The two-month-long timeout for the Colorado General Assembly is scheduled to come to an end on May 18, leaving as much as 52 days remaining on the 120-day calendar, based on the Colorado Supreme Court’s April 1 ruling.

When lawmakers come back, their top priority is to pass the 2020-21 state budget, the school finance act, “sunset” bills that reauthorize state programs, and what’s known as “orbital bills” that go along with the state budget to help balance the budget.

There could be one other issue lawmakers will address: petition clauses on some of their bills that now may have unintended consequences.

A petition clause allows the public to challenge a law passed by the General Assembly. The clause delays the bill’s effective date for 90 days until citizens have had an opportunity to decide whether to issue that challenge. That’s the process that led to the ballot measure on National Popular Vote, which will be decided by voters this  November.

But that 90-day clock doesn’t start until the General Assembly has adjourned for the year. It was supposed to be next Wednesday, May 6. Then the pandemic happened.

A check of the 359 House bills and 204 Senate bills introduced so far in 2020 show that at least 72 have been signed into law that have petition clauses: 22 in the Senate and 50 in the House.

Take, for example, House Bill 1026, which creates the 23rd judicial district for Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties. The new judicial district won’t be created until January 2025, but a portion of the bill goes into effect on Sept. 1, 2020. The law also has a petition clause, delaying its effective date until 90 days after the adjournment of the General Assembly.

Should the legislature go beyond June 1 – and that’s highly likely – the bill would have conflicting effective dates.

There’s talk that the General Assembly will meet for two weeks to get the budget done and then come back, perhaps in August. The Supreme Court’s ruling allows the General Assembly the latitude to do another timeout without loss of calendar days. But that would push out the effective dates tied to petition clauses until much later in the year.

One bill affected by that scenario is legislation around Columbus Day, scheduled for Oct. 12, 2020. The General Assembly passed a law substituting Columbus Day for Frances Xavier Cabrini Day, designated as the first Monday in October, which in 2020 is Oct. 5. But HB-1031 also has a petition clause, which delays its effective date to 90 days after the General Assembly adjourns. Should that be past July 5, that change could push the first Cabrini Day into 2021.

Of more concern are bills that may have tie-ins to the current pandemic situation.

Senate Bill 91 increases the pay for the lowest-paid members of the Colorado National Guard, which has been called out to assist with the pandemic. Its effective date – tied to the petition clause – is now on hold until the General Assembly adjourns. Had the bill been written with a safety clause, which allows for immediate enactment, those called out for the pandemic would be eligible for that higher pay. Currently, low-ranking members of the Guard get about $20 per day; the law will eventually bump that up to about $88 per day.

It’s unknown whether any of the Guard members working on the pandemic are among the lowest paid.

State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg is a Sterling Republican and a co-sponsor of SB-91. He said changing the effective day would be the right thing to do and said he plans to see what can be done to help the National Guard. But he said that the bill as written didn’t carry a cost to the state, and changing the effective date would probably result in a fiscal note, which lawmakers have been warned to avoid at all costs when they return.

The Guard is being paid for their pandemic work by the federal CARES Act, and on Monday, Gov. Jared Polis was asked by Colorado Politics if he had taken any steps to increase the pay of the lowest-paid members of the Guard. He hasn’t, but said he was looking for a way to “reward” those members.