Stories follow the video.
Colorado legislature week in review for Feb. 27, 2026. Gun bills, lawsuits against immigration and an ethics investigation plods on. @The Denver Post
Former state representative tapped to fill vacant Colorado Senate seat
A Democratic vacancy committee has picked former state Rep. Adrienne Benavidez to fill a vacant Colorado Senate seat.
Benavidez, of Commerce City, will replace former Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet after winning the Thursday night vacancy election. Michaelson Jenet resigned earlier this month to take a job as the director of the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism.
Benavidez will represent Senate District 21, which stretches from north metro Denver to parts of Adams and Arapahoe counties.
Read more
Former Colorado senator gets probation, community service for faking support letters
Former state Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis was sentenced to two years of probation and 150 hours of community service on Friday following her conviction on four felony charges.
Jaquez Lewis, a Longmont Democrat, was convicted in January of three counts of forgery and one count of attempting to influence a public servant. Jaquez Lewis submitted faked letters of support to the Senate Ethics Committee last year as it investigated her treatment of aides.
During sentencing in Denver District Court, Jaquez Lewis acknowledged making “bad decisions” and maintained that the letters of support, which she wrote but signed with other people’s names, were a simple mistake. She also characterized the process as politically motivated.
Read more
Colorado bill would create new fees on alcohol sales to fund treatment, prevention
Colorado lawmakers are pushing new fees on alcohol to fund prevention and treatment, similar to the way the state taxes gambling revenues to offset the costs of addiction.
House Bill 1271 would create three state enterprises to collect fees: one for beer, hard cider and “apple wine”; one for grape wine; and one for spirits. It defines apple wine as beverages made from apples or pears that contain up to 22% alcohol and aren’t cider.
In 2024, the state recorded 1,419 “alcohol-induced deaths,” which includes deaths from organ damage caused by excessive drinking or complications of withdrawal, but not other deaths where alcohol was a factor, such as accidents or certain cancers.
While seeing a decrease is encouraging, Colorado still has a high alcohol-related death rate compared to other states and to itself in 2014, said Dr. Bill Burman, a Denver Health physician and member of the Colorado Alcohol Impacts Coalition.
“We still have a rate of alcohol deaths that is twice the country as a whole and twice the rate a decade ago,” he said.
Read more
Bill would ban prop bets on sports apps in Colorado as lawmakers seek to curb gambling addictions
Colorado lawmakers who are concerned about rising gambling addiction and betting scandals in professional sports filed a bill Wednesday that would prohibit sports-betting apps from offering proposition bets on individual athletes’ performances.
The bipartisan bill — SB26-131 — would also attempt to slow down gambling habits by eliminating credit card usage on sports-betting apps, limiting the number of deposits a person can make into an account, curtailing television commercials and banning push notifications to cellphones from betting companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel.
“Frankly, the more I looked into it, the more I became really, really alarmed by everything that has happened as a consequence of legalized sports betting and, in my view, placing very few restrictions on it,” said Sen. Matt Ball, D-Denver, one of the bill’s sponsors.
Read more
Colorado slashes rape kit testing backlog, but lag time still tops 6 months — 3 times as long as standard
Colorado forensic officials have slashed the turnaround time for sexual assault kit testing, but it still takes analysts more than six months to process and complete a test, a new state audit found.
The 190-day testing lag is well outside the 60-day goal set by the legislature in state law, and itap more than twice as long as the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s internal goal of three months.
But the reduced backlog also represents a significant improvement from last June’s lag time of 450 days, officials from the state auditor’s office told lawmakers Wednesday morning. Both auditors and CBI officials said the agency should be able to hit 90 days before the end of the year.
“At this time last year, we were at over 500 days, maybe it was in the 560s,” said Rep. Jenny Willford, a Northglenn Democrat. “So I do want to acknowledge that there has been significant progress made, and there are a lot of audit recommendations to implement still, and I look forward to working with you on that.”
Read more
Ethics committee finds probable cause to investigate if Colorado House member broke rules
Colorado state Rep. Ron Weinberg will face more scrutiny for allegations of unethical behavior following a vote of his peers Wednesday morning.
The House Ethics Committee found probable cause to further investigate two out of six allegations filed against Weinberg, a Loveland Republican, by fellow GOP Rep. Brandi Bradley. One surviving claim involves allegations that he copied or otherwise misused a master key that could access any of the offices of his fellow legislators and that he used the key to enter at least one member’s space.
The other still-active claim by Bradley alleges that Weinberg made sexually suggestive and inappropriate comments to her and others on multiple occasions.
Read more
Colorado Senate passes measure that would allow people to sue ICE agents for constitutional violations
The state Senate approved a measure Tuesday that would allow Coloradans to sue federal agents if they believed their constitutional rights were violated during immigration enforcement.
The Democrat-backed measure, Senate Bill 5, passed the chamber 20-11 on a party-line vote. It still needs to pass the House before it goes to Gov. Jared Polis for consideration.
SB-5 is part of a trio of bills run by Democrats this year that immigrant-rights advocates hope will help insulate the state from what they see as federal overreach. If it becomes law, the bill will establish a legal right to sue agents in state courts for people whose constitutional rights are violated during immigration enforcement actions.
“Windows are getting smashed in cars in Alamosa, and glass is raining down on children,” Sen. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat who sponsored the bill, said during debate Monday. “… Five-foot-2, middle-aged women are being thrown to the ground and pinned down by federal officials in Durango. Agents with generic uniforms that say ‘sheriff’ or ‘police’ are walking around northwest Aurora, my district.”
Read more
Lawmakers take on Big Data, housing bills, ICE liability in the Colorado legislature this week
Welcome to another Monday in the state Capitol, folks. Lawmakers are settling in for a week of housing debates and efforts to limit the sharing of Big Data.
But first, the Senate is set to have the first floor debate and vote today on Senate Bill 5. The measure is the first of Democrats’ trident of immigration bills, and it would allow Coloradans to file lawsuits against federal agents if residents are injured by those agents during immigration enforcement operations.
The bill was one of the first measures introduced this session, and it cleared its first committee earlier this month on a party-line vote. Itap likely to pass the full Senate, too, and today’s vote is the first of two it’ll need before it can move to the House.
Read more
