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

The 2021 legislative session concluded on June 8, with the last day featuring a drawn-out debate over a climate change bill and a failed effort to boot the House Minority leader by far-right members of the Republican caucus.

The bill that would have provided reparations to hundreds of farmers and ranchers who were cheated out of tax credits by the State Department of Revenue also fell victim to a last-minute request from Governor Jared Polis, one that resulted in the bill’s demise, to the shock of the bill’s supporters.

Senate Bill 33 was never going to be an easy win in the General Assembly, given lackluster support for reparations by Democratic lawmakers. 

The bill would have set up a repayment program for those tax credits, tapping into a pool of money annually appropriated to the Department of Revenue for new tax credits. But years of bad publicity about how donors of conservation easements, with most of them in southeastern Colorado, has resulted in most of those credits going unclaimed for the past six years. 

A task force, set up through legislation in 2019, proposed several ideas on how to fix the troubled program, including reparations and boosting the value of tax credits for new easements. That produced two bills in the 2021 session, Senate Bill 33 and House Bill 1233, although the working group initially only endorsed the reparations bill. The land trusts banded together to support the increased tax credit bill, to the chagrin of some in the working group, who feared they were going to get stiffed on the reparations bill. In a sign of good faith, according to State Senator Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling, both bills were supposed to be on the same track, with both awaiting final decisions on the session’s last days.

That sign of good faith was all for naught. The reparations bill cleared the House Finance Committee on June 7, with one day to go. But an amendment that ensured the bill would die was offered by Representative Kim Ransom, a Littleton Republican, tripled the bill’s operating costs to the Department of Revenue and the House Appropriations Committee overwhelmingly voted to kill the bill. Ransom could not explain why she decided to offer that amendment, blaming it on the bill’s sponsors, Reps. Dylan Roberts, D-Eagle and Perry Will, R-New Castle. Roberts told this reporter the amendment wasn’t his idea. 

However, multiple sources told this reporter that Polis did not want the bill on his desk and he got his wish. Republicans, including Minority Leader Hugh McKean of Loveland, declared the war on rural Colorado and on agriculture in full swing in a June 9 meeting with reporters.

After the House adjourned for the year on June 9, McKean beat back an effort by a contingent in his caucus to remove him as minority leader. The effort was backed by Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, which sent out deceptive emails claiming McKean had voted in favor of a gun control bill that would ban the sale of firearms for five years to anyone with a violent misdemeanor conviction. But McKean had erred in that vote on House Bill 1298 and immediately asked for an opportunity to correct it. The House Majority Leader, Daneya Esgar of Pueblo, in a moment that even some members of her caucus viewed as petty, asked her members to reject that request.

Democrats, both in the House and Senate, were unhappy with her decision and promised McKean they would amend the bill in the Senate so he would get another chance to vote on it. That happened on June 7, and McKean, who had argued against the bill when it was in the House, voted against it. 

That didn’t matter to RMGO or the far-right faction of his caucus, who demanded an opportunity to vote “no confidence” in McKean after the session wrapped up. McKean won strong support from the Colorado State Shooters Association and Senate Minority Leader Chris Holbert of Douglas County, prior to the secret ballot vote. McKean didn’t vote, and won the day, 15-8. Rep. Rod Pelton of Cheyenne Wells is believed to have voted for McKean, according to a vote tracking sheet from RMGO.

The following day, 16 caucus members, including 14 of the 15 that backed McKean, signed onto a statement of support for the Second Amendment, issued by Kristi Burton Brown, the head of the Colorado Republican Party. That statement was also viewed as supporting McKean.

Pelton led some of the opposition on the session’s last day to a climate change bill that Republicans said showed an abuse of power by legislative Democrats.

House Bill 1266 creates the environmental justice ombudsperson and advisory board within the Department of Public Health and Environment. It also requires the Air Quality Control Commission to establish a fee on greenhouse gas emissions and to adopt and implement rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from certain sectors.

The bill is a successor to another bill, Senate Bill 200, which would have given the AQCC considerable authority over retail, wholesale and municipal electric utility and cooperative electric associations, as well as a huge portion of manufacturing industries, including oil and gas. Polis threatened to veto the bill, so Democrats amended major portions into House Bill 1266, after negotiations with the governor.

But it resulted in a 25-page amendment on the session’s last day, one that Republicans argued against, saying they hadn’t had sufficient time to even read the amendment and would not be allowed to challenge it under House rules. 

The bill claims it will address “environmental justice,” which isn’t defined in the bill. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like in rural Colorado,” Pelton said during Tuesday’s debate.  “Someone goes out to my district, goes to the local coffee shop or something and starts talking about some of this, it is going to be an ugly, ugly meeting. So I hope people come prepared for just what they’ll be faced with in that situation.”

The session’s last days also saw the final passage of bills contained in two stimulus packages: an $800 million package using one-time money left over from the 2019 tax year and $3.4 billion in federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan. 

The State money includes the largest-ever funding for the Colorado water plan, at $20 million. However, that continues to fall far short of the estimated need, at $100 million per year, which was to begin in 2020. To date, the water plan has received only about $10 million for its projects. Sports gambling profits, which was set up through legislation in 2019, is expected to provide some of those funds.

Lawmakers set up several funds to house the American Rescue Plan money, although with few details on how it would be spent. Most of that will be left for the next legislative session, which begins on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022.