At $8.31 an hour, Colorado’s minimum wage is largely academic. A full-time worker earning minimum wage will bring in $17,000 a year – an amount inadequate to cover essentials in any community in the state. In many cities, including Durango, that $17,000 would hardly scratch the surface in covering living expenses. As such, it makes sense for local communities – if they so choose – to set appropriate wage guidelines that correspond to the cost of living in a given region. Nevertheless, the state Senate on Wednesday killed a bill that would have allowed such local control.
Senate Bill 54 would have repealed statutory language that reserves minimum wage-setting rights for the state, thereby extending the authority to local jurisdictions. However, the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee – among the Legislature’s best-known “kill” committees – laid the measure to rest on a 3-2 party line vote. Republicans whose votes killed the bill apparently accepted opponents’ rationale that extending wage-setting authority to local governments would create uncertainty in the marketplace by creating a patchwork of regulations.
But the varied and divergent economic makeup of Colorado’s communities suggests that uniformity – in wages, housing, fuel, food and utility costs – is far from the norm in the state. Handicapping low-wage earners or communities that aim to increase those earners’ bottom lines is not the appropriate means of injecting uniformity.
Given the wide disparity in cost of living across Colorado and the corresponding challenges many communities have with affordable housing and cost of living that is out of reach, wages ought to be able to fluctuate accordingly. While the market, ideally, should respond to these conditions, many Colorado communities – Durango among them – report a growing imbalance between earnings and the salary it takes to cover basic costs. If the Legislature is unwilling to address this disparity at the statewide level – where a uniform wage boost, while helpful, would not necessarily respond to wage-cost discrepancies in Colorado’s most expensive communities – then granting local entities the right to do so is warranted.
The Colorado Center on Law and Policy released a report in 2015 documenting the self-sufficiency standard – the earnings needed to “realistically support a family” without public or private assistance - for the state. The index covers food, housing, health and child care, transportation, taxes, savings and household items such as clothing and diapers. One adult in La Plata County would have to earn $11.15 an hour to meet that standard; one adult with an infant and a preschooler would require $28.57 an hour. In that context, an $8.31 means very little. A single adult in Yuma County, on the other hand, needs just $8.25 an hour to make ends meet, while the parent of the same family of three must earn $19.32 an hour to do so.
The discrepancy is stark, and allowing local communities to address it according to their needs and gaps would provide the needed flexibility to help correct markets that are determined by factors other than straight economics: quality of life, proximity to public lands, community size and diversity all play a role in a community’s desirability and corresponding income disparity. The Legislature missed an opportunity to empower communities to, where needed, address imbalances in a manner tooled to the needs of their economic sectors, a process that can spur important conversations among workers, business owners and policymakers invested in their collective well-being.
