- An Alliance For Community Action
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- info@WesternColoradoAlliance.org
Three bills for action: Let’s get to work this Thursday!
We’re almost a month into the legislative session now and the bills keep coming. Some highly anticipated bills still have yet to be introduced but we’re just fine with that as we’ve got plenty to work with.
This Thursday at 5:15 pm (MST), we’ll host our second We Are The Change legislative webinar, where we’ll connect you to important upcoming bills and discuss actions you can take to help ensure they pass. This week, we’re focusing on three main bills, presented by our members who have laid the groundwork to see them introduced in the legislature. A reminder that these webinars are just 45 minutes, packed with easy-to-digest info about these bills, and actions we need your help with. But we won’t just break down the bills, we’ll also discuss the best actions to take, suggest clear messaging to use when communicating about the bills, and let you know how long each action might take so you can decide what fits best with your schedule.
We appreciate that the legislature can seem like an intimidating box to open, but we’re committed to seeing Western Colorado voices ringing loud and clear through the halls of the Capitol, even from hundreds of miles away. In addition to our three priority bills, we’ll add in a few more to give you a taste of the breadth of work happening under the dome, and I’ll be available to connect offline if you want more info to take action on one of those or any other bill you are interested in. For the big bills, here’s a look ahead.
Senate Bill 21-079
Presented by local rancher and member of the Colorado State Agriculture Commission Kathryn Bedell
Essentially, this bill would open up local meat sales from ranchers in our community directly to consumers. So, if you like to buy your produce locally through a CSA and are excited for opportunities to do the same thing with your meat, this is the bill to get us there. For our ranchers, this means better market access to consumers looking for select cuts of meat, higher compensation for their product, and shorter wait times for processing — all highlighted issues brought on during the pandemic that have strained our local ranching community. (Kathryn Bedell, who will be presenting on this bill in our Thursday session, is also the chair of Western Colorado Alliance’s Food & Agriculture Committee.)
HB21-1119
Presented by former West Slope Youth Vote intern & current NYU student Liliana Flanigan
It’s a devastating truth that Western Colorado communities experience higher-than-average suicide attempts and deaths year over year. For every life lost to suicide, there are 25 people who survive a suicide attempt. Responders, providers, students, and other suicide survivors suffer elevated risk themselves. This bill, sponsored by three West Slope legislators — Senators Don Coram and Kerry Donovan, and Representative Janice Rich — challenges the state to rethink suicide prevention to include suicide intervention and postvention. But what does this mean? Did you know suicidal thinking can be a direct result of common medical conditions, and only 46% of suicides are mental health related? This bill would improve conditions for attempt survivors, their families, loss survivors, and medical professionals. It would ensure that all those affected are brought into the conversation when studying our historic self-harm related deaths, including working to understand what needs to be done differently to protect lives in our communities.
House Bill 21-1131
Over 70% of Colorado’s geography is powered by Rural Electric Co-ops (or RECs), including much of Western Colorado. Rural electric co-ops are member-owned cooperatives, making you the boss of your electricity — supposedly. In Colorado, most RECs purchase their electricity from the power supplier Tri-State under long-term contracts. Over the years, many of our co-ops have leveled criticism of some of Tri-State’s practices and those co-ops have recently begun to win major reforms. This bill tackles a number of Tri-State and REC reform priorities, including ending Tri-State’s practice of requiring board members to vote exclusively in Tri-State’s best interests instead of the best interests of their own communities. Among a variety of other things, this bill would also enable co-ops to conduct electronic voting for board of director elections, and require the reporting of key co-op financial information to the public.
Each of these bills have some important dates coming up in at the Capitol, and our legislators need to hear from their constituents to help them take favorable votes. Best of all. Most of the actions we will ask you to take can be done on your own time, and could make a real difference. To learn more about what you can do to support these bills and more, we hope you’ll join us this Thursday, March 4 at 5:15 pm (MST) to get started. No registration is necessary! This link will take you straight to the Zoom meeting on Thursday!
Jeriel joined the Western Colorado Alliance staff in February 2017 (back when we were still Western Colorado Congress), but you may remember her as our Canvass Director for the successful Minimum Wage ballot initiative in 2016! In her young career, Jeriel has worked with engaged citizens across Colorado on issues ranging from veterans' affairs, healthcare and women’s rights. Jeriel has called Grand Junction and the Western Slope home for 16 years, and enjoys running, hiking, biking and crafting with her daughter Emma.