NCLA expects highway, energy, health-care impacts from 2021 Legislature
Businesses in Northern Colorado can expect to see legislative proposals affecting highway funding; climate policy affecting the oil and gas industry, construction and transportation; and health care as it relates to the COVID-10 pandemic during the upcoming legislative session.
The Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance, a multi-community lobbying organization coordinated by the Greeley, Loveland and Fort Collins chambers of commerce, gathered government officials and business leaders for its annual Regional Issues Summit Tuesday morning.
Economic landscape
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Whatever happens at the legislative level in the coming year, it will be overlaid on a much different economic landscape than what existed when the 2020 legislative session began.
Adam Crowe, who works in the economic-development/labor force area of Larimer County government, said the labor force itself looks different now and will look different for months to come.
“Some of the reasons that people aren’t going back to work are different now. Some businesses [that shut down during the pandemic] aren’t coming back to the same level. There’s also fear of pandemic, and there are child-care issues affecting the return to work,” Crowe said.
David May, president and CEO of the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce, noting the dropoff in economic activity in multiple sectors affecting Northern Colorado, said the chambers and economic-development agencies have worked together to get businesses to the recovery phase, which has required gathering a lot of data.
“We’re in the ‘pre-recovery’ phase,” said Josh Birks, the Fort Collins economic development director. He said the region has begun rebuilding the economy. “Now it’s about looking ahead to what the new normal will be. We need to reinstill confidence in the economy. We all have a vested interest in this.”
Climate policy
One area likely to see attention in the upcoming legislative session will be climate policy. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, led off a discussion that drew the most discussion of the day from panelists.
“2019 was an active year at the Legislature for climate policy,” Toor said, with House Bill 1261 establishing goals for reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions. The goals would affect four major areas of the economy: transportation, electricity generation, emissions from the oil and gas industry, and emissions from heating and cooling buildings.
The biggest change toward meeting climate goals, Toor said, has occurred among electricity generators, which is moving at a faster rate than the other sectors.
Multiple utilities are retiring coal-fired generating plants as wind and solar resources are coming online at costs below what it can take to operate a coal plant, Toor said. This will help moderate consumer electricity costs and, in some cases, may result in lower utility bills, he said.
Toor also said automobile manufacturers have gotten behind efforts to replace a larger and larger share of conventional gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles with electric vehicles.
“We are on a trajectory of reduced pollution over time, but not fast enough to meet the state’s targets,” Toor said. “We’re on track to meet about half the state’s targets.”
Toor said five areas will need to make progress in order to meet goals:
- Continuing the transition from coal plants to renewable energy in electricity generation.
- Accelerating transition to electric vehicles.
- Building efficiency into buildings, including use of electric heat pumps for cooling and heating.
- Reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations as well as agriculture operations and sewage plants. The state’s plan has no current recommendations for a regulatory approach with agriculture but may use incentives to promote methane capture on dairy farms, he said.
- All sectors have a role to play to reach the state’s goals.
Dan Haley, president and CEO of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, said the traditional energy industry has made headway, and as the state develops its greenhouse plans, it needs to consider the impacts for all Coloradans.
“VOC [volatile organic compounds] emissions [from oil and gas operations] have gone down as production has tripled. We share the state’s vision of lowering emissions, but in order to achieve these goals, there needs to be a big-tent approach,” he said.
“We would encourage policies that encourage further improvements. As an industry of scientists and geologists, we are well-prepared to help find solutions,” Haley said.
Newly elected state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer of Weld County said her major concern is who pays for the implementation of the state’s greenhouse plan and whether the costs of implementation are equitably applied across the population.
“What’s lacking is … how much is our infrastructure going to cost, and what is the effect of that on people. There’s a million households in the state that earn less than a $50,000 income. How is this going to affect them?” she asked.
Toor responded that the state shares concerns about affordability and reliability of energy systems. “What we’re seeing in practice is that because wind and solar have done so well that we can achieve substantial pollution reduction without jeopardizing affordability and reliability,” he said.
Transportation
Local business leaders are hoping that transportation funding will be on the agenda for the Legislature in the coming session. The project to rebuild Interstate 25 in Northern Colorado continues to have the support of the Colorado Department of Transportation, and Gov. Jared Polis has proposed a one-time infusion of $220 million into transportation projects. About $160 million of that would be for road and bridge construction.
That’s still a small amount of the total highway construction backlog in the state but nonetheless is seen as a potential stimulus to keep people working as the state recovers from the pandemic.
“One of the things we determined is that if we want to fix I-25 we’ll have to help the state fix its highway funding problem,” May said.
The region has to help the state find new funding sources, whether that’s general-fund money, increased gas taxes, figuring out how electric vehicles pay their fair share of road construction and maintenance or other solutions, May said.
Shoshana Lew, CDOT director, said the pandemic has demonstrated to everyone the importance of trucking and delivery in our economy. “Look at the Amazon Prime trucks delivering to our neighborhoods,” she said, in reference to the spike in home delivery of products ordered over the Internet.
Lew said the state needs a good transportation plan with a discrete set of projects and discipline in implementing its priorities.
She said a potential federal stimulus “may be a shot in the arm” and help to bring some projects to the forefront.
Health care
Health-care institutions have begun to recover from the early onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic just as cases have begun to creep up again. But thanks to a partnership between industry and Colorado State University, health-care practitioners are in a better position to deal with the effects.
Dr. Nicole Erhart, director of the CSU Columbine Health Systems Center for Healthy Aging, said the existence of the partnership between Columbine, which operates nursing homes and senior-living centers throughout the region, and the university’s labs and disease experts enabled a relatively quick response to the pandemic and prevented what could have been a worse situation.
Early on, silent carriers of the disease were not being discussed, Erhart said. Testing was limited to hospitalized patients, and processing of tests was limited to state laboratories.
CSU got permission to develop its own testing methods and facilities, and conducted studies that determined that 15% of people within a study group were positive but showing no symptoms of the disease. Yet they could spread the disease and were “a trojan horse that could be a threat to older adults,” she said.
As a result of CSU’s work, the model created in Northern Colorado was emulated elsewhere in Colorado, and the Centers for Disease Control requested results and samples to use across the country, she said.
Dr. Rebecca Jackson, geriatric medicine specialist at Columbine Health Systems, detailed the experience of Columbine, which had the first outbreak of the disease in the state at one of its facilities in Loveland.
“We really needed clear, reliable data points in making decisions. Initially, we had to wait one or two weeks to get test results back,” Jackson said, which meant that the initial outbreak required 72 days to bring under control.
Another outbreak in August in a Fort Collins nursing home was brought under control in 33 days because of improvements in testing, with results coming back in hours instead of days.
“CSU made something we thought was impossible, manageable. I can’t express that enough,” Jackson said.
Elected voices
Gov Polis, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse also addressed the summit.
Bennet, a Democrat, was optimistic that changes in leadership in Washington may improve the federal response to issues affecting Northern Colorado.
“The founders didn’t expect that we would agree with each other. But out of those disagreements, we can create a more-durable solution through debate. We’ve lost that. When we have divided government, it’s particularly important to find ways to work together,” Bennet said.
He said he hopes Congress can pass a pandemic-relief package in the lame-duck session before the presidential inauguration in January. He would like that package to include:
- Ramped up public health testing.
- Direct assistance to families that have suffered the most.
- More aid to state and local governments.
- More support to hardest hit small businesses.
He said Congress is unlikely to do anything about infrastructure spending during the lame-duck session, but he sees infrastructure is “the likeliest place” for the new administration to have an impact.
Bennet includes national forests in the infrastructure discussion, which because of insufficient forest management were impacted by forest fires.
“There’s an opportunity to build a coalition across the West to protect our critical watersheds and national forests,” he said.
Neguse agreed that infrastructure assistance may be possible because it has support from both parties.
“[President-elect Joe] Biden’s build back better plan will be part of that,” he said.
“While I’m grateful for all the work of our local governments with transportation, the truth of the matter is that federal investment must be brought to bear. Local taxpayers should not have to bear the total cost,” Neguse said.
Neguse is also working to permit forgiveness of economic injury disaster loans. “We think this can pass the Congress and benefit all parts of our state,” he said.
Gov. Polis has proposed a stimulus package as part of his 2021 budget proposal. That includes:
- Direct payment of $375 to unemployed Coloradans.
- $105 million in tax relief to restaurants, bars and others heavily impacted by the pandemic.
- $220 million to create jobs in infrastructure, mostly transportation.
- $160 million for broadband projects.
- $140 million for workforce development.
- $200 million for the legislature to help allocate.
“But COVID is the crisis of the moment. We need to keep coronavirus rates down. We’re seeing an alarming increase in hospitalizations. Over 1,000 are currently hospitalized in the state,” he said.
He called on state residents to interact only with family members for the next month and to follow the procedures outlined by the state health department: use of masks, hand washing, social distancing.
“This is more dangerous now than it was in March or April,” he said. “The lives of your friends and neighbors are in your hands.”
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