Yuma included among schools to be reviewed by Indian Affairs Commission

The 2022 General Assembly session came to its constitutionally mandated conclusion shortly before midnight Wednesday, May 11, bringing forward 657 bills during its 120 days.

What remained on lawmakers’ agendas until the very last day included bills on collective bargaining for county workers, the school finance act and a bill on hospital visitation.

The collective bargaining bill, Senate Bill 230, was already watered down by the Senate, exempting counties of less than 5,000 population (which included Phillips and Sedgwick) and allowing county commissioners to reject collective bargaining agreements.

The bill was introduced April 25 after two years in the making. The original bill would have allowed any public sector worker, whether in higher education, K-12, cities and towns and counties, to form union bargaining units and advance collective bargaining agreements.

But between a November 2021 draft and its eventual introduction, the bill was narrowed down to just counties and higher education employees, and upon introduction, left only the State’s 38,000 county workers eligible to form unions, a right they already had. Five counties — Adams, Pitkin, Pueblo, Las Animas and Summit — already have collective bargaining agreements in place.

The bill’s sponsors, including House Majority Leader Daneya Esgar, Pueblo, said she believed that right needed to be enshrined in state law. But unions, notably the AFL-CIO, threatened last year to withhold campaign contributions through May 2022 if Democratic legislators did not take their interests to heart. 

Not one current county worker who was not already a union member testified they wanted a union during the bill’s trip through the General Assembly.

The bill that won final approval on May 11 was significantly watered down, allowing county commissioners to reject those agreements for any reason. 

House Republicans, as part of an effort to get House Democrats to negotiate on that bill and others, threatened more than 500 amendments in the session’s final days. That produced a fragile early-morning agreement on May 10 on Senate Bill 230 and several other measures.

The bill was amended in the House on May 11 to hike the exemption to counties with 7,500 residents. That, in addition to exempting home rule counties — those that can manage their own affairs — and to two counties that are also cities, resulted in exemptions for 26 of the state’s 64 counties. Those that won exemption on May 11 now include 10 Eastern Plains counties, adding in Bent, Crowley, Kit Carson and Lincoln.

A second amendment put in a more definitive timeline for agreements to be negotiated between bargaining units and counties. 

Senate Bill 230 cleared the House on a 41-24 party-line vote; the amendments were later adopted by the Senate, also on a 20-15 party-line vote. It now goes to the Governor for signing.

Part of that early morning May 10 agreement, as first reported by the Denver Post, also included an agreement to allow a bill on hospital visitation to begin moving through the House after a delay of more than a month.

Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, described Senate Bill 53 as the most important piece of legislation he’s carried. The bill as introduced would allow a patient in a hospital or long-term care facility to have a visitor of their choice. 

The measure is a response to complaints during the pandemic that too many Coloradans were either hospitalized or died alone, without the comfort of family. Medical experts cited family visits as a key factor in avoiding isolation, depression and anxiety, for both family members and the patients during hospitalization. 

The measure has been opposed all along by the Colorado Hospital Association, whose representatives cited concerns about the safety of patients and medical staff.

Sonnenberg attempted to address those concerns in the measure, allowing hospitals to place limitations on visits, such as requiring visitors to use facemasks and sign waivers or to be screened for pandemic conditions.

Senate Bill 53 won a 23-10 vote in the Senate back in March but stalled in the House, where measures in 2020 and 2021 were killed by majority Democrats.

Representative Rod Pelton, R-Cheyenne Wells, was initially the House sponsor of SB 53. But he dropped off in favor of adding a Democrat, Rep. Barbara McLachlan of Durango, and Rep. Tim Geitner, R-Falcon, the previous sponsor of similar legislation.

On May 10, the apparent hold on the bill ended and it won a 7-2 vote from the House State, Civil, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee, including the support of three committee Democrats. On the session’s final day, it began with a 49-16 vote. 

The House changes included one more significant amendment: to require visitors to be tested for the pandemic-related disease. However, Sonnenberg told this reporter the language is permissive, meaning that hospitals do not have to mandate that testing. He sought and won unanimous Senate approval for the amendment and the bill now goes to the Governor, who has 30 days to act.

The 14th effort to bring relief to mostly Eastern Plains landowners who were retroactively denied tax credits tied to donations of lands through the State’s troubled conservation easement program died in a Senate committee on May 10.

Senate Bill 119, sponsored by Sens. Faith Winter, D-Westminster, and Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, had been awaiting action from the Senate Appropriations Committee since winning approval from Senate Finance on March 16. 

But sources said opposition to the bill from Governor Jared Polis, whose views on the 2021 bill also led to its demise, kept it from winning approval from the committee on May 10.

The school finance act, House Bill 1390, became among the last bills addressed by the General Assembly before it adjourned shortly before midnight on May 11 and it was delayed due to Native American mascots in public schools.

Last year, Senate Bill 21-116 banned the use of Native American symbols as mascots in public schools, The Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs published a list of 26 schools, including three in the Yuma School District, with mascots that violated the ban. The law gave those schools or school districts until June 1, 2022, to eliminate all use of those mascots or face a $25,000 per month fine.

As of March 2022, that list of 26 had dropped to 12. The commission intends to review the 12 schools still on the list, including Yuma, on May 19.

But in the meantime, seven schools that initially fell outside of the commission’s radar were found to be using a thunderbird as a mascot, a symbol also tied to Native American culture. The superintendent of the Montrose school district, where two schools have that symbol as a mascot, pointed out that the thunderbird is a logo for the U.S. Air Force. However, according to a representative of the Southern Ute tribe, the Air Force adopted that logo from Native American culture.

The big problem for those seven schools is the ability to come into compliance with SB 116 before the June 1, 2022, deadline. That’s where the school finance act comes in.

House Bill 1390 initially granted those seven schools until June 1, 2023, to come into compliance, based on notification from the commission that they were using mascots banned under the law. But a mystery amendment, put on the bill by the Senate, made that notification unclear.

House sponsors of the 2021 law raised concerns that the mystery amendment created a loophole in which all schools using banned mascots would get another year to come into compliance. That’s why the bill’s passage, which is usually non-controversial and quick, wound up delayed until May 11. That gave the bill’s House sponsors, including McLachlan, who also sponsored the 2021 mascot law, time to fix the language so that it only addressed the seven schools that expect to be added to the state’s list in the coming weeks. The bill now heads to the Governor.