By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
Colorado senators Friday narrowly defeated a bill to create an online clearinghouse of pre-introduced legislative proposals in between sessions of the General Assembly.
House Bill 25-1069, which passed the House earlier this month with only one vote in opposition, would have been a voluntary way for state lawmakers to post drafts or titles of bills they were thinking about introducing. To avoid an impact on the FY 2025-26 state budget, the project wouldn’t have started until 2028.
A similar proposal died last year on the calendar of the Senate Appropriations Committee. This year’s measure died on a 17-18 vote during second reading.
No senators spoke against the measure on the Senate floor but two Democrats, Sens. Mike Weissman of Aurora and Tom Sullivan of Centennial, voted against it Tuesday in the Senate State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee. Weissman discussed what he saw as the bill’s “unintended consequences.”
“We all have the ability to share what we are doing — up to and including the level of an actual bill draft — in a lot of ways” such as social media, newsletters and town halls on Zoom, he said. “We do town halls where the entire focus is, ‘I’m going to be working on this,’ and we take questions and often get ideas about how to improve that.”
Although the provisions in HB 25-1069 were voluntary for legislators, Weissman said he was concerned the bill “will, over time, drift into a calcified expectation, maybe, frankly, even be weaponized into a calcified expectation.” He said his perspective “comes out of a pretty sober reckoning with the blunt reality of power” at the state Capitol, noting that a bill he sponsored had been “ground to paste by some of the most powerful monied interests that come into this building.”
Sullivan in the committee hearing said he was “perplexed” about how a voluntary website “is different from a newsletter or a town hall or a posting on your Instagram account or doing an interview with the media … I don’t know why the state legislature needs to get involved and create some kind of a state-run agency to publish my thoughts and ideas before my thoughts and ideas actually have to be” laid out in an introduced bill.
Rep. Stephanie Luck, R-Penrose, and Sen. Mark Baisley, R-Woodland Park, sponsored HB 25-1069. In the Senate committee hearing, Baisley called it “a public transparency facilitation bill” that would encourage the public and subject-matter experts “to chime in on what we’re thinking about.”
The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition supported the bill as did the Colorado Press Association and the League of Women Voters of Colorado.
In committee testimony, CFOIC called it “a great and low-cost way for journalists and the public to learn about proposed bills ahead of time rather than having to wait for the avalanche of legislation in the first days of a session. And it would encourage year-round public engagement in the legislative process.”
Linda Hutchinson of the League of Women Voters testified that HB 25-1069 would “enable voters to be better informed and have more meaningful discussions with their representatives, including on the formation of public policy.”
Creating the web page for pre-introduced legislative proposals was expected to cost $63,840 in FY 2025-26, according to the bill’s original fiscal note. An amendment adopted in the House gave the legislature’s IT staff three years to fold it into the automated system used for bills introduced during legislative sessions.
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