A plan to make the legislative session 20 days shorter died in committee today after lawmakers questioned whether the bill was necessary.
The bi-partisan team supporting Senate Concurrent Resolution 9 said the current 120 days provide too much time for their colleagues to introduce superfluous legislation and prevent lawmaker from spending time in their districts.
Leaders of the House and Senate can already shorten the session at will, though they rarely do so by more than a few days.
The proposal would have required both a two-thirds vote of the legislature and a vote of the people in 2010.
Co-sponsor Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, honed in on the fact that lawmakers who hail from far off locales don’t get the same contact with their constituents that Front Range legislators enjoy.
“Those citizens need to be heard as well. That’s a common sentiment among rural lawmakers,” Schwartz said. “This is less about money. This is about how we can be responsive to our communities.”
The resolution died on a 3-2 vote in Senate state affairs committee. It would have given lawmakers a 120-day span in which they would be limited to 100 days of actual work.
Both Schwartz and co-sponsor Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, said that the longer session you give lawmakers, the more bills they will run.
“We’ve all probably introduced throwaway bills,” King said. Or bills where “we want to make a statement about something.
But members of the committee, like Sen. Bob Bacon, D-Fort Collins, could not see the point adding additional restrictions to the state Constitution.
“There’s nothing that prohibits us from adjourning early or starting late,” Bacon said. “We already have that perogative.”
Jessica Fender: 303-954-1244 or jfender@denverpost.com.
