In her first press conference this legislative session, House Speaker Crisanta Duran on Wednesday celebrated the bipartisan cooperation she said had marked the first week of work. She also told reporters to expect a package of bills aimed at addressing the growing affordable housing crisis that has plagued cities and towns across the state in recent years.

She argued that bipartisan bills have filtered out at a regular clip and that work to find common ground behind the scenes was continuing apace. “We’re off to a very good start,” she said.

Duran commented only briefly on comments House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, R- Castle Rock, issued Tuesday, in which he pointing out that Duran had already assigned a suite of high-priority House GOP bills to the State Affairs kill committee. He called into question her commitment to bipartisanship and he decried the fact that Duran had expanded the Democratic majority on the kill committee from three to six members in order to shore up defenses against any surprise compromise.

Duran explained that, with the new expanded Democratic House majority – which jumped from three seats to nine after November – she simply had more committee seats to fill. She smiled and her eyebrows jumped.

“We just have more members who want to sit on that committee,” she said.

She also spoke at length about efforts to enact construction defects reform to spur housing development and defended the related litigation reform bill she co-sponsored with Republican Senate President Kevin Grantham. The bill, SB45, aims to jumpstart condo development in the state by empowering judges to spread out liability as a way to lower builder insurance rates. The bill has drawn some criticism as a half measure.

Duran conceded the bill was no silver-bullet solution to the ongoing problem, but she said she thought building subcontractors in particular would be protected against large liability payouts and that the bill was a good fast start to any continuing effort to tackle the issue.

“Legal defense costs are the largest driver of insurance [rate hikes],” she said.

“We’ll continue to look at other proposals,” she added.

The construction defects bill is an attempt mostly to bring down real estate prices for first time home buyers and would predominantly affect condo prices. It’s a proposal that addresses the middle-income problem of limited attainable housing.

The related problem still waiting for a legislative proposal this session is how to bring down, or at least slow down, skyrocketing rental rates across the state. That’s the lower-income problem of limited affordable housing.

Duran said lawmakers were preparing a “package” of bills to address the affordable housing problem. She said the bills would likely be bipartisan – as affordable housing proposals have been in the past – and take a commonsense approach.

“Right now, tenants only receive seven days’ notice for rent increases. That’s not enough time to make plans,” she said, suggesting the kind of quick-fixes that might be in the offing.

She said her caucus was committed to pursuing a “robust housing policy agenda.”

Also from the press avail, House Majority Leader KC Becker, a Boulder Democrat and environmental lawyer, told reporters she didn’t think there was any way Colorado could legally force the Environmental Protection Agency to pay compensation to communities or individuals affected by the 2015 Gold King Mine spill that turned the Animas River orange with roughly 3 million gallons of long-built up toxic mining waste.

EPA personnel loosed the waste into the river while attempting to add a tap to a tailing pond on the longtime slow-leaking site.

Becker said the best thing to do was to work to head off similar future catastrophes. She said it was important to try and track down companies responsible even for long-closed mines and mine clean up and that public funding for clean up was inadequate.

– john@coloradostatesman.com