Colorado Legislative Strategies Updates 4.15.22

COLORADO LEGISLATIVE STRATEGIES NEWSLETTER
 
April 15, 2022
 
Happy Friday! The General Assembly is closed today for Good Friday, although it is not an official state holiday. During the 120-day session, the legislature can basically choose to work or not work on any day they want. It’s nice to have the Capitol closed today but with so many bills left for this session, this day off means more long nights and possibly even weekends at the Capitol in the few remaining weeks.

​Good Friday is an official state holiday in 11 states: Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. The actual date of Good Friday can vary wildly. It’s obviously the Friday before Easter, but Easter moves around a lot because it’s calculated as the Sunday following the full moon that occurs on or after March 21. Plus Eastern and Western Christianity don’t even agree on the date because they use entirely different (Julian vs Gregorian) calendars. Thankfully the Colorado House and Senate don’t come up with different calculations on the legislative calendar! 
 
Benjamin Franklin famously said that the only things certain in this world were death and taxes, and today has that all wrapped up in one. In addition to being Good Friday, the day commemorating Jesus’ death, April 15 is also traditionally known as Tax Day. However, this year you have an extra weekend to finish up your tax filings, and it’s actually not due to Good Friday falling on Tax Day. Washington DC is closed today because of Emancipation Day, the local holiday celebrating when Abraham Lincoln freed over 3,000 slaves in the District of Columbia eight months before the broader Emancipation Proclamation. So get your taxes in by Monday unless you live in Maine or Massachusetts, where they actually have until Tuesday because of Patriot’s Day holidays on Monday commemorating some of the first battles of the Revolutionary War. 
 
Lots of holidays going on! Today is also the start of Passover. And now that you have some fun facts to bore, I mean impress your friends, let’s get to some legislative news from this week.
 
Today is the 94th day of the legislative session. There are now only three and a half weeks left until the legislature adjourns. That’s both exciting and scary; exciting because we can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, but scary because we know there is still a train of bills bearing down on us. 
 
This week again proved that as the time on the legislative clock gets shorter, the time spent in committee hearings can get much longer. The much-discussed bill dealing with the fentanyl crisis, House Bill 1326, had its first committee hearing on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yes, it needed two days just to get through one committee hearing because it went so long. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee began with the bill in the early afternoon and did not finish witness testimony until nearly 3:00am. The committee then spent several hours debating amendments to the bill on Wednesday. The House Judiciary can be notorious for going long and this was no exception. 
 
The testimony was heart wrenching at times as witnesses spoke of loved ones who died from fentanyl. Law enforcement made a big push for harsher penalties for possession of even small amounts of fentanyl. Harm reduction advocates pushed back hard on the idea that harsher penalties would do anything to help addicts. Stuck in the middle was Speaker Garnett trying to forge a compromise on the issue. As it became clear that the Speaker did not have the votes to pass the bill as introduced with a four gram limit for a felony charge, the Speaker offered an amendment to lower the threshold down to one gram and also increase the charge when it can be shown that a drug compound has over 60 percent pure fentanyl. The bill picked up one Republican vote from Mike Lynch, who is also a prime sponsor on the bill, and passed out of committee 8-3. The bill now heads to the Appropriations Committee before what is likely to be another robust debate on possession penalties, and then wash/rinse/repeat over in the Senate. 
 
If you’re tired of hearing about the budget then this will be good news; the Joint Budget Committee met this week as the conference committee and both chambers re-passed the final budget on Thursday. The JBC largely took a hatchet to all the amendments that were added to the budget. The House’s amendments added $63 million to the budget and the Senate’s amendments added a whopping $731 million to the budget. In the end, the JBC added about $5.5 million from those amendments to the final budget. The $36.4 billion state budget for next fiscal year now goes to the Governor. 
 
A quick note about conference committee as you’re going to see more of those as we approach the end of the session. When the second chamber amends a bill and it’s now different from what the first chamber passed, the first chamber sponsors have a choice; most often they will just accept the changes, but they can also reject the changes, or they can request a conference committee to iron out the differences. Conference committees, like the JBC as well, are always made up of three members from each chamber, two from the majority and one from the minority. 
 
Thursday also had a long and contentious hearing in the House Energy and Environment Committee. The committee was originally scheduled to hear three big bills, including House Bill 1348 about oil and gas chemicals, House Bill 1345 about banning PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl) chemicals, and House Bill 1218about requiring buildings to have EV charging. Then House Bill 1362 about green building codes was added to the end of an already very full calendar, which upset many. In the end, the committee wrapped up hearing all of these bills shortly before 1:00am and passed them all on party-line votes. 
 
However, the most remarkable thing about that hearing wasn’t the time and was instead an outburst that happened during the hearing. Around 7:00pm as witness testimony was coming to a close on the PFAS chemical bill, an activist who was testifying pulled out a bottle of water she said was from the sink in her home and she implored the committee members to take a drink of the water her family has to drink. When none of the committee members took her up on that, she proceeded to go dump it in the water dispenser for legislators located behind where they sit. 
 
Expect some ruckus behavior to continue as the time starts to really get crunched and there are still a lot of big controversial bills. Not only are there a lot of bills still moving through the system, more bills are still continuing to get introduced everyday with just a few weeks left in the session. There are hundreds and hundreds of bills that are still in the first chamber, many of which have been held up in the cue for the Appropriations Committees. Now that the budget is wrapped up and each chamber has finished their internal caucus prioritization process for the available money to spend, watch out for the dam to break starting next week. 
 
In addition to all the bills that have already been introduced and will be moving in the final few weeks, there are also big controversial bills still even yet to come. Collective bargaining for public sector workers has been hanging in the background the entire session. Governor Polis weighed in to narrow the bill and the labor coalition has been splintering with some still supporting the bill and others who have said they will oppose it without a provision allowing strikes. After intense opposition from higher education to the collective bargaining draft there is now a draft bill to be introduced requiring more budget transparency. There is also a bill draft on nurse staffing ratios that will be sure to be a big legislative fight. Plus so much more!
 
All of this will be crammed into just the next three and a half weeks… Enjoy a holiday where you can. 
 
Have a good weekend.