Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, has challenged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, to debate bills passed by the House of Representatives and let the legislative process work.

“We have 173 bills at last count, two of which are mine, that are sitting on the Senate waiting for action right now,” he said during a sit-down interview last week. “I understand calendars, I understand some of the politics of it there, but if you look at the quantity of legislation that’s been generated out of the House of Representatives versus the Senate and our backlog versus their backlog, they’ve got us about 10 to 1, 6 to 1, somewhere in those areas.”

Last year, only 60 bills were passed by Congress and signed into law, one of which belonged to Tipton – the Hydropower and Rural Jobs Act, which streamlined the regulatory process for small hydropower projects.

In the upcoming months, he will continue the push for legislation, including good Samaritan protections for those who clean up mine pollution, the Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act and a bill to provide federal funds for Native American tuition at Fort Lewis College.

Many of these bills, which are currently in committees or waiting for a hearing on the House floor, also were introduced in previous sessions.

“Sometimes it takes more than one time to get bills into law,” said Joshua Green, communications director for Tipton. “When it’s important, we keep pushing for it. Tipton has been good at that.”

Tipton has served since January 2011 and serves on three House Committees: Natural Resources, Agriculture and Small Business.

Tipton’s big project is the Water Rights Protection Act, Green said. This bill would prohibit federal agencies from unilaterally taking water rights from ski areas, ranchers and other private groups in exchange for contract renewals or without compensation. Tipton said this bill would merely codify existing practice in Colorado.

“This is an incredibly important piece of legislation for the Western United States and our district in particular,” he said. “Water is literally the lifeblood of our communities.”

The bill is expected be debated in the full House in the coming month and has companion legislation in the Senate, sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

Within the Committee on Small Business, Tipton is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Energy and Trade. He is using that subcommittee to examine regulations passed by government agencies that affect small business owners.

“The regulatory bodies that were authorized by Congress have 44,000 new pages of regulation,” Tipton said. “Some good regulations are out there, but, unlike Colorado, we don’t have a review mechanism to be able to go in and clean out the books, to be able to see if rules and regulations are actually having the intended consequences, and, quite frankly, if some of them are even needed.”

In the committee, Tipton gives voice to small business owners to try to prohibit regulations from being implemented or to change regulations that are in effect, if needed, Green said.

Tipton has hopes for legislation on immigration coming through Congress and has been visiting with various legislators to push for a solution that provides clear tools to address flaws in the current system.

He will be in Colorado all of next week during a congressional district work period.

“People are usually surprised about the amount of time (I’m) behind a wheel,” he said. “When we have these work weeks, we’ll typically have a minimum of 1,000 and up to 1,700 miles over the course of that week, and that’s with meetings interspersed in. That’s been a wonderful thing for me.”

Tipton also goes back to Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District every weekend.

“Home is a misnomer. Inevitably I’ll be somewhere in the district, and I’m not able to be in Cortez,” he said. “We really try to get out into the district and meet with as many folks as we can.”

Tipton is up for re-election in November.

kfiegenbaum@durangoherald.com, Katie Fiegenbaum is a student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald.