by Kathy Zambrano and Richard Sweetman

With the close of a legislative session, the question now is, “What changes did the General Assembly make to the law of Colorado?” To answer this question, the Office of Legislative Legal Services (OLLS) is well on the way to publishing the bills enacted during the legislative session and republishing the Colorado Revised Statutes (statutes). Each summer, the OLLS organizes the bills passed in the preceding legislative session and publishes them as the Session Laws¹. The Office also incorporates the enacted changes into the statutory database and republishes the C.R.S. by the fall of each year.

Session Laws

After each regular and extraordinary session of the General Assembly, pursuant to section 24-70-223, Colorado Revised Statutes, the OLLS publishes the “Session Laws of Colorado (year)”. The Session Laws are usually available to the public in early- to mid-July, providing access to the new law that is not yet published in statutes.

Each edition of the Session Laws includes:

• All bills enacted by the General Assembly at the preceding legislative session;
• All proposed constitutional amendments and laws referred to the people by the General Assembly at the preceding legislative session; and
• All constitutional amendments and initiated laws adopted by the people at the general election held prior to the printing of that edition of the Session Laws.

The Session Laws also contain certain joint resolutions, resolutions, and memorials enacted by the General Assembly at the preceding legislative session. The Session Laws reprint each bill exactly as it passed the General Assembly, including the existing language that was repealed, which is printed in strike type, and the new language that was added, which is printed in small caps. So, to see exactly how the General Assembly changed the language of a particular statute, you should look up the bill in the Session Laws.

The Red Book

Along with the Session Laws, the OLLS prepares a Red Book, which is a numeric listing of all of the C.R.S. sections that were added, amended, or repealed during the preceding legislative session. The Red Book gives users a quick reference to the page of the Session Laws where a statutory section affected by legislation appears.

The Red Book includes:

• The section of each bill in which an added, amended, or repealed statutory section appears;
• The effective date of each such bill section; and
• The chapter of the Session Laws where each such bill appears.

Colorado Revised Statutes

Section 2-5-101 (1), Colorado Revised Statutes, charges the Revisor of Statutes² within the OLLS with compiling, editing, arranging, and preparing for publication all laws of the state of Colorado. This process includes publishing the hard-copy statute books as well as electronically publishing the statutes, which is facilitated by LexisNexis on the public statutes website.³

After the Governor signs an enacted bill or allows it to become law without signature, the OLLS updates its statutes database to reflect the changes made in each statutory section that is added or amended by the bill. This database provides the basis for the publication of the hard-copy and electronic versions. Once the Governor has acted on, or decided not to act on, every bill enacted during the regular or extraordinary session, the OLLS begins the process of finalizing the updated database for the republication of the Colorado Revised Statutes

Finalizing the updated database requires a lengthy process of updating source notes to enable the public to track the legislative history of each statutory section; creating editors’ notes and cross-references to assist the public in reading the statutes; adding annotations of judicial opinions that interpret the statutes; and proof-reading and reviewing the newly printed database multiple times to ensure that the enacted statutory changes are accurately enrolled and none of the unaffected statutory language is accidentally removed or changed. The OLLS typically distributes the republished statutes in early September.

During the next legislative session, a legislator — usually a member of the Committee on Legal Services⁴ — introduces and passes a bill to enact the previous year’s statutes as the permanent law of the state. Passage of this bill prohibits a person from subsequently challenging the constitutionality of the title of a bill enacted in the previous legislative session.

Each legislative session, pursuant to section 2-5-104, Colorado Revised Statutes, a member of the Committee on Legal Services also introduces a clean-up bill, referred to as the “Revisor’s Bill.” This bill makes nonsubstantive changes to the law to correct errors that have been discovered since the republishing of the statutes.

1. https://leg.colorado.gov/laws/session-laws ↩︎
2. https://content.leg.colorado.gov/agencies/office-legislative-legal-services/revisor-statutes ↩︎
3. (http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/colorado/) ↩︎
4. https://content.leg.colorado.gov/agencies/office-legislative-legal-services/committees ↩︎

by Nate Carr

Most of us appreciate getting a few pointers every now and then. With the start of a new legislative session, you might find it interesting to learn some of the advice given to your predecessors 111 years ago in the Colorado Legislative Manual – 1901 edition:

1. Avoid personalities in debates.
2. Do not crowd through too many bills.
3. Watch your bills and keep pushing them forward at all times.
4. Read section 40 of article V of the state constitution.
5. Be as regular as possible in attendance. It is the watchful and attentive member who advances legislation.
6. Endeavor to be present at roll call at the morning session and listen to the reading of the journal, that action on your measures and your own movements be correctly recorded. If the journal as read is in error, ask to have it corrected.
7. After your measure has been considered in committee of the whole, ask the clerk to permit you to see that all amendments and alterations are properly incorporated into your measure.
8. On the last day of session, have all surplus stationary and supplies in your desk or committee room collected and turned over to the secretary of state, for use at the next session. This is both law and practical economy.
9. The legislative session closes at midnight on the ninetieth day. It has sometimes been the practice to stop the clock, and proceed with business beyond that hour, but this can be prevented by simply entering a protest for record on the journal.

Words of wisdom written long ago can be as useful now, in many respects, as they were back then. Although stopping the clock to proceed with business beyond the constitutionally mandated time for sine die probably would not be tolerated today.

No. Your name will not go onto any bill unless the OLLS has received your permission to be added as a joint prime sponsor, an additional sponsor, or as the opposite house prime sponsor. The procedure for getting your permission is called “sponsor verification.” If the sponsor of a bill or a lobbyist tells the OLLS that you will sponsor the bill, you will most likely receive a call, an e-mail, or a personal visit form a member of the OLLS staff stating that the Office is trying to “verify” you as a sponsor on Member A’s bill. You are then free to say yes or no. Or, after you tell Member A or the lobbyist that you will be a sponsor on the bill, you can call or email the OLLS verifying that you will be a sponsor. After we confirm your sponsorship with Member A, we will add your name to the bill.

You may ask to see a copy of the bill before you agree to become a sponsor. The OLLS will then get permission from Member A to give you a copy. If you still can’t decide whether to become a sponsor, you should probably talk directly with Member A.

Rules adopted by executive branch agencies, boards, and commissions can be found through the Secretary of State’s website. The Secretary of State maintains the Code of Colorado Regulations (CCR), which contains all executive branch rules adopted over the years. The link to the website is: http://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/Welcome.do

From that page, you can start a search for a rule. One way is to search by agency name. A link on this page directs you to a detailed listing of state agencies, from the Board of Accountancy to the Division of Youth Corrections. Use these links to delve deeper into the rules of the agency you’re interested in until you find the subject that you are looking for.

You can also start on the site linked to above and use the “search” button on the top left of the page. On that page, you can search using keywords or using the CCR number for the rule if you happen to know it. A typical cite to a rule is in this format: 1 CCR 1101-5. It doesn’t really help to use the agency’s internal rule numbering system because this database relies on the CCR number.

Another way to find agency rules is to go directly to the website of the agency you’re interested in. You may have to dig a while, but you can often — though not always — find a version of the agency’s rules on its own website. Often, these are in pdf form. In other instances, you will be linked back to the Secretary of State’s website for the CCR version of the rules.

Section 22 of Article V of the Colorado constitution says that “no bill shall become a law except by a vote of the majority of all members elected to each house taken on two separate days in each house…” The requirement that a majority of all members of each house must vote for a bill on two separate days means that bills cannot be heard on second and third reading on the same day. A bill can be introduced, read on first reading, heard in committee, and then passed on second reading in the same (busy) day. This means it takes a minimum of two days for a bill to pass either the House or the Senate.

This two-day minimum per house means that the minimum number of days for a bill to pass is three. A bill could be introduced in the House of Representatives on Day 1, and then sent to committee and to the floor for second reading later that day. However, the state constitution requires that third reading take place on Day 2. After the bill has passed the House, it may be introduced and sent to committee and then on to second reading in the Senate on Day 2. Final passage of the bill by the Senate on third reading and consideration of concurrence or appointment of a conference committee, if necessary, would have to wait until Day 3.

So, the answer is a minimum of three days.

by Ed DeCecco

What is your purpose? It’s a big question; one that can confound even the greatest of  thinkers. And it is a question that the attorney drafting your bill might be asking you soon.

No, I’m not talking about your purpose in life — though that is a good thing to have. I’m talking about the requirement that any bill that creates a tax expenditure must include a statement of the intended purpose in a legislative declaration. Before I tell you a little more about this new requirement, let me first anticipate and answer your obvious follow-up question. A “tax expenditure” is “a tax provision that provides a gross or taxable income definition, deduction, exemption, credit, or rate for certain persons, types of income, transactions, or property that results in reduced tax revenue.” So, if you have a bill that reduces the amount of taxes that the state or a local government collects, it is likely a tax expenditure, and you should continue reading. (And if you don’t have such a bill, then have a nice day 🙂

In the past, you probably had discussions with the OLLS attorney about the purpose of your tax expenditure, as that information helps us make sure that we are correctly drafting your bill. You will still have those discussions, but now we will be using that information to officially describe this purpose and include it in a statutory or non-statutory legislative declaration because section 39-21-304, Colorado Revised Statutes, which was enacted as part of Senate Bill 11-184, requires that “any bill that creates a new tax expenditure or extends an expiring tax expenditure shall include a legislative declaration stating the intended purpose of the tax expenditure.”

But wait, this purpose won’t just be dropped in some dusty law books to never be heard from again. In some instances, it will breath new life every other year as a part of the tax profile and expenditure report that the Department of Revenue will complete. Alas, if the tax is not included in the report, the purpose won’t make it either, and it will be just in the law books — though hopefully yours are not dusty.

So remember, if you have a bill that reduces taxes and your OLLS attorney asks “What is your purpose?”, he or she is not trying to cause you existential angst. The attorney is just following up on a law that the 68th General Assembly enacted. Of course, if you are opposed to answering this question, we can always create a discrete statutory exception for you. But I’ll have more on that topic in my future blog posting entitled “But I Don’t Want to!”

by Julie Pelegrin

A constituent has just brought you a great idea for a bill. It’s such a great idea that you can’t believe someone hasn’t already introduced a bill on it. You put in your bill request, you introduce your bill, and then, just before you go into the committee room for your hearing, the committee chair warns you that the last three years this bill was introduced, it went down in flames. Obviously, this would have been good information to have much earlier in the process.

Now, this information is available to you – all you have to do is ask your bill drafter.

The Office of Legislative Legal Services has created a database of the long title and short title of every bill introduced since the 1999 legislative session. At a legislator’s request, a bill drafter will search this database to determine whether a bill has been introduced in the last 10 years that addresses the issue of your bill request. If the drafter doesn’t find any bills that appear to be on point with your request, you may ask the drafter to search further back.

If the drafter does identify one or more bills that address your issue, he or she will provide you a history of each identified bill:  When it was introduced, the prime bill sponsors in both houses, what committees it was assigned to, whether it passed, and, if it didn’t, the stage at which it was defeated. The drafter will also provide to you a copy of the introduced version of the bill and the version it was in when it either passed or was defeated.

You may request additional information concerning these identified bills, such as a copy of the summary of the committee hearings at which the bill was considered, copies of any amendments that the committees considered, copies of the committee reports, and copies of the journal pages for the days on which the bill was debated on second and third reading. You can even request a CD of the recorded committee hearing or floor debate if that would be helpful, but it may take the drafter some time to obtain the recording.

We have to mention a couple of caveats with regard to these bill history searches. The drafter will obviously do his or her best to identify the bills that address the issue you’re interested in, but we cannot guarantee that the drafter will find every bill. The database is limited in that it contains only long and short titles, and the searches are limited in that they may or may not include the correct terms. So, a drafter may miss some bills when conducting the search.

Also, there is some degree of subjectivity involved in interpreting the search results. A drafter may identify a previous bill that addresses an issue that is similar to one you’re considering, but the drafter may decide that it is not similar enough to be helpful or that the issue was one of several included in the bill, so the bill is not actually comparable to your bill. Also, the drafter may decide that an earlier bill addressed your issue in a manner that is so different from your approach that the earlier bill is not comparable. Your best practice is to discuss the search results with your drafter, regardless of whether the drafter identifies comparable bills.

Obviously, if your bill drafter personally knows of a bill from an earlier session that is similar to the one you’re requesting, he or she will likely discuss that bill with you prior to drafting your bill.

Anyone may request an audit and no specific form is required. However, to ensure the Office of the State Auditor receives the request, it is recommended that you address your  request to the State Auditor or to the State Auditor and the Chair of the Legislative Audit Committee.

Although you don’t need to use a specific form or format to submit a request for an audit, your letter requesting the audit should state the program or function that is the subject of the request and the problem or reason giving rise to the request, as well as contact information.

When the State Auditor receives audit requests from members of the General Assembly or the Governor, the Office conducts initial research on the topic and evaluates whether the Office has the authority to audit the area of interest. The Office also considers whether a similar audit has recently been performed in the area, whether the topic is a stand-alone audit or could be incorporated into an existing audit, and the resources and expertise required for the audit, among other things. The Office then presents this information to the Legislative Audit Committee and makes a recommendation to the Committee regarding the audit request. A majority of the Committee must vote to proceed with the request before the Office undertakes the audit.

The Office of the State Auditor receives audit requests from many other sources as well, including state employees, local government officials, special interest and advocacy groups, and private citizens. While the Office of the State Auditor considers the audit requests it receives from sources other than members of the General Assembly or the Governor, it does not present them to the Legislative Audit Committee.  The Office may use the request for a discretionary audit, initiated by the State Auditor, or include it in an existing audit, but it does not take any public action regarding these requests.

No, you don’t need an opposite house prime sponsor when your bill is introduced.  You must, however, have an opposite house prime sponsor before your bill can pass on third reading in the house in which you serve.  So, before your bill is heard on third reading, talk with a member of the opposite house about being the second-house prime sponsor on your bill.  Once someone agrees, talk to the Chief Clerk of the House if you’re a representative, or to the Secretary of the Senate if you’re a senator, about the form you need to fill out.  After you turn the form in to the front desk of the house in which you serve, the front-desk staff will make sure that the opposite house prime sponsor’s name appears on the reengrossed version of your bill when it is introduced in the second house.

by Ashley Zimmerman

Somehow, somewhere, in Colorado in 1937, the governor’s office appeared to have a mole problem.  The names of judicial and political appointees were being published in the Denver Post before the appointees had even been notified. Teller Ammons, the colorful and somewhat profane governor of the state, was upset and confused. Who could possibly be leaking his information to the press?

The young governor, elected at age 39, was born in Denver and spent his younger years on his father’s cattle ranch in Douglas County.  He attended and graduated from North High School in Denver before serving in the United States Army during World War I. After returning home, Ammons hired on as a clerk for Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton.  While clerking, Ammons also attended Westminster Law School and earned his law degree in 1929.

The next year, in 1930, Ammons was elected to the state senate. During his years in the senate, he served as chair of the Temperance Committee and Judiciary Committee. He introduced the bill that outlawed hanging as the method of capital punishment for the state, and he was instrumental in passing the bill authorizing use of the gas chamber for executions. In 1935, Senator Ammons resigned when Mayor Stapleton appointed him Denver city attorney. It was clear that Ammons was working his way up the political ladder, and he became known as a power player in the Denver Democratic Party.  He was elected governor in 1936.

As governor, Ammons pushed through a service tax to fund the state’s expenses instead of using already-raised funds from the recently enacted state income tax that were earmarked for education.  Despite numerous special interest groups pressuring him, Governor Ammons refused to tamper with the existing funds. As a result, he was highly criticized for his handling of state funds and attracted intense public opposition.  During the later years of the Great Depression, Governor Ammons established the State Game and Fish Department and the State Water Conservation Board, and he dealt with water rights disputes between New Mexico, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas.

Perhaps the most memorable moment from his term, however, was the aforementioned mysterious mole incident.

Governor Ammons was frustrated.  Appointments were being made public, information was being leaked to the press, and no one seemed to have a clue as to who was breaking the confidence of the governor.  Governor Ammons remarked, years after the incident, “One day a man came into my office, called me over to the window and whispered that there were microphones in my office.”  The man, who was not identified by Governor Ammons, was right.  A sweep was conducted of the governor’s office, and two microphones were found in the vents. The microphones were connected to a phone line that led to an apartment five blocks away, which belonged to a private detective named Jack H. Gilmore.

Gilmore was in cahoots with Walden E. Sweet, a reporter for the Denver Post, and Earl H. Ellis, an attorney who hired both Sweet and Gilmore. The entire scandal prompted a grand jury investigation, and the three men involved were convicted on eavesdropping charges.  Ellis was disbarred. The transcripts obtained were printed in the newspapers, and the entire situation earned a mention in the September 20, 1937, issue of TIME.  “I don’t know. . . what they were trying to get on me,” Governor Ammons reflected, later admitting that he brought a lot of it on himself. “When I took office, I resolved that I would not be dominated by any man or any faction or any newspaper.”

Though the recordings from Governor Ammons’ office did not produce any incriminating information against the governor, he did not win a second term in office. “It was embarrassing to a lot of people, but the worst thing was what my mother said: ‘I didn’t know Teller used that kind of language!’.”