would allow mobile homeowners time to put together an offer, with financing, she told the House on March 3. The bill passed on...
The long-awaited solution to the State’s troubled conservation easement program is itself in trouble, after concerns over its cost nearly derailed the bill on Feb. 27. Senate Bill 135, sponsored by Senators Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling and Kerry Donovan, D-Vail, got a tough reception from the Senate Finance Committee, which decided to postpone action on the bill to give its sponsors a little more time to find a path forward. The bill has been the subject of hard negotiations over how the State will compensate landowners who donated land to t...
The House held a memorial on Feb. 20 for former State Representative and Senator Maynard Yost, R-Sterling, who passed away on Dec. 1, 2019 at the age of 83. Seventeen members of Yost’s family were in the Colorado Capitol for the memorial, which was read in both the House and Senate. Yost served in the House in the 1977-78 sessions and in the State Senate from 1979 to 1982. He chaired the Senate Agriculture, Natural Resources and Energy Committee in the 1981 and 1982 sessions. Senate Joint Memorial 2, offered by Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R...
The effort by the State of Idaho to move up to 1,200 inmates to the Kit Carson Correctional Facility in Burlington got new life on Feb. 12 when the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a marathon session, made major changes to House Bill 1019. The bill came out of an interim committee on prison populations last fall, and at the time it was written, the State’s biggest concern was overcrowding at many State prisons. There was also an interest by some of the committee’s lawmakers in ending the use of private prisons, and the bill would start the State...
