The House on Monday gave preliminary approval to a bill adjusting the date that dozens of bills will go into effect, a change required by the 73-day recess due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The four legislative leaders of the General Assembly are sponsors of Senate Bill 209, which moves the date that bills with petition clauses become law.

As of March 14, when the General Assembly paused its 2020 session due to the pandemic, at least 72 bills with petition clauses had been signed into law or were at that final step. 

The petition clauses in those bills say that the laws go into effect 90 days after the adjournment of the 2020 session, assuming an adjournment date of May 5.

That adjournment, as of Monday, still hasn’t happened. That meant the legislature needed to amend all 72 of those laws to ensure they had an official start date that complied with the Constitution, which allows citizens 90 days to challenge a new law with a petition clause. The easiest way to do that was to change the petition clause for bills adopted in the 2020 session prior to the recess.

That wasn’t the only problem the bill had to address. Another is the timing of petitions that could be submitted to the November 2020 general election ballot that challenge the pre-recess laws.

Senate Bill 209 pushed those petitions to the November 2022 ballot, meaning any of those laws challenged by petition might not go into effect until then.

The bill’s fiscal note points out that those challenges are “infrequent.” In fact, they’ve only happened twice in the last century: in 1932, when citizens challenged (and later affirmed) a law taxing margarine, and last year, when citizens mounted a challenge to the 2019 National Popular Vote law. That measure will appear on the November ballot.

Speaker of the House KC Becker announced Monday the beginning of House rules changes that take place in the last five days left of the session. That implies an adjournment date of this Friday, June 12. With a 90-day wait, that’s an effective date for those laws of around September 12. 

The bill, however, doesn’t deal with conflicts that the recess may have caused for bills already signed into law with specific implementation dates.

That includes House Bill 1026, a bill creating a new 23rd Judicial District and which has a partial effective date on September 1. But it also has a petition clause, which pushes its effective date to September 12, 11 days later.

Republican Rep. Kevin Van Winkle of Highlands Ranch, one of the bill’s sponsors, indicated the September 1 date is more of a technical problem than one that affects how the bill would operate, since the 23rd Judicial District, which would include Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, doesn’t actually open until 2025.

The one section that it does impact has to do with when the judicial department can start working on the logistics in setting up the district.