Legislative leaders on Wednesday tested a pilot program for video livestreaming of committee hearings in select committee rooms, which is set to begin in August and run through the end of the year.

The rooms in play are the Old Supreme Court Chambers; the Old State Library, which is known as Room 271; Room 112; Room 357; and the main Joint Budget Committee room on the third floor of the Legislative Services Building.

That will allow for livestreaming virtually every committee hearing, interim or otherwise, through the fall, except for hearings held off-site.

The current schedule shows that those rooms are slated for hearings for the Transportation Legislation Review Committee, wildfire, legislative audit, executive committee, and legislative council meetings, as well as capital development and capital building advisory, water and ag review, and the JBC hearing in September, which features the quarterly revenue forecast.

The vote to approve the pilot wasn’t unanimous.

Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, D-Denver, voted against it, citing concerns over possible technology issues, such as when systems go down.

That’s not hypothetical. Rodriguez noted there was a two-hour downtime on the Senate floor during the final days of the session due to technological problems.

The solution: building a backup or redundancy system, similar to what is already in use for audio recordings of committee hearings. That’s to ensure recordings are captured even when the audio goes down, and a similar backup would have to be in place for the video livestreaming. And that adds cost.

Cost was a concern for House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, R-Colorado Springs, who voted in favor of the pilot. The costs are estimated to be $20,000 for setup and $50,000 per year in annual expenditure, excluding the redundancy system.

Once the pilot is completed by the end of the year, a report on the pros and cons will be developed, according to legislative council staff. This will include input from citizens, which will be routed through a feedback mechanism on the remote testimony pages, as well as on individual committee website pages.

And the pilot has no guarantee that video livestreaming will continue into the 2026 session. House Speaker Julie McCluskie, D-Dillon, said she would hate to set expectations for those watching this summer that this will continue into session.

“Since it’s a pilot, I would like for that to be clear,” she told legislative council staffers.

Video livestreaming may also not be feasible in every scenario during committee hearings once the regular session gets underway, such as when there is a long list of witnesses, according to Manish Jani, deputy director for legislative information services.

But the pilot “should give us a pretty solid perspective on what the experience would look like,” Jani said. “I just wanted to caution that it may not be as complete or comprehensive as a regular session would be.”

Video streaming would work similarly to how it already does for the Senate and House chambers, utilizing fixed cameras. The committee rooms would have up to two fixed cameras, one focused on the committee and another on witnesses, according to an April memo.

According to research from the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, Colorado is the only state in the nation that does not video livestream its legislative committee hearings.