General Assembly returns following 10-week COVID hiatus

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 debate on the budget. That process will resume this week and the budget should be wrapped up by week's end.

Then it's on to the School Finance Act and bills dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The protesters were a small portion of the more than a thousand who gathered at the Capitol for four days to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer put his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes. In one of the most dramatic moments, more than a thousand people laid on the lawn of the State Capitol, in Lincoln Park and on Lincoln Street, some laying in broken glass. For nine minutes, they laid on their stomachs, hands behind their backs in a handcuff position and chanted "I can't breathe," reportedly Floyd's last words before he died.

During the four days, the exterior of the State Capitol was badly damaged with graffiti, broken windows and statues, including those saluting a Hispanic Medal of Honor winner and a Civil War statue on the Capitol grounds.

Police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper balls, shooting at both protesters and the journalists who were covering the event.

Leaders of Denver's black community, including Representatives Leslie Herod and James Coleman, both of Denver, pleaded with protesters not to cause damage, to no avail. The protests organized by the black community wrapped up in early evening and those intending to cause damage took over from there.

The protesters have returned each day to clean up the mess left behind.

In the session's remaining weeks, in addition to the budget, lawmakers are also expected to clear the agenda of measures that won't pass, either because of cost or because they don't fit within the priorities laid out by Democratic leaders.

Those leaders in the House and Senate have made it clear that any measure with a cost would not succeed in the next several weeks and committees have worked to end dozens of measures.

But leaders also released a priority list of bills that will be allowed to move forward, a list that is largely bipartisan.

Among those slated for passage: House Bill 1029, sponsored by Rep. Rod Pelton, a Cheyenne Wells Republican. The measure would allow county officers to accept lower salaries, a welcome move in a time when state and local governments are struggling to cut budgets. The measure had already cleared the House and Senate before the General Assembly went into recess on March 14, but a disagreement between the House and Senate on the final version held it up. It's now awaiting a discussion by a conference committee to resolve the differences between the two versions.

House Bill 1237 is also on the pass list. It's sponsored by Republican Senator Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling. The measure requires the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing to assign young people who are in out-of-home placements or under juvenile detention to be assigned to managed care providers in the same county.

Sonnenberg is also a prime sponsor of the annual bill paying for the Colorado Water Conservation Board construction list, and that measure, House Bill 1403, is expected to sail through. It may wind up being one of the most expensive bills to clear the General Assembly, aside from the budget and school finance bills, with a $26 million cost in 2020-21. However, the projects on the list are funded by a cash fund controlled by the water conservation board that was left largely untouched in the budget-cutting process. The bill includes $7.5 million for the State water plan.

The water plan money will go for:

• Up to $3,000,000 for storage, artificial recharge into aquifers and dredging existing reservoirs;

• Up to $1,000,000 for grant funding for long-term strategies on conservation, land use and drought planning;

• Up to $500,000 for grants on water education, outreach and innovation efforts;

• Up to $1,500,000 for agricultural projects; and

• Up to $1,500,000 for environmental and recreational projects.

Among the measures that didn't make the list: the bill that would have set up reparations for landowners who were stripped of tax credits for conservation easements.

Rep. Dylan Roberts, an Eagle Democrat, told this reporter that the measure, Senate Bill 135, was in trouble before lawmakers recessed, and that a different proposal, one that didn't include reparations, had been in the works.

The measure has three components: reparations for landowners, totaling some $147 million; finding an alternative way to do conservation easement appraisals and dealing with orphan easements. Those are easements - donations of land to a land trust or county - that have been abandoned or the trust no longer maintains them.

Roberts said there could be a bill yet this session to deal with the two latter parts of SB 135. Sonnenberg is among the prime sponsors of the original measure.

Pelton's bills on behavioral health also aren't on the list and despite minimal costs are unlikely to pass. A measure providing peer support for behavioral health professionals, which carried a $127,000 general fund price tag and one that provides crisis training to behavioral health workers, with a $78,000 cost, are awaiting the ax.