By Kent Singer, CREA Executive Director
The Colorado legislature began this year’s legislative session January 13, marking the 140th consecutive year that the General Assembly has met since statehood in 1876.
Since each General Assembly meets for two years, the 2016 session is also known as the second regular session of the 70th Colorado General Assembly. The voters of Colorado approved a 120-day limit on the length of legislative sessions back in 1988, so the legislature will adjourn this year on May 11.
As usual, this year’s legislative session began with speeches by the Governor, the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, as well as the minority leaders in both houses. All of these elected leaders described their goals for the 2016 session and their wish lists of policy objectives.
Predictably, given the fact that the Senate has a Republican majority and the House has a Democrat majority, the leaders of the two houses differed in terms of their priorities for the state. The one thing that is clear is that the only bills that will be successful in 2016 are those that can garner bipartisan support.
Colorado proved over recent years that we are truly a “purple” state, meaning that we have nearly equal numbers of Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated voters. This political diversity is evident in the state legislature where the Republicans have an 18-17 majority in the state Senate and the Democrats have a 34-31 majority in the House of Representatives.
At the Colorado Rural Electric Association, we will once again be vigilant in terms of monitoring the bills that are introduced in this year’s legislative session to make sure that the autonomy of Colorado’s electric co-ops is maintained. Since each of the 100 members of the General Assembly may sponsor up to five bills (more in the case of delayed bills), we will be reading and analyzing hundreds of pieces of legislation to determine if we have any concerns from the co-op perspective. These bills could deal with energy policy issues, such as renewable energy or energy efficiency; or they could deal with issues like requirements for motor vehicles or perhaps workers’ compensation. Since electric co-ops are small businesses, legislative changes can impact our operations in many different ways.
We will also be sponsoring a bill of our own this year. While electric co-ops are not under the jurisdiction of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission for rates like the investor-owned utilities are, we are still subject to certain requirements when it comes to co-op board elections and other matters. This year, we are proposing a bill that would make two minor tweaks to the co-op board election law.
The current co-op election law states that when co-op member-owners vote by mail in board elections, they must place their ballots in a security envelope in addition to the return envelope. While the law does not say that ballots must be invalidated if they are not in the security envelope, we want to make it clear that signed ballots are valid and will be counted whether or not they are in a security envelope. This is simply an effort to make sure as many votes as possible are counted in co-op board elections.
The second part of our proposed bill would clear up a provision of the co-op election law that was changed back in 2010. In House Bill 10-1098, a provision was added that said all candidates for the board of directors “shall” have an opportunity to be present to observe the tabulation of the ballots. However, that bill also required co-ops to use an “independent third party” to count ballots “when practicable.” Since some of our co-ops are using independent firms from out of state to count the ballots, it is impractical for the candidates to travel out of state to actually observe this process.
So, we are proposing a change to this provision to make it clear that if a co-op uses a third party to collect and count the ballots in a board election, the candidates are not entitled to observe the tabulation, but they are entitled to inspect the ballots after the tabulation.
I believe both of these changes are commonsense improvements to the co-op board election law that will honor as many votes as possible and clarify how ballots are to be handled when third parties are used.
The co-ops have bipartisan support for our co-op election bill with Sen. Kevin Grantham (R) as the prime Senate sponsor and Rep. Dominick Moreno (D) as the prime House sponsor.
We look forward to working with the 140th edition of the Colorado General Assembly on this and other bills.