By Kent Singer, CREA Executive Director
With the completion of the 2016 legislative session, we want to say “thank you” to legislators on both sides of the aisle for passing bills that aided Colorado’s electric coop members.
The Colorado General Assembly adjourned for 2016 on May 11 after completing the latest 120-day session. And with that, our staff breathed a sigh of relief.
The Colorado Rural Electric Association monitors all of the bills introduced in the legislature each year to determine whether they will have any impact on the business operations of member co-ops or their member-owners. CREA supports or opposes individual bills after discussion with and at the direction of its board of directors.
Although some commentators suggested that the 2016 legislative session was a failure since the General Assembly failed to address big issues like transportation and Medicaid funding, CREA sees 2016 as a productive legislative session. As I reported in the February issue of Colorado Country Life, CREA initiated a bill relating to co-op board elections to clarify a couple of provisions in the current Colorado law. That bill, SB 16-055, revised the co-op board election statute in two ways.
First, the bill made it clear that votes cast for candidates for electric co-op boards will be counted regardless of whether or not they are returned in a security envelope. Second, the bill clarified that while candidates for co-op boards are entitled to audit the results of the board elections, they are not entitled to be present when the votes are counted by third parties. This change recognized that, in some cases, co-ops use out-of-state firms to count ballots, and it’s not practical for the candidates to travel to these locations.
SB 16-055 passed unanimously in both the Colorado House and the Senate and was signed by Gov. John Hickenlooper on March 23. We are grateful for the leadership of state Sen. Kevin Grantham (R-Cañon City) and state Rep. Dominick Moreno (D-Adams County) in carrying the bill and shepherding it through the Senate and House.
While we thought that SB 16-055 might be the only bill we would initiate this year, about halfway through the session we became aware of another issue that required a legislative fix. Since 1980, electricity sales to residential users were exempt from Colorado state sales tax. Like many other exemptions from the sales tax, certain basic necessities like food and electricity used in residences were exempted from the tax by the legislature. However, in a recent audit the Colorado Department of Revenue determined that one of our member co-ops should have been collecting sales taxes on the sale of electricity to any account that is not in the name of an individual. So even though the use of the electricity was for residential purposes, the state concluded that the tax applied.
Once again, we sought bipartisan support for a bill, HB 16-1457, that addressed this situation. The bill made it clear that if a coop applies its residential rate to an account, the co-op is entitled to presume that the account holder is using the property for residential purposes and therefore the co-op is not required to collect sales tax. The bill also added definitions of the terms “residence” and “residential use” to make it clear that multiunit apartments that are billed under one meter are exempt from the sales tax. These clarifications codify the practice that has been in place at the Department of Revenue for many years.
HB 16-1457 also sailed through both chambers of the legislature with unanimous support, and we are grateful to the prime sponsors, state Reps. Alec Garnett (D-Denver) and Jim Wilson (R-Salida) and state Sens. Tim Neville (R-Jefferson County) and Leroy Garcia (D-Pueblo) for their work on the bill. We’re also grateful for the efforts of the whole team of co-op lawyers and lobbyists who assisted us in crafting the right language for the bill and moving it through the process.
We were successful sponsoring legislation in each of the past two legislative sessions because, as an organization, we bring legitimate issues to the legislature and seek commonsense, bipartisan solutions. We appreciate the willingness of both Democrats and Republicans to hear our concerns and help us work out issues of importance to Colorado’s electric co-ops.
Although some people suggest that the Colorado legislature is just as fractured and deadlocked as the United States Congress, that has not been our experience. Just remember: While a lot of important issues were not resolved this year, at least our legislature balances the books and allows open hearings on hundreds of pieces of legislation. Maybe the U.S. Congress should take a few notes.