Today is April 27, 2023 and here is what you need to know:

The Senate Appropriations Committee on a party-line approved an amendment watering down Gov. Jared Polis’ signature affordable housing bill before advancing it out of the panel that brought a halt to its progress. 

The Wednesday vote came after a vigorous hour of debate among committee members over a competing amendment and an effort to return it to a lower committee. Both Republican efforts failed on party-line votes.

The hearing on Senate Bill 213 was delayed several times while bill sponsor Senate Majority Leader Dominick Moreno, D-Commerce City, tried to broker a compromise between the governor’s office and Senate Democrats. Among the key opponents in the Senate’s majority caucus were the appropriations panel’s chair and vice-chair, both who pledged to vote against the bill if it continued to strip local government authority on zoning.

The winning amendment was a strike-below that rewrote the bill and took out its most controversial provision: language that sought to allow state control of local government zoning decisions. The bill in its new form would signal a major defeat for Polis, who made state preemption a key feature of his affordable housing plan for the 2023 session.

An effort to change the way Coloradans buy event tickets passed its last major legislative hurdle on Wednesday.

If signed into law, Senate Bill 60 would prohibit many common practices in the ticket selling industry, classifying them as “deceptive trade practices.” This would include banning “speculative ticketing,” in which companies resell tickets they do not yet own and customers are often not guaranteed to receive the tickets they purchase.

This comes as recent events have shaken public confidence in the ticket selling industry, including hundreds of Bad Bunny concert tickets turning out to be invalid during his world tour and Taylor Swift fans experiencing hours-long wait times for tickets costing thousands of dollars a pop. 

As Colorado continues to suffer through harsh drought conditions, the Colorado legislature passed a bill seeking to remove barriers for some residents to save water on lawn watering. 

Around 60% of Coloradans live under a homeowner association. If signed into law, Senate Bill 178 would allow those homeowners to swap their grass lawns for landscaping that needs less water to maintain, forcing HOAs to accept the alternative landscaping. 

The bill passed its final legislative vote on Wednesday, now only needing the governor’s signature to become law.

A Broomfield County judge did not have the legal authority to extend an order prohibiting the defendant from harassing his victims after the man was acquitted by reason of insanity, Colorado’s second-highest court ruled last week.

Nicholas James Licata brutally killed his father and assaulted his partner in January 2019. Two evaluations found Licata was legally insane at the time of the murder. Consequently, a judge concluded Licata was not guilty by reason of insanity and committed him indefinitely to the state’s mental hospital.

However, Chief Judge Don Quick also extended for an additional 99 years a mandatory protection order that covered Licata’s partner and child. Licata argued Quick had no authority to do so because Colorado law terminates mandatory protection orders, also known as restraining orders, when there is an acquittal – and courts have long equated not guilty by reason of insanity with acquittal.

A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals agreed with Licata.

Despite surging interest rates, punishing inflation and global turbulence, the U.S. economy stood firm last year. From employers to consumers, the picture was one of surprising resilience.

This year may be shaping up as a more downbeat story. The economy is widely expected to decelerate steadily and to slip into a recession sometime this year.

Some early such signs could begin to emerge Thursday, when the Commerce Department will issue its first estimate of the economy’s performance in the first three months of 2023.

Forecasters have predicted that the gross domestic product – the broadest measure of economic output – grew at a 1.9% annual rate from January through March, according to a survey by the data firm FactSet. That would mark a significant slowdown from the 3.2% growth rate from July through September and the 2.6% rate from October through December.