We want you to know what is happening under the Golden Dome in Denver that has the potential to cost the taxpayers of Douglas County up to $50 million.

We anticipate a bill will be introduced mandating collective bargaining for county governments. This unfunded mandate would apply a top-down collective bargaining obligation on every county government in Colorado.

To be clear, collective bargaining is the process in which employees, through a union, negotiate contracts with their employers to determine their terms of employment, including pay, benefits, hours, leave, job health and more. Collective bargaining is a required negotiation process, one that happens after a workforce unionizes, that would potentially create an adversarial relationship between the county and its workforce, harm the cooperative relationship we currently share, and impact service delivery to you.

For these reasons and more we believe collective bargaining is a local decision that should be left up to individual counties and their employees, not mandated by the state.

Please recognize. Collective bargaining is not designed to improve public services – in fact it does not even consider that aspect of our role in your life.

A major concern of the anticipated bill is that it does not contain a no-strike provision. Nothing would prohibit county employees from striking – not even those whose primary responsibility is to enforce laws that protect you and your community; provide front-line services, such as distributing cash assistance to needy families; and plow snow off your roads. If your county’s employees were to walk off the job during a labor dispute, it could very well threaten the health, safety and welfare of your community.

One more concern: data substantiates that productivity is often lower in unionized environments due to the inability for organizations and their people to move quickly or creatively in response to change. Unionizing increases difficulty recruiting and retaining the most creative and effective employees.

Unionizing creates massive barricades between employees and supervisors. Meanwhile, in a non-union environment, supervisors are the most trusted source in an employee’s relationship with its employer.

Mandated collective bargaining has the potential to make hiring and retaining a county workforce in a post-COVID world even more difficult, especially as counties compete with municipalities for a limited pool of public sector employees.

Another concern of ours is county property tax revenues – the primary source of revenue in our budget that funds your services – are finite in nature. We cannot “generate” more revenue without asking voters for a tax increase, nor would we want to. Collective bargaining will necessitate additional staff time, legal resources, human resources expertise, dispute resolution costs and, ultimately, higher workforce costs.

It is important to emphasize that all local governments are already authorized to accept and recognize collective bargaining units. This bill makes it mandatory for some, but not all, local governments to accept unions at the county level.

To be clear, we believe collective bargaining is a local decision that should be left up to individual counties and their employees. This statewide collective bargaining mandate is nothing more than a solution looking for a problem. It is bad for our county and bad for Colorado.

Abe Laydon (R-Lone Tree, District I), George Teal (R-Castle Rock, Disrict II) and Lora Thomas (R-Highlands Ranch, District III) comprise the Douglas County Board of County Commissioners.