DENVER
The Colorado Legislature reached the midway point Saturday of the 120 days allocated to lawmakers to take care of business, and Sen. Don Coram, R-Montrose, perhaps summarized their progress best:
“We’re half-way and we’ve got two-thirds of the work to do.”
And this is perhaps an understatement of the workload looming for the second half of the session.
So far, the General Assembly has introduced 462 bills, about on pace with the 685 proposed in the 2016 session. But of those, only 88 have passed both chambers and either been signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper or placed on his calendar for action.
An almost equal amount, 87, have been killed in committee.
For comparison, the Legislature has on average sent more than 390 bills to the governor each of the last three years, meaning that once again, lawmakers can anticipate long days of debate and compromise to achieve the lofty goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the session.
At the forefront of the promises were pledges to find lasting solutions to the state’s crumbling transportation infrastructure and the lack of affordable housing, which is widely attributed to construction defects litigation.
Legislation has been put forward to address both issues.
But much work remains, and the way the session will be measured hinges on legislators’ ability to find common ground and bring lasting relief to Coloradans.
“We have to actually get something done that moves the needle to say it’s a successful session,” said House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, R-Franktown.
Senate President Kevin Grantham, R-Cañon City, said at the session’s outset he was optimistically cautious that the two parties would find a construction defects solution, and believes the ongoing talks between the GOP and Democrats speaks to the progress being made.
“We’re so much farther along – we actually have legislation this year, we have multiple pieces of legislation, so I’m very happy about that,” Grantham said.
And on Wednesday, House Bill 1242 was introduced. It seeks to raise the state sales tax by .62 percent and shift existing funding to generate roughly $677 million annually for maintaining and building roads, bridges and expanding multimodal transportation options across the state.
But the future of the bills that stand front and center at the Capitol is very much in question.
For construction defects litigation, there is concern by Republicans in both chambers that meaningful legislation might be derailed.
“The reason this issue hasn’t gotten resolved over the past five years is because special-interest politics has hijacked the process,” said House Assistant Minority Leader Cole Wist, R-Centennial. “We have to decide if we’re going to side with Coloradans or if we’re going to allow special-interest politics to hijack this process.”
Senate President Pro Tem Jerry Sonneberg, R-Sterling, echoed the sentiment but wouldn’t elaborate as to which group of stakeholders he was implicating.
“There are several of those special interests that tend to gain and make money off of construction defects, and those are the special interests who tend to hold this up,” Sonneberg said.
For his part, Hickenlooper believes action on affordable housing will get back on track this year. But he is taking a hands-off approach and not dictating what needs to be in the bills.
“I think there are certain key elements, but as soon as I start injecting that into the negotiations that are going on between the House and the Senate, it’s not going to improve the situation,” Hickenlooper said.
With transportation funding, it’s perhaps muddier, as the release of HB 1242 was met with immediate criticism from GOP leadership outside of the president’s office.
Neville said House GOP would “aggressively oppose” the measure as they were not included in negotiations and it did not meet their vision of a solution that is revenue-neutral in its first year.
Senate Majority Leader Chris Holbert, R-Parker, took to Twitter soon after the bill was introduced to declare himself as a no vote.
Speaker of the House Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, applauded Grantham and the members of both parties that came together to draft the compromise that the transportation bill represents.
“Leadership takes courage, and in an effort to not do politics as usual and to be able to do something to deliver results to the people of Colorado, it takes courage,” Duran told the press. “It takes courage to do something besides the status quo.”
The backlash from his fellow Republicans did not surprise Grantham.
“This is going to be difficult for our side, there’s no secret to that,” he said. “This is a difficult issue for us, and there’s going to be people that are going to inflame the discussion because this is some folks actually trying to solve the problem.”
There is, however, another 60 days to close in on common ground, using HB 1242 as a jumping-off point.
And it might just run down to the final days.
“I don’t know of any deadline, any timeline, that said we had to have those things solved by the midterm instead of the last day,” Holbert said.
lperkins@durangoherald.com
