Talk about a crazy ride. This year has been filled with controversy and hot button issues, like sexual harassment allegations, gun reform, basic LGBTQ+ civil rights and, who can forget, angry teachers storming the Capitol as part of the #RedforEd campaign. Of the more than 700 bills legislators considered this session, here are the most significant pieces of legislation that passed and failed.
Virginia’s Law aimed to protect Colorado immigrants, but the bill sponsors spiked the effort last legislative session after realizing Republican lawmakers in the State Senate were never going to pass it.
And Polis baaaarely eeked out of the radical left.
The City of Denver disagrees with some of the key findings in an explosive new report about laws in the Mile High City affecting the homeless. The University of Denver is defending its report.
Today is the last day of the state legislative session. Normally, that would mean that it’s time to party — not for the legions of Colorado legislative fans (if those exist, please let us know), but for the legislators themselves, along with the lobbyists and the interns and the staff and the hangers-on.
It took 119 days to pass what is arguably the most important piece of legislation to come out of the Capitol this year. After unanimous support in the Senate and an almost exclusively Democratic push from the House, a multibillion-dollar transportation bill was finally pushed out of the legislature and onto the governor’s desk.
The Homeless Advocacy Policy Project at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law has just released a report showing that thousands of Denver’s homeless are being displaced under the city’s urban camping ban.
A political movement is recruiting centrist-minded Coloradans to run in eleven state legislature seats this fall.
Although Lisa Raville has worked hard to build the Harm Reduction Action Center into the Colorado’s largest syringe exchange, she feels strongly that even more good could be done if the state had supervised use facilities, where individuals could inject drugs in an environment that put safety first, as opposed to the Denver Central Library branch, where six people overdosed during the first three months of 2017.
The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless is seeking a restraining order and preliminary injunction from the U.S. District Court of Colorado to prevent a federal agency from selling 59 acres of government land in Lakewood that had been awarded to the nonprofit to build permanent supportive housing for the homeless.
The state says Brad Levin is 1,521 signatures short on his ballot petition to be a Democratic primary candidate for attorney general. Levin mounted every argument he had in court to get his name on the June primary ballot, but he was shot down. Now he’s asking the state’s highest court to intervene before Colorado starts mailing out ballots this month and he’s completely knocked out of the race.
The Colorado Civil Rights Division is at stake this legislative session. The House passed a bill to reauthorize the agency. The Senate amended it, but representatives in the lower chamber were not keen on those changes. House Democrats have said the proposed changes to the civil rights agency would overly politicize and radicalize it. Now, the two have to negotiate their differences before the end of session. But the House Democrats seem to have all the leverage.
Doug Lamborn has been battered by lawsuits this election cycle over his petition to get on the June Republican primary ballot. He finally caught a break this week when a court ordered the state to reinstate his name on the Republican primary ballot for the Fifth Congressional District of Colorado. But it’s unclear how long this reprieve will last.
Everyone is buzzing about Colorado’s proposed red-flag law, which might have the strongest due process provisions of any state in the country that currently has red-flag legislation. In other instances, the American Civil Liberties has been an outspoken opponent of red-flag laws, which would allow law enforcement to seize an individual’s firearms with a court order. So what does the ACLU think about Colorado’s proposal?
Last night, May 1, the Castle Rock town council voted unanimously to adopt a new animal ordinance that effectively ends the community’s prohibition on pit bulls. Advocates for pit bulls are overjoyed by this turn of events and feel optimistic that the move will trigger new efforts to overturn similar bans in six other Colorado cities.
A committee that advises the city on issues of homelessness has been revised and rebooted; its initial lineup consists of fifteen individuals, including people who have experienced homelessness.
U.S. Congressman Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs is suing to get his named placed back onto the primary ballot after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last week that his campaign illegally gathered signatures by using two out-of-state petition circulators. After the ruling, Lamborn was 58 signatures short of the 1,000 he needs to be eligible for the primaries, so he sued twice. But if the courts don’t make a decision before Wednesday, he could still be left in the dust.
Denver has a new rule requiring that all single-occupant public restrooms in the city have gender-neutral signs, and businesses that violate the ordinance may face escalating fines. But Laura Swartz, a spokesperson for the city’s Community Planning Department, thinks that in most cases, a warning will be enough.
Thousands of Colorado educators followed the lead of states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona in demanding that state legislatures stop carving up public education and start putting money back into its public schools. Colorado legislators have cut $6.67 billion out of the state education budget since the Great Recession. And although the economy has bounced back, the practice of cutting education dollars continues. So what can protesters actually do to keep the #RedforEd momentum going?
The search is on to replace Denver Police Chief Robert White, who formally announced his retirement on April 24, and Nick Rogers, president of the Denver Police Protective Association, the city’s most powerful police union, knows exactly the type of person he’d like to see in the post: “someone who has a tremendous amount of honor and integrity.”
This weekend is the fortieth anniversary of the Rocky Flats Truth Force, and the truth keeps spilling out.
Brad Levin thought he had the ballot petition in the bag. He collected 16,000 signatures, far more than the 10,500 signature requirement to get on the statewide ballot. He was wrong. The state threw out 7,000 of his signatures. Some were thrown out over technicalities. Others were thrown out because the signatures were of unaffiliated voters, who are not legally locked out of the candidate petition process. Now, the Democratic candidate for attorney general is suing to get his signatures back.
