‘Red Room of Doom’ tales

BY BENTE BIRKELAND COLORADO PUBLIC RADIO

e Red Room of Doom. at’s the nickname one House Democrat gave the state Senate this past session. Others joked that the chamber — with its red wallpaper, carpet and ceiling — was where progressive bills went to die.

While Democrats held a near super majority at the Colorado legislature this session, closely divided committees in the state Senate frequently blocked or watered down some of the progressive priorities.

And that inspired one supporter of some of those policies to wonder why — why didn’t such big Democratic majorities translate into bigger margins on Senate committees in particular?

Coming down to a single vote

Alex Nelson, a public school teacher in Denver, is passionate about a ordable housing. He visited the state capitol this spring to back several Democratic housing bills and testify in committee.

Nelson sees the impact that the lack of a ordable housing has on schools, with students and families being priced out and having to move away, and also people choosing to have fewer children.

“Housing costs, costs of living are so high that we see diminishing enrollment every single year, which is leading to closure, consolidation, all sorts of things like that.” e issue also a ects teachers.

“Friends in the teaching profession have a hard time accessing a ordable housing,” Nelson said. “A couple of my friends have left the state because of housing costs.”

Given how many people are struggling with housing, Nelson said he was surprised when measures like a proposal to allow local communities to enact rent control narrowly died in a Senate committee. It failed on a 4-3 vote.

“I was thinking just about how many bills in the Colorado Senate came down to a single vote of either passage or failure,” said Nelson. e situation led him to wonder, “why those committees had only a single vote majority when the members on the oor held almost two thirds (of the seats)? … Is that a decision made by leadership?”

On seven out of the state Senate’s ten committees this year, Democrats only had a one-vote advantage. ose narrow margins made it possible for a single moderate member to side with Republicans to vote down a bill, or to demand signi cant changes in order to win passage.

Nelson was on the right track with his question about who decides the committee makeup; that power rests in the hands of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Dominick Moreno. He appoints lawmakers to committees and decides on each panel’s size and political split.

“ e committee makeup is dictated by the political makeup of the chamber as a whole,” he said. “ e rule says that the committee makeup has to be in rough proportion to the number of seats you occupy in the Senate chamber.”

But because it’s only a “rough proportion,” Moreno still has leeway on each committee. Moreno acknowledges he could have given Democrats a bigger advantage on some committees, but said he doesn’t have enough members to pad out all of them and that lawmakers’ individual expertise played a signi cant role in his choices.

SEE LEGISLATURE, P23

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