The Colorado legislature is returning Sunday during the final weekend of work in its 2024 session, set to end Wednesday. Among major pieces of legislation still pending are gun regulations, housing, land-use policy, transportation, property tax reform and other priorities.
This story will be updated throughout the day.
Updated at 4:23 p.m.: The long-awaited property tax bill remains in flux Sunday afternoon, with Democrats and progressives accusing a powerful business group of refusing to budge from proposals that would require hefty cuts to schools.
“There’s no agreement on anything,” a frustrated Rep. Chris deGruy Kennedy, a Lakewood Democrat involved in the negotiations, said Sunday.
The session ends Wednesday, and the clock is ticking. Any bill that hopes to pass before time expires must be introduced on Monday at the latest, and the earlier the better. Even introducing it first thing Monday will require swift work to finish up by Wednesday, and the late arrival has grim echoes of last year’s scramble that led to the failure of Proposition HH in November.
The problem now is that Colorado Concern — the powerful business group — is asking for provisions that would include cuts to local education, said Scott Wasserman, the president of the progressive Bell Policy Center. That’s a “nonstarter,” deGruy Kennedy added.
“If there’s any theme to this legislative session, it’s that we just celebrated paying down the budget stabilization factor,” Wasserman said, referring to the budgeting maneuver that Colorado has relied on for years to fund schools below the constitutionally mandated level. “We cannot risk further destabilization.”
The problem is that Colorado Concern is allied with the conservative group Advance Colorado, which, in turn, is backing two ballot initiatives that Wasserman said would blow a hole in the state budget. Proposition 108 would cost local governments about $3 billion immediately, with the state making up about $2.25 billion of that loss — or about 14% of the total general fund, and more than the budget of several state agencies.
Initiative 50 would likewise institute a hard cap on property tax collections, but slowly sap local governments of revenue for services, Wasserman said.
Striking a deal with Colorado Concern would help diffuse those initiatives. But Wasserman said the group has only recently engaged in negotiations, with the ballot measures hanging menacingly over the talks. Democrats have privately said they don’t think those measures would pass, but the risk that they might is too great to ignore.
DeGruy Kennedy said Colorado Concern had “no respect” for the various services that would be gutted by its proposals, including schools and first responder services.
Anneliese Steel, spokeswoman for Colorado Concern, declined to comment Sunday.
Heading into Monday with no deal in sight, legislators face a series of uncomfortable choices, including another special session or a deal that doesn’t include Colorado Concern and risks a ballot showdown in November.
Updated at 2:11 p.m.: Amid the flurry of land-use votes, property tax negotiations and various grand bargains, the legislature is still passing — and killing — other bills.
Among them: On Saturday, the House fully passed Senate Bill 117, which will ultimately lead to the creation of specific regulations on eating disorder treatment providers. That’s been a particularly sharp concern in recent years, as diagnoses increase and state regulators scrutinize the practices of a major provider — the Eating Recovery Center — that’s headquartered here in Denver.
A similar bill was gutted last year over financial limitations. This version will now head to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.
Elsewhere, a House committee killed Senate Bill 181, which would’ve instituted a new fee on the sale of alcohol to pay for treatment. The bill cleared the Senate and was pared down, but it was defeated Saturday night.
Finally, an attempt to re-launch a defunct criminal justice policy commission is dead, at least for this session. Last session, House lawmakers allowed the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (or CCJJ) to expire. The body had helped guide — and, critics charged, stifle — policy reforms in the Capitol for years. In the fall, Polis issued an executive order creating a working group to re-launch a new version of the commission.
That work finished earlier this spring, with the support of law enforcement, some legislators and most of the commission. But some reformers said the relaunch was just that: a repeat of the previous commission’s failures.
The next step was running legislation this year to build the new commission. But Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who was going to sponsor the bill, said Friday that the effort was dead, with the clock running out on the session. It may return next session — or Polis could always issue some sort of executive action again — but for now, the CCJJ is staying dead.
Updated at 1:57 p.m.: In the latest of a slew of grand bargains announced in recent days, the insurance industry and Colorado’s trial lawyers unveiled a deal Sunday to raise the damages cap on various forms of medical malpractice liability.
It’s wonky but important: On one side you have the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association, who had backed a ballot measure to remove the cap on damages for catastrophic injuries. On the other side was the medical community and the business groups, who supported an existing bill to slightly raise one cap and were running their own, competing ballot measures — one of which would’ve capped contingency fees for trial lawyers.
Enter House Bill 1472. The bill raises the cap on noneconomic damages from civil lawsuits to $1.5 million (up from $250,000), with future inflation adjustments; for medical malpractice cases, it bumps the damages limit from $300,000 to $875,000. It also sets the wrongful death damages cap at $2.125 million and the medical malpractice wrongful death cap to $1.575 million. The bill also allows allows a sibling to file a wrongful death lawsuit in certain situations.
In exchange, both sides agree to pull their ballot measures. The bill was introduced Sunday morning and cleared its first committee, House Judiciary, shortly after. It needs to pass the House and then the Senate before the legislature turns the lights off for the year Wednesday.
It’s another deal brought about by dueling ballot measures. Late last month, Gov. Jared Polis announced a deal between the oil and gas industry, the legislature, and environmentalists, all of which were armed with legislation and ballot measures. The deal sets new air quality targets and introduces a new production fee on oil and gas to pay for public transit, among other things.
Updated at 11:14 a.m.: In a pair of late-night votes Saturday, the Colorado Senate advanced two land-use reform bills, inching them just a few steps away from Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.
House Bill 1313 — which would require Front Range local governments to set density goals near transit-rich areas and set strategies to hit those targets — passed on a standing vote. House Bill 1152, which would allow accessory-dwelling units to be built in Front Range cities, cleared on a voice vote. Both now need a final vote in the Senate (which is not meeting Sunday after its late night) before sponsors meet to reconcile changes made since the two bills passed the House.
A third land-use bill, to limit parking minimums along the Front Range, fully passed the Senate on Saturday, too. Rep. Stephanie Vigil, a Colorado Springs Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors, said she planned to accept the Senate’s moderating changes and send the bill to Polis.
The flurry of weekend activity puts the land-use package, a which would mark first-in-decades reforms, on the brink of full passage, a year after a first attempt collapsed under its own weight like a dying star.
The second attempt hasn’t been easy, and none of the bills has advanced unscathed. House Bill 1313 has been amended repeatedly, sparking frustration from one Democratic senator Saturday night. The parking measure, which supporters feared was on life support just a few days ago, was pared back from a broad ban to only developments near transit stops; local governments also would now have a case-by-case option to still require some parking. The ADU bill also includes a soft parking requirement after a late amendment in the Senate.
The repeated changes appeared to prompt Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who’d given key but skeptical backing to the density bill, to abandon her support entirely. Gonzales has said she’s particularly concerned about the bill because it’s likely to impact her community — urban parts of Denver susceptible to gentrification — more than others.
She reiterated those concerns late Saturday, as well as frustrations with more late changes to the bill; sponsors brought several amendments Saturday, which were somewhat technical but also gave local governments more flexibility in exempting certain areas from the density goals.
Gonzales called for a no vote on the bill at one point. Later, during a procedural vote, she also advanced an amendment that would’ve essentially gutted the ADU measure.
Still, even with the amendments, the bills would still mark a shift in how the state — and local governments — approach land-use and development across the Front Range as policymakers reach for a solution to the state’s housing crisis. The ADU and density bills could face their final votes in the Senate on Monday, giving sponsors two days to reconcile changes and send them to Polis.
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