Author: John Tomasic
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Colorado’s closely watched digital database open records bill advances
A long-coming update to the Colorado Open Records Act that aims to make government digital datasets more readily accessible to and manageable for the public advanced with bipartisan support in the State Senate Tuesday night. Senate Bill 40, sponsored by Fort Collins Democrat John Kefalas, is the latest version of a proposal that has been…
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Colorado driverless car bill wins bipartisan support in state Senate
A Colorado legislative proposal meant in part to attract automated car entrepreneurs advanced in the state Senate on Tuesday. The bill is being promoted by its sponsors for being ahead of the curve nationwide and welcomed by the burgeoning industry. Supporters played down public-safety and job-loss concerns posed by driverless car technology, arguing that the…
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Crowder on tweaking TABOR: Rural Coloradans would rather have a hospital than a $45 tax refund
It was a tax bill bound to make a splash, even though it was all but doomed from the start not to pass into law. It was a Republican proposal meant to tweak the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, a constitutional amendment that caps taxing and spending in the state and sacrosanct public policy…
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Colorado campus free speech bill scores full House support
Colorado’s campus free speech bill on Tuesday won a unanimous 64-0 vote on the state House floor. It was another triumph of bipartisan support for a bill that was early linked in the minds of lawmakers to contentious conservative cable-news narratives but that broke increasingly free with each committee and floor debate to be embraced…
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Bad week for guns on the Great Plains?
You would think every week of the next couple years would by a good week for the gun-rights lobby. Washington is being run by hardline pro-gun officials. Even before Trump and the Republican Congress, the Obama-Biden efforts in Washington to pass any gun-control laws at all met stiff resistance and failed. So what’s happening this…
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Firefighters work plumes and politicians to battle Colorado wildfires
Firefighters, with the aid of some non-windy weather, managed by Monday afternoon to almost fully contain the Sunshine Canyon Fire that blazed through forest just west of Boulder on Sunday. On Monday night, it was still smoldering above the city. When the fire ignited and spread, Boulder was experiencing a record-setting 78 degree day in…
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#Coleg Week 11: GOP tax proposal shot down, Transpo bill grumbling, fracking school setbacks, gay conversion, gun bills, budget countdown
The week is already moving fast. Republican-sponsored House Bill 1187 was shot down by Republicans in the Senate State Affairs committee. It was an important bill. Here’s a magazine-like summary of what it proposed to do, as best as I can write it at this stage: The bill aimed to allow the state to collect…
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How did that song at the Ralph Carr hearing go, exactly?
Michael Bellmont, a folk musician from Longmont, led attendees in song at a press conference introducing Thornton Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar’s Ralph Carr Freedom Defense Act, a states’ rights pro-immigrant and refugee bill. Bellmont felt an obligation to be there, he told The Colorado Statesman. He fears a “return to those dark days” when ethnic…
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Tate early-voting cost-savings bill still waiting back stage for big Senate curtain call
An elections administration bill that has been quietly hanging around the Senate chamber since it was introduced the first week of the legislative session in Colorado will stay a little while longer. On Friday, lawmakers laid over Senate Bill 71 for second reading until Monday. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Jack Tate, a Republican from…
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Legislature green lights Sand Creek memorial. But what will it look like? Where will it stand?
Lawmakers passed a resolution green lighting a memorial to be placed on the Capitol grounds dedicated to the 1864 Sand Creek massacre, in which Colorado Volunteer soldiers killed as many as 163 Cheyenne and Arapaho, many of them women and children. The memorial has been years in the making. The 12-member Capitol Building Advisory Committee…