This past legislative session reminded me of some wisdom a Senate sage shared with me so many moons ago, “Mamet, I’ve been reading your legislative drivel and you don’t think we support local control down here, well I’m here to tell you that we do… until we don’t.”

That bit of counsel stood the test of time for me as I struggled with the jetsam and flotsam of statehouse public policy debates involving cities and towns for 40 years. It left an indelible mark on my psyche. This session was the height of inconsistency and at times arrogance and hubris, or at least it seemed that way to someone who has been quite removed from the daily grind.

For example, there has been much punditry regarding the defeat of Gov. Jared Polis’s land use magnum opus, Senate Bill 213. I’ll submit it failed simply because it was poorly drafted, radically overreached and mishandled strategically. I will go one step further, call it naiveite, but I am not even clear what the bill was trying to do. It was a blunderbuss of a bill.

The opposition to it at the Statehouse was strongly bipartisan, enough to stop 213 in its tracks, thankfully.

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Who should have been surprised? A 105-page incoherently written bill with questionable “stakeholder” engagement gets introduced at the end of the session including 22 pages worth of legislative declaration (something I have never seen) indicting every land use and zoning policy enacted over the past 50 plus years by municipal officials working with their citizens. This was intended to override home rule and local control. And there is nothing more quintessentially local than land use, and that’s not my opinion, go read the myriad of state court decisions which say so.

For those 105 municipalities operating with a home rule charter many of which were specifically covered by 213, only the State Supreme Court can legally decide whether land use is a matter of local and municipal concern. Since 1902, when home rule was first authorized in the Colorado Constitution, case law overwhelmingly affirms this fact.

Paraphrasing a line uttered by Capt. Louis Renault (portrayed by the incredible Claude Rains) in the greatest movie of all time, “Casablanca”: “Outrage uttered by local officials to 213, well I’m shocked, simply shocked.”

Many of those same lawmakers endorsing blanket state land use control did an about face and supported local control when they moved forward legislation to allow local governments to adopt rent control policies. I know a little about this, since I was in the room when it happened in 1981. I lobbied and testified against the original law prohibiting local governments from adopting rent control policies. It was, I argued, a matter of local control. I lost the debate.

Of course, not to be outdone, state lawmakers turned right around to restrict municipalities from enacting growth caps. A handful of cities are directly affected by the new law. What arrogance to overturn locally approved growth measures. This is a direct slap at citizens and the state constitutional right of using the initiative process for land use policy matters.

There are many other examples which arose during the session which demonstrated, in my respectful opinion, minimal interest in the views of local government. It was frustrating to observe this behavior, and I surely do hope during this interim period lawmakers will truly reach out to their locally elected officials and the statewide associations to have an honest dialogue about a meaningful state-local partnership driven by good public policy, not ideology.

My hope for the future is the statehouse refrain will be: we do support local control, and we are intentional about it.

Sam Mamet is the retired executive director of the Colorado Municipal League.