At the Colorado Legislature, it is budget season, it is defunding season.

Taking up where Republicans on the Joint Budget Committee left off last week, Republicans on the state House Appropriations Committee Tuesday morning voted against an amendment to the “long bill” that would have returned to the state budget $8.5 million used to fund the Colorado air quality division.

The Republican vote to effectively eliminate the division was symbolic. Democrats enjoy a seven-to-six majority on the Appropriations Committee and they voted to pass the amendment.

Most observers, including Gov. John Hickenlooper, see the clashing as flashy but fleeting.

“There are a lot of other industries that count on the air quality division to do their business,” Hickenlooper said at a news conference Tuesday. “Not just oil and gas facilities. It’s gas stations. It’s, my goodness, breweries — they all need to make sure they have air quality certificates. There’s a whole array of industries that would be affected, so I think there will be a lot of opportunity to find a compromise.”

The budget long bill, HB 1405, now goes to the House floor, where it is sure to pass with the air quality division money included. Then the bill heads to the Senate where majority-party Republicans hold sway. So the battle may get hotter before it fades.

Republicans have targeted the air quality division as part of a campaign to oppose any movement made by the state to implement the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to slash carbon emissions tied to the power industry.

The Clean Power Plan was drawn up by the Environmental Protection Agency as the main pillar of the president’s program to combat climate change. Even as it was being formulated, the plan drew attacks on the right. When it was unveiled, fossil fuel industry groups and conservative attorneys general, including Colorado’s Cynthia Coffman, filed lawsuits against it. Those lawsuits led the U.S. Supreme Court in February to stay implementation of the plan pending a ruling expected later this year.

But states such as Colorado, which have taken up work to tailor their own approach to meet the federal emissions targets, have continued to do preliminary research and planning. And, at the same time, sympathetic political leaders have worked to stymie legislative efforts to stall progress.

The air quality division defunding move is the latest broadside launched by Colorado’s Republican lawmakers, who know that the bills they have introduced this year targeting the plan face little chance in the divided Legislature of passing into law.

The idea is to strip the air quality division only of money that pays for work developing the state’s Clean Power Plan compliance program. Republicans have asked for an amount and have failed to get an answer.

The air quality division told them that work on the Clean Power Plan is tied to the division’s larger, everyday work, and so difficult to price accurately.

That led frustrated Republicans, seeking in part to pressure the division for a figure, to vote to defund the entire division — a move many have seen from the beginning as just an opening gambit in a game of legislative poker.

To move the budget bill out of the Republican-controlled Senate, Democrats may have to agree to strip some funding from the division. The question is how much funding.

Hickenlooper said the “state would not stand by” and let the division go unfunded, because killing the air quality division would be bad now for state businesses and in the future would result in less effective Clean Power Plan regulations.

“Basically we’d be turning over our (Clean Power Plan development) to the EPA, and the EPA is certainly not going to have the same attention to local (needs),” he said. “In general, local regulation is always going to be better regulation.

“We’re a mile high,” Hickenlooper continued. “We have higher vulnerability to air pollution than do cities at lower elevation. We already know that we’re out of compliance on a variety of air quality measures. If we can move toward having cleaner air and not raise people’s utility bills by more than 1 percent or 2 percent — and hopefully come in flat and have cleaner air for the same cost, why wouldn’t we do that? That’s the goal.”

Besides, he said, the total number of people working on the Clean Power Plan in the air quality division of the state is “something like a couple people in that division.”

“To try to take out the whole air quality division, it’s a little like the baby and the bathwater, except,” the governor was rooting around for a proper metaphor. “Maybe a baby with the gas — the baby with the oxygen? I don’t know.”

— john@coloradostatesman.com