Climbing Out of COVID

Each year Western Colorado Alliance produces a legislative scorecard, highlighting important bills from the most recent legislative session. By producing a scorecard we are able to hold our elected officials accountable to their votes, challenge them to tackle issues at the Capitol that have a direct effect on our local communities, as well as thank them for championing issues important to western Colorado. This year was different. This year, the session began poised to tackle vital issues like climate change, sustainability, and affordable access to health care; and ended with one focus – keeping the state afloat while helping people climb out of the crippling health and economic crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the legislature ended their mid-session adjournment, they came back unified and with a clear path forward. As discussions began around the suite of COVID-19 bills and the looming 3.5 billion dollar deficit, another crisis arose as the death of George Floyd sent people to the steps of the Capitol in demand for racial justice and police reform. And again, with a mostly unified body, the state legislature answered the call and passed one of the most sweeping police reform bills in the nation. We want to thank all of our legislators for giving so much of yourselves to tackle the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and while there is much work to do, we want to extend a huge appreciation to the many West Slope legislators who voted in support of SB20-217 to enhance law enforcement integrity and accountability. While we know this just the start, it was a good step forward.

With all this in mind, our Alliance’s legislative committee quickly realized in the early months of the pandemic that a legislative scorecard wouldn’t be fair to produce. We saw legislators line up to kill their own good bills on the simple fact that the fiscal note was now something unattainable. We instead asked ourselves, in place of a scorecard, what is best to communicate to our members and communities right now? The answer was clear, we needed to help – What is the suite of COVID-19 relief bills that were passed, and how can our local areas access them? With that, we spent the summer doing the research and are eager to present to you our COVID-19 relief synopsis!

A special thanks to Veniece Miller, our very first West Slope Youth Vote intern, a current student at CU Boulder, and a recent intern with the National Law Institute on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, for spending a part of her summer to help us put this together. It’s students like Veniece who, in spite of a pandemic, give us all hope for the future.

— Jeriel Clark, Western Colorado Alliance Political & Organizing Director