Sonnenberg dubs session most frustrating of 15-year career

With just one more year left as a State lawmaker, State Senator Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling finds the most-recently concluded General Assembly session to be one of the most frustrating in his 15 years.

“There were things we did that were good, to help stimulate the economy, to help those who need it, and in areas that needed help,” Sonnenberg told this reporter recently.

But his fear is that lawmakers did things that are unsustainable in future years, such as investments in day care, early childhood and even K-12 education. “I don’t know how we sustain some of the attempts we’ve made to help education funding.”

In 2020, the General Assembly cut $572 million from education, among the most painful cuts, in order to balance the 2020-21 budget. 

As it turned out, the $3.4 billion in general fund cuts was more than was necessary, so lawmakers were in the position of restoring those funds, and education, through several different changes, got back everything that was cut.

The problem is that those dollars are one-time only, dollars from individual income taxes in 2019, for example, that exceeded expectations and at some point that could mean having to go back to cuts again.

It isn’t the only thing that irked Sonnenberg. He called the $5.4 billion transportation bill signed last week by Governor Jared Polis one of the biggest mistakes the General Assembly has ever made. That’s because the bill sets up a series of four enterprises — State-run businesses — that all have a revenue cap of $100 million per year. Those enterprises will all fund a different aspect of the transportation bill, through a slew of fees on delivery services increases in the gas tax. That’s to get around a voter-approved ballot measure in 2020 — Initiative 117 — that requires voter approval for any State enterprise above $100 million.

“We continue to thumb our noses at the voters of Colorado,” Sonnenberg said. “Voters very specifically said if you’re going to charge a bunch of fees, we want to have some say in that.” 

The bill sends a message to voters that “we don’t trust you,” he added. 

It’s not the only slap at voters in this session, Sonnenberg said. 

He’s teamed up with Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute on two ballot measures that would reduce the state income tax rate. But General Assembly Democrats (and two Republicans) approved a bill to require that ballot measures, in the nonpartisan Blue Book, show the top three programs that could be impacted by measures that aim to reduce taxes and by how much.

Sonnenberg indicated the bill is deceptive since that money that would be reduced would not necessarily be in those areas. It’s another thumbing of the nose at voters, he said.

Democrats “want to spend it all” and those voters get in the way of that agenda, he added.

Then there’s the bill to provide, for the first time in years, general fund support for the State Division of Parks and Wildlife. That division has been self-sustaining through park fees for years. Yet the General Assembly approved a $25 million boost to their funding. 

Sonnenberg gave that as an example of spending like drunken sailors, on new land acquisition and to create access for a handful of hunters.

But no bill frustrated him more in 2021 than the failure of the conservation easement reparations bill, Senate Bill 33, which died on the day before the end of the session. “We spend money on diapers (Senate Bill 27) but we can’t make right what the government screwed up?” he said. “It blows my mind that we would spend money on diapers and not take care of the people who were screwed over by Mark Weston,” an appraiser who recommended denial of easements when he was on the State’s conservation easement commission, despite telling those same landowners they should apply for easements.

The one bright spot is the help provided to the National Western Stock Show, the Colorado State Fair and agricultural events such as the Greeley Farm Show. That’s help provided through House Bill 1262, a Sonnenberg-sponsored bill, which pumps $5.5 million into an Agricultural Events Relief Program within the Department of Agriculture. Sonnenberg had tried to find help for those ag events during last November’s special session, but the Polis administration put a “kill” order on the bill and Senate Democrats complied.

But between November and the 2021 session, Sonnenberg found an ally in Senate President Leroy Garcia of Pueblo, and the two teamed up to ensure the ag events got funding. Sonnenberg praised Garcia for his willingness to get involved and to do more than was originally anticipated. The money for Senate Bill 1262 came from an $800 million stimulus with those leftover dollars. 

Another bill to help agriculture during tough times is House Bill 1242, which transfers $500,000 annually from severance taxes to help with drought. The bill creates a drought resiliency office within the Department of Agriculture. Sonnenberg said the bill requires coordination among various state agencies on drought issues rather than reinventing the wheel. 

One issue that Sonnenberg is not quite ready to let go of: helping rural pharmacies. He made progress on that issue in 2021 but not as much as he would have liked. House Bill 1297, which is awaiting a signature from the governor, creates the Pharmacy Fairness Act, which would prohibit pharmacy benefit managers from a variety of business practices, such as stopping someone from getting a drug from an in-network retail pharmacy unless otherwise prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration, and failing to designate as a preferred pharmacy a pharmacy in a county with under 20,000 people.

A pharmacy benefit manager is a third party that negotiates prices between employers and/or health plans and drug manufacturers. Critics claim they also influence which drugs a patient can receive, reducing choice for patients. 

Sonnenberg has had a long-time concern over the practices of PBMs and hoped HB 1262 would get to some of those concerns.  “I’m excited we got a little farther, but we need to go farther. PBMs have not helped with health care,” he said, citing the increase in medicine prices. The hitch has been the powerful lobbying by PBM advocates.

Sonnenberg hopes that in his final session he can make one last attempt to help rural pharmacies, such as creating a level playing field so those pharmacies can compete with the copays assessed by mail order pharmacies. While it’s illegal to mandate that a patient use a mail order pharmacy, PBMs have gotten around that by denying pharmacy claims after a couple of refills, which forces the patient to go to mail, Sonnenberg said. 

There also needs to be an appeals process when the PBM pays less than the actual cost of the drug, which costs the pharmacies money. 

But his biggest ask is to allow small counties at 30,000 to 35,000 population to participate in the fairness act. That could include Morgan County, for example, he said. The difference is that in counties not included, a local pharmacy may be excluded from a PGM and that’s not right for smaller counties already losing pharmacies because of these kinds of arrangement, he explained.

His worries for the interim include what the department of agriculture is going to do with some of the stimulus money it received and for which it has no plan on how to spend nor the expertise in figuring that out. The department sent out an email last week asking for feedback on how to spend some of its stimulus money. Sonnenberg called the department’s commissioner a “bureaucrat ... with no dirt under her fingernails” and hoped that the ag commission will be able to help. 

Then there’s the farmworker bill, Senate Bill 87, which he called the most devastating to ag since he’s been involved in politics. “We are going to end up in lawsuits” because of how federal permits conflict with the bill, such as for H2A workers. He blasted the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jessie Danielson of Wheat Ridge, who points out that she grew up on a farm. But Sonnenberg said a child doesn’t learn the details of running a farm, managing it or its employees. He’s also frustrated that organizations such as Colorado Farm Bureau and the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, in the bill’s final days, went from opposition to neutral, and is considering dropping his members in both.

Finally, Sonnenberg noted the partisanship of the 2021 session and more partisan bills passed in 2021 than he can remember. When he talks of building coalitions to formulate policy and relationships, “I used to talk about two kidneys of bills. Bills that solve problems and bills to make points.” In 2021, Democrats did a lot more bills on making points than solving problems.

His plan for his last session is to make sure ag and rural Colorado continue to be a priority. And a bill making sure families cannot be kept away from loved ones in hospitals and nursing homes in their final days.

Finally, On June 21, the Colorado Supreme Court threw out the ballot measure that would have devastated the livestock industry by defining the “natural life span” of a livestock animal and prohibiting its slaughter until it had reached a quarter of that life span. It also would have banned certain animal husbandry practices. The Supreme Court ruling means the animal rights proponents for Initiative 16 must start over from scratch.