The 2019 General Assembly will be historic if legislators and the governor can move Colorado’s “kick the can down the road” issues forward. The Supreme Court decision to allow the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to operate on the basis of its original rules puts the fossil fuel business front and center along with health care, education, and campaign finance reform for legislative action.

These four policy areas have been worked on more or less at the margins for a decade. In that time, the state has turned from leaning GOP to leaning firmly Democratic. That trend culminated in November’s election.

Climate change is a high priority for Democrats, with the governor aspiring, in his words, to a 2040 transition to renewable energy for electricity production. Oil and gas production is a parallel issue, because it’s hard to reduce global warming, according to scientists, while continuing oil and gas drilling.

This conundrum became clear in research on oil and gas pipe leaks and methane flaring. Fracking for oil produces natural gas that needs release. Natural gas pipelines are often full, but the gas has to go somewhere so it won’t explode. That somewhere is the air. Those gas burn-offs, leaks, and releases produce ozone that increases global warming. The bad air and gas mixture banks up against the Front Range as haze and smog, exacerbating problems from car exhaust and irritating lungs for people who live far away from actual energy production.

Many Coloradans near oil and gas production also object to the industrial land use and health and safety problems.

Here’s the environmental and economic problem matrix the legislature will face to do its decision-making. Put the climate change mission plus ozone violations plus citizen demand for more control over drilling on one side of the matrix. Put the economics of the energy industry for employment, royalties, and severance tax on the other side. Mix in your values. These are industrial-weight problems.

Affordable health care is also critical to the quality of life in Colorado, especially for rural Coloradans. Bills related to hospital costs and the licensing of emergency care facilities should provide insight into the dimensions of the economics of delivering medical services. The challenge is how tangled up the costs are when the matrix of hospitals, insurance providers, medical personnel, pharmaceuticals, etc., and government regulation is considered. It gets boggling quickly.

The state’s education funding formula isn’t any easier. Arcane criteria for distributing tax dollars, which change by district each year, drive educators nuts. Denver Public School teachers may go on strike in part because its experimental compensation system, now years old, hasn’t worked at all as predicted. Some of Colorado’s rural school districts are in serious financial difficulty, while others receive enough tax support from the energy industry (see above) and property taxes to do well.

Inequities in education funding go back decades. The ultimate basis of the problem rests in the state’s constitution with competing and contradictory taxing, in every sense of the word, requirements.

The gaping transparency holes in election finance feed into these legislative issues. While the Supreme Court in its Citizens United case limits regulation on the amount of money in campaigns, it doesn’t limit how regulation can increase the transparency of where money is coming from.

The 2018 election produced a familiar story. Millions of dollars flowed into the state from out of state for legislative and state offices and initiative campaigns. Coloradans must still be wondering why. These dollars influenced which initiatives won or lost, which legislators won or lost, and which state officers won or lost. It’s impossible to know whether all the outside dollars ended up as evensies, essentially cancelling out their impact. Probably not. But who knows? The secretary of state as well as the governor will have to take the lead on untying the knot.

This General Assembly, with its single-party control, should make progress on these challenges. This year will tell whether there’s the will. Next year should finalize the way.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.