By Bob Gardner

I served in the statehouse for 16 years. I have been a practicing lawyer for over 30 years.   In that time, I must have seen thousands of bills introduced with seemingly good intentions but leading to disastrous consequences. The worst of those almost aways had the somewhat curious quality of uniting those in the most extreme quarters of both parties in supposed efforts of protecting individual rights and liberties, but in practice, carrying consequences the sponsors either didn’t care to acknowledge or perhaps worse, were not astute enough to understand the disastrous consequences of their good intentions. A new proposal coming next week at the statehouse is one of those bills — and Coloradans deserve to know where it really came from, what it will really cost, and who is going to pay.

Here is what the bill really does: it creates new grounds for a state lawsuit which exposes government workers to lawsuits for legitimate decisions they make in their jobs. All would be subject to lawsuits holding them personally liable for day-to-day decisions that someone doesn’t like. Any public employee would now be personally liable to defend and pay for any lawsuit from anyone unhappy with their work. This means the judge in Prowers County who sentences a sex offender to prison, the building inspector in Alamosa who holds a neglectful landlord accountable, and the school administrator in Crowley County who issues a detention for misbehavior.

Your cities, counties, and school districts would be targeted as well. The bill’s attempt to give these local governments even basic protection from the most nonsensical claims is fundamentally flawed. And who would pay for all of this?  You, of course — every time your city, county, or school district is sued, you will pay for it and the costs are incalculable.

And do you know who benefits the most? Trial lawyers, of course.  A single lawsuit under this bill — even an outlandish one quickly dismissed — can cost a small town or rural school district $50,000, even $150,000 before it even gets started. And if that cost falls to the individual public servant? That would mean they would have to use their children’s college funds, their retirement funds, or savings for down payments on homes to pay a lawyer instead.

Colorado’s small towns and school districts will face a choice: carry more liability insurance at dramatically higher premiums or self-insure against the exposure-filed because plaintiff’s lawyers know that small local governments have to settle because defending will cost them thousands of dollars more.  And that money will have to come from somewhere. That could be a fire truck, another officer on patrol, another road or bridge that can’t be fixed.

This bill did not grow organically out of community concerns expressed to state legislators, or the rural communities of the Eastern Plains, or the mountain towns on the Western Slope. This is the product of a coordinated national campaign, led by advocacy organizations, with lots of lawyers and lobbyists, who want state legislatures to dismantle legal protections against these “sue the taxpayers and get rich” lawsuits, after Congress declined to do so. Colorado taxpayers should ask whose interests are really being served here, and who will be left footing the bill?

The sponsors of this bill will tell you it’s about government accountability. That government actors who engage in misconduct ought to answer for it. I don’t disagree that we should demand accountability of our government and its officials.  I spent a decade and a half in the legislature demanding exactly that— even to the point of having some like the sponsors of this bill try to have me removed from committees because I insisted on transparency and accountability. But good intentions and sound public policy are two different things. In fact, the best of intentions often leads to the worst laws. Every citizen with common sense knows that. Their legislators apparently don’t.do not.

Bad actors in government should answer for what they do. But we already have a mechanism for that. The law allows for civil lawsuits in legitimate cases and protects public servants from facing frivolous actions The remedy exists. If the organizations funding this campaign believe those protections in that system are interpreted too broadly by the federal courts, they should take that argument up with Congress — not take Colorado’s local governments off the cliff of financial ruin, taking our police, firefighters, and schoolteachers with them.

Colorado should solve Colorado’s problems. We should not be a laboratory for a national legal experiment whose costs will fall on the smallest communities in our state. For the sake of those who elected them, every legislator voting on this bill needs to ask themselves two simple questions: what will this bill cost the smallest town in my district and who will pay for it?

Bob Gardner is a former state representative (2007-2014) and senator (2017-2024). He served as either chair or ranking member on both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees for 16 years.