Big wins at the Colorado legislature in 2024

The 2024 legislative session is officially over and Coloradans have a number of reasons to celebrate actions the legislature took to protect consumers, our health and our quality of life.

Many of these bills are awaiting the Governor’s signature. You can see our complete legislative agenda here.

Here are some of the most important wins from the 2024 legislative session.

Coloradans will have the broadest repair rights of any state in the country

Colorado has been a leader when it comes to Right to Repair – the idea that we should have access to the tools, parts, diagnostics and software we need to fix our stuff.

The state already enshrined the Right to Repair for powered wheelchairs in 2022 and agricultural equipment in 2023.

In 2024, Colorado passed a bill that extends those protections to most consumer and business electronics. The bill awaits the Governor’s signature.

Right to Repair for electronics is important because it ensures the owner of a product, whether it’s a blender, appliance, cell phone, laptop, or IT equipment, has a choice in how repairs are made and the freedom to repair it themselves or take it to someone they trust from a local repair shop to the original manufacturer.

Repair options save us time and money while also reducing the amount of waste that we produce.

Colorado to Feds – we need a national repair score

Repair scores for tech such as laptops, phones, and appliances provide consumers with a 1 through 10 score that measures availability of spare parts, ease of disassembly, and longevity of support.

This allows consumers to compare repairability across participating companies before they purchase expensive devices and encourages companies to design with repair in mind not obsolescence.

The resolution was submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during a public comment period asking for feedback on how they can help states improve and foster repair.

Passing the joint resolution was like sending a powerful “super comment” from Colorado to the FTC to work with companies to develop a repairability criteria that’s fair for both consumers and manufacturers to ensure transparency in the market.

The year of transit – legislature raises approximately $170 million per year to expand and improve bus and train service

In what became a historic legislative session for transit, the legislature, working with the Governor’s office, committed significant new money to trains and buses in Colorado.

One bill raises nearly $60 million a year for statewide transit – projects like Front Range Passenger Rail from Pueblo to Fort Collins, passenger rail from Denver to Craig via Winter Park and Steamboat Springs and an expansion of Colorado’s statewide bus system Bustang. The money will come from a new $3 rental car fee.

A second bill raises approximately $110 million a year for local and regional transit service with a focus on increasing ridership. Seventy percent of those funds would go into service (more routes, more frequency), an unprecedented investment in Colorado. The remaining funds would focus on competitive grants and rail projects. The money comes from a new fee on oil and gas operations.

The bills also contained important policies that support expanding travel options in the state including spurring more of the dollars raised from our state’s managed (tolled) lanes to multimodal options.

In addition, agencies that receive the new service money will need to share their service plan, helping the public understand where the new money is going. And for the state’s largest transit agency, RTD, they will need to ensure the public has easy access to their budget information, capital plans, ridership and reliability data by route and workforce statistics.

A third bill will maximize the use of some limited dollars to allow transit agencies to either run a youth zero fare program or a short-term ozone zero fare program. While not long-term funding, it at least keeps some momentum going for two programs that have resulted in an increase in riders.

Taken together, these bills demonstrate that the legislature made 2024 the year of transit.

Continuing to reduce exposure to dangerous PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

For years Colorado has been chipping away at PFAS in products. PFAS are a group of “forever chemicals,” earning that name because they are nearly indestructible toxins that can cause major health problems in humans.

In April, the EPA announced limits on PFAS substance chemicals (or mixtures thereof) in drinking water, underscoring the need to stop these chemicals at their source – our stuff

Previously, Colorado limited PFAS in firefighting foam and passed a sweeping measure that will phaseout PFAS from items like carpets, rugs, juvenile products and food packaging.

This year, Colorado added most outdoor apparel, cookware, dental floss, ski wax, menstruation products and artificial turf to the no-PFAS list.

The bill has already been signed by the Governor.

Reducing ozone pollution across the board

With less than a month before Colorado’s traditional ozone season, the legislature took actions to reduce ozone pollution from the oil and gas industry, industrial facilities, gas-powered lawn equipment and transportation.

One bill should cut emissions from the oil & gas sector by strengthening air quality enforcement tools for state regulators to hold polluters accountable and increasing transparency by requiring the state to publicly share information on enforcement actions.

The bill also increases funding for the state’s program to plug “orphan” oil and gas wells and expands the program to include so-called “marginal” wells, which are wells that are low-producing but often highly polluting.

The bill will also codify Gov. Polis’s targets to reduce ozone-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) from oil and gas production and preproduction activities (such as drilling) within the Denver Metro/North Front Range ozone nonattainment area by 50% by 2030. Putting the commitment in state law gives us more ability to watchdog the development and implementation of these rules that could significantly reduce ozone forming pollutants.

A different bill tackled the shockingly polluting gas-powered lawn equipment in the state by kicking in $400,000 to transition to cleaner electric-powered mowers and blowers on state property.

Finally, the major investments in transit service mentioned above will reduce the number of trips people need to make in a vehicle, cutting tailpipe emissions – a significant source of ozone pollutants.

More data privacy protections, especially for kids

Right now we’re all having our data collected way more often than we realize, and it’s getting sold to a bunch of companies we’ve never even heard of. That puts our personal security at risk.

In 2021, the state passed the Colorado Privacy Act. While the protections only earned a C+ in our scorecard on state privacy laws, that was the second best in the country.

In 2024, legislators passed a law to raise the bar around data privacy for minors 17 and under. The bill:

• Stops websites and apps from gathering a minor’s precise geolocation, unless it’s necessary for a service (such as using Google Maps) and requires geolocation data to be deleted as soon as it is no longer necessary.
• Requires websites and apps delete any of a child’s data it has collected once it’s no longer needed, unless a teen or parent of a child under 13 consents to the storing of that data
• Prohibits websites and apps from collecting a minor’s data for targeted advertising or to sell it to other entities without consent of the minor or parent of a child under 13 (one major exception is platforms used by schools, which allows websites, apps and other software tools for learning to sell student data to advertisers or other third parties without collecting consent).

Another bill raises the bar around the privacy of biological and neural data.

No more hidden fees when shopping for tickets to shows and games

Consumers deserve to know what they are paying for, and how much, up front. It is that simple.

But whether we’re buying a ticket to a football game or show, too often consumers are blindsided with hidden fees –  touting one price in their advertising and then tacking on fees at the final payment screen.

In 2024, the legislature passed a bill that requires ticket sellers to disclose all fees at the time they disclose the price of the tickets.

It also ensures consumers can get a refund if a ticket seller sells a counterfeit ticket or the event was canceled.

Saving consumers money through communitywide clean building upgrades

There’s a lot of money available for individuals to switch to cleaner, more efficient electric heat systems and reduce their exposure to volatile gas bills. But the biggest savings and benefits can come when communities no longer need to pay for the maintenance of a gas system infrastructure on top of the electric grid.

One bill passed this year, and waiting for the Governor’s signature, would create a process for neighborhood scale conversions to electric heat systems. The savings could be big since gas is expensive to maintain given how dangerous gas leaks are.

Another bill will ensure utilities are investing so the grid has the capacity for not just more heat pumps and electric water heaters but also the electric vehicle charging infrastructure needed to serve the millions of electric vehicles headed to Colorado over the next few decades.

A final bill stands up the Office of Sustainability, which would align sustainability measures and strategies across more than 20 state departments. From energy efficiency upgrades in buildings to water conservation measures, good sustainability measures can also save taxpayer dollars.

For example, our report found Colorado state and local governments could save taxpayers up to $152 million in lifetime expenses by purchasing electric vehicles as opposed to gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles for their light-duty fleets.

Bees and pollinators added to conservation programs

Bees and other pollinators play a crucial role in our lives and our food system but their populations are shrinking due to factors of climate change, pesticide use, and habitat loss.

The state has programs and funding to protect eagles, bighorn sheep and other iconic animals. But insects were not included in those programs even though everything is connected.

Now, a new bill includes pollinators and native plants in the state’s research and conservation programs, opening up funding and support for critical parts of our ecosystem – pollinators.

Transformational waste reduction policy gets green light

While it wasn’t a bill, this session the Joint Budget Committee (JBC) did need to approve the initial plan for the state’s producer responsibility program.

Producer responsibility will be transformational. The companies that make the stuff we buy will need to pay for all the bags, boxes, bottles and shrink wrap that comes with that stuff. The money they pay will go to fund an expansion of recycling services to everyone across Colorado, and that should result in more than a doubling of our recycling rate and 410,000 more tons of recyclable materials diverted back to companies to be reused instead of landfilled.

In April, the JBC green-lit the program, which will be implemented over the next few years.

In addition, the legislature passed a bill that would eliminate state incentives for plastics-to-fuel gasification and pyrolysis facilities – a bad use of taxpayer money given the toxic pollutants associated with them. We should be reducing plastic use not finding ways for plastics to fuel additional polluting processes.

Finally, the legislature merged different waste reduction programs to maximize their ability to use fees collected from waste facilities to fund grants and technical assistance to support efforts to reduce waste.