The Haxtun-Fleming Herald - What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope

The effort by the State of Idaho to move up to 1,200 inmates to the Kit Carson Correctional Facility in Burlington got new life on Feb. 12 when the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a marathon session, made major changes to House Bill 1019.

The bill came out of an interim committee on prison populations last fall, and at the time it was written, the State’s biggest concern was overcrowding at many State prisons. There was also an interest by some of the committee’s lawmakers in ending the use of private prisons, and the bill would start the State down that path.

The circumstances changed on Nov. 1, when Gov. Jared Polis submitted his 2020-21 budget request to the Joint Budget Committee. Contained in that request, funding to reopen Centennial South, a shuttered solitary confinement prison in Fremont County that the State closed in 2012. That was due to a change in State policy around the use of solitary confinement.

Polis’ budget request said he wanted to close the Cheyenne Mountain Re-entry Center and move its 650-plus inmates into State prisons. That came as news to the GEO Group, which operates the prison on behalf of the State. On Jan. 7, GEO announced it would close Cheyenne Mountain on March 7, and the State had to quickly find beds for the inmates.

House Bill 1019 as introduced would allow the reopening of Centennial South for maximum security inmates who would be relocated from other state prisons, and tasks the Department of Corrections with conducting a study on how to close private prisons, with the last two located in Bent and Crowley counties.

When the bill went through the House Judiciary Committee on Jan. 28, a new wrinkle was added: language that the Governor’s office wanted in the bill to block Idaho’s efforts to move inmates to Kit Carson.

An amendment put on the bill said the Governor would make the call on whether to accept out-of-state inmates, in consultation with the head of DOC and only under emergency situations. It struck language that said permission to move inmates to Colorado private prisons could not be “unreasonably withheld.” That phrase is important. It has allowed DOC to bring in out-of-state inmates into Colorado for years, including 250 from Idaho to Kit Carson in 2012.

HB 1019 landed in Senate Judiciary on Feb. 12, and that’s where things got interesting.

Rumors of major amendments to the bill, dealing with the study and the Idaho move, were rampant during the day. The committee listened to testimony from dozens of people opposed to the study from Bent and Crowley counites, who cited the devastating impact that closing the prison would have on those local economies, including to their school districts.

The committee also heard from former Senator Greg Brophy of Wray, who was hired by the city of Burlington to lobby on the Kit Carson issue.

Brophy worked behind the scenes with Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, to come up with a way to keep the Idaho deal moving forward.

Their solution? Restore the language around the permission slip, as Brophy described it, and add in criteria DOC could use to evaluate the move. That criteria included the level of security — the contract between Idaho and CoreCivic, which owns Kit Carson, calls for medium or mid-level security inmates — that staffing levels should be adequate and that there would be no “commingling” of inmates from multiple states. That led to a riot at Crowley County in 2004, according to Christy Donner of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.

Brophy told the committee that allowing Kit Carson to reopen would be a boon to the community, adding 300 jobs in a community of 3,100. And those are good-paying jobs, averaging $50,000 a year in town where the median household income is around $41,000 per year. “It would be the equivalent of adding 50,000 jobs to Colorado Springs or 300,000 jobs to the Denver metro area,” Brophy explained.

“It’s a big deal.”

The tax impact also is huge, he said. When Kit Carson closed, the property tax base was cut in half. That’s $20,000 less to the hospital and $200,000 less to the school district, money the State must cover through the annual school finance act. And the city’s budget took a $250,000 hit, he said.

People are concerned about the bill’s language on the Governor’s authority to nix the deal, which wasn’t in the original bill, he said.

HB 1019 as amended by the House “represents a tremendous threat to Burlington.”

Brophy also weighed in on the study itself. “It’s unnecessary,” he told the committee. “You can look at what happened in Huerfano County (where a prison closed in 2010) or Kit Carson and what the consequences were of shutting down a facility.”

The committee took an unusual two-hour break after listening to witness testimony in order to work out the amendments with Brophy, the Governor’s office, DOC, criminal justice reform advocates and the Bent and Crowley County commissioners.

They adopted four, all on unanimous 5-0 votes, and one included the amendment crafted by Brophy and Sonnenberg on the permission issue.

Sonnenberg told this reporter Thursday that while there’s still a ways to go on the bill, the changes adopted by the judiciary committee improve the situation for Kit Carson and Burlington.

The committee also made major changes to the study itself, taking it out of the hands of DOC and putting it under the Department of Local Affairs, which works with county governments. It also no longer says the State will look at the impact of ending the use of private prisons and instead will look at “future prison bed needs.” The bill now directs DOLA to look at economic impacts and set up an advisory committee that would work with the contractor who does the study. That group must include at least three representatives of local governments in impacted counties and to hold public hearings that would be incorporated into the final report.

The bill passed on a 5-0 vote and now heads to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

In other news at the Capitol: two committees took a look at conservation easements bills, postponing one indefinitely and sending the second, backed by a working group that included co-chair Alan Gentz of Sterling, on its way.

Sonnenberg and co-sponsor Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Vail, presented Senate Bill 135 to the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee on Feb. 13.

The bill contains the recommendations of a working group that met last year to figure out how to pay millions of dollars in reparations to landowners who were arbitrarily denied tax credits for conservation easement donations.

Gentz and several other landowners who lost tax credits when the Department of Revenue decided their land had no values shared their stories in a brief hearing.

The issue for lawmakers is the cost. A fiscal analysis that came out on Feb. 11 says the State would have to come up with $149 million to repay the landowners whose tax credits were unfairly denied and that’s a big bite in a year when the State budget is expected to be tight. The task force recommended the State tap into unused tax credits from 2013 to the present, but the fiscal analysis said that the money doesn’t exist — that unused tax credits were not pooled for future use.

That leaves the program’s current annual tax credit allowance of around $45 million, and the task force suggested tapping half of that until the reparations are paid off.

The financial issues around reparations are raising concerns within the General Assembly. Amendments on the bill are expected, but the Senate Ag committee decided to let the bill move on with the expectation that those amendments will surface at the bill’s next stop, the Senate Finance Committee.

SB135 passed on a 4-0 vote Thursday.

The second bill was offered by Minority Leader Patrick Neville of Castle Rock and was a rehash of a 2019 measure on conservation easement transparency carried by Representative Kimmi Lewis, R-Kim, who died in December. Neville ran the 2020 version as an homage to Lewis, but the House Rural Affairs and Agriculture Committee rejected House Bill 1046 on a party-line 7-4 vote.