Sonnenberg hits 16-year mark in Colorado's General Assembly

Sixteen years. That’s the maximum any Coloradan can serve in the Colorado General Assembly, at least consecutively, with four two-year terms in the House and two four-year terms in the Senate.

What does that mean? It means seniority, respect, and the ability to effect policy changes, even when the lawmaker spends most of his time in the minority. 

This year, only one lawmaker out of 100 in the Colorado General Assembly, hit that 16-year mark: Senator Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling.

Sonnenberg sat down with this reporter shortly before the wrap-up of the 2022 General Assembly, to talk about the policies he’s advocated for, the people he’s worked with, and most of all, how he managed to stay close to his family and manage his farm during that time. 

“I wanted to come up here and fix things,” Sonnenberg said. He looked at public policy in the same way he looks at farming and business: there are inefficiencies and things that can be done to solve problems.

His intent was to lend the legislature the rural voice, Sonnenberg said. He was first elected in 2006, the same year the State upped the minimum wage and indexed it to inflation. His first question to his Republican colleagues was what would happen if the Federal government increased its minimum wage and how that would work.

That turned into an amendment on the legislation to enact the voters’ decision, but the majority leader (then Rep. Alice Madden of Boulder) shot it down, saying “typical freshman amendment.”

When there’s a problem on the farm, you sit down and talk, Sonnenberg explained. He tried to do that with Madden, whose response, he said, was “We don’t care.” Sonnenberg said he took his tail between his legs and sat down, thinking “This is not going to work out the way I thought it would.” 

The lesson he said he learned was that it’s always about relationships and integrity, both which disappear as soon as someone learns “you can’t be trusted.”

In the legislature, that’s votes that a lawmaker can’t count on, or conversations lost that could be of value. “Those were key for me” from the beginning and both integrity and relationships have continued to be core values since then. 

“I went up there with my integrity,” Sonnenberg said. “Ten years from now, the only thing I’ll be remembered for is whether I was an honest guy. ‘Was he fair? Did he have integrity?’” because no one “will give a hoot” about the bills he ran.

Sonnenberg believes his biggest impact at the legislature is from his experience in the agriculture sector. “The dirt underneath my fingernails brings a unique perspective” that not many lawmakers have. 

“And that's quite honestly where I wanted to make sure I had the biggest impact,” he added. People encouraged him to run because the legislature needed an ag voice; at the time, it was just him and Sen. Greg Brophy, Wray; one farmer in the House, one in the Senate. There was no one else that actually knew how seeds popped out of the ground, he said.

Sonnenberg’s agenda over the years has wavered little: fighting against taxes and fees, including several ballot measures. But then there was the landmark legislation he sponsored in 2017, known as Sustainability of Rural Colorado, which created a fee-based enterprise that helped save many rural hospitals, including in his district, lowered business personal property taxes for small businesses, created lease-purchase agreements that provided $2 billion for capital construction and transportation projects, prioritized property tax refunds for seniors, andrequired higher copayments from Medicaid recipients for certain services. The law survived later court challenges.

“I represented my district,” Sonnenberg said of SB 17-267. “When you have a very conservative district, they expect you to vote conservative, but they also have small rural hospitals.

The most endangered one at the time was in Hugo, which would leave only on I-70 between Aurora and the Kansas state line. That leaves rural residents with little time to reach emergency care, he noted. 

He’s also advocated for rural mental health, including in the 2022 session, acknowledging that some may not believe that’s the role of government. “But from my perspective in rural Colorado, when we have more suicides per capita than anywhere ese in the State, that’s a hug issue.”

Mental health has not always been a conservative issue, Sonnenberg said, “but we need help. I’m tired of seeing kids take their own lives because we don’t have the resources.”

Another area in which representing the district may have differed from conservative viewpoints is on education funding. Fully one-quarter of the state’s 178 school districts are in Senate District 1, he noted, and that becomes a huge priority.

Above all, Sonnenberg said he’s kept his word to his family. When he was first elected, he promised he would never let the work of a lawmaker get in the way of being with family. When there was a school event, he said he did everything in his power to be there or at baseball games or FFA events. “Family still has to be first,” Sonnenberg said.

That became just a little easier as a member of the minority party, which was his lot for the last four years. “Your vote really doesn’t matter” on some issues, he said, so you can spend time with family. 

The advent of remote work via Zoom also helped with that, he said. Sonnenberg was able to be home on the farm and still do his legislative work, whether participating in the Senate’s daily work or in committees. 

Short days, which are more common in the early part of the session, also allowed him to be home by noon, when he could be on the back of a horse, on the tractor or welding. 

In the early years, before his sons were old enough to run the farm, he had to hire to get the work done and that meant most of his legislative salary went to do that. Being a lawmaker was not profitable, he said. 

He’s also managed to keep the business going from Denver as well; he noted one day he was on his laptop and buying cattle online. Someone walked by and took a picture, and asked what he was doing. Sonnenberg answered that he takes the opportunity to buy cattle online on Wednesdays. 

“So did you buy any?” the other man asked. “About a semi load,” Sonnenberg replied, about $50,000 worth. “You spent $50,000 on the internet?” the other man said, incredulously. 

Sonnenberg joked that he has a hard time telling Vonnie, his wife, to “quit buying crap on Amazon” when he spends $50,000 on a Wednesday buying cattle.