By Rocky Mountain Voice Editorial Board
From housing fights and election battles to late-night hearings and grassroots backlash, the 2026 session left many Coloradans questioning where decisions are really made.
Arrive early. Sign up fast. Wait six hours. Get three minutes at the microphone.
By April, Colorado citizens had learned the Capitol routine.
Parents waited to testify on parental rights and gender policy bills. Survivors of child trafficking described years of trauma while lawmakers debated sentencing standards. Gun owners warned against expanding red flag authority to what Senate Bill 26-004 would ultimately define as “institutional petitioners”—a category now including schools, healthcare facilities and behavioral-health entities authorized to seek firearm seizure orders. Local officials fought state zoning preemption proposals.
Colorado Senate moves to widen red flag authority despite due process warnings
Colorado Senate advances bill limiting local control over housing projects
Election hearings became arguments over what counted as a real election problem. El Paso County officials pointed to a voter-roll cleanup system that identified more than 91,000 address discrepancies and reduced undeliverable ballots, but HB26-1104, which would have expanded the model statewide, still failed.
Immigration hearings went even longer, with sheriffs warning about operational problems and lawmakers arguing over subpoenas, detention inspections and ICE cooperation.
Colorado House panel advances immigration bill after hours of testimony
The hearings kept ending the same way.
House Bill 26-1083, the girls’ sports eligibility bill, died in House State, Civic, Military & Veterans Affairs after a reversal of the previous roll call and an 8-3 vote shortly after 9 p.m. Reps. Scott Bottoms, Brandi Bradley and Stephanie Luck voted no. The rest voted to kill the bill.
Another committee room, another late-night defeat.
House Bill 26-1105 would have required abortion providers to offer information about adoption before performing abortions. Women who regretted past abortions testified alongside adoptive families who said they wished more mothers knew what alternatives existed. Opponents called the proposal intrusive and politically motivated. The bill failed 8-5 in House Health & Human Services.
Colorado House committee kills bill requiring abortion providers to offer adoption information
Then there was the parental-rights resolution.
Twenty Coloradans testified in support of HCR26-1004. No organized opposition testified. Democrat committee members asked no questions before the resolution failed 8-3.
Colorado parents packed the hearing room. Democrats didn’t ask a single question.
Colorado citizens became very familiar with the Capitol fitness program this session: sprint to the sign-up sheet, sit for seven hours, testify for three minutes, then watch the vote happen anyway.
Colorado entered the 2026 session under one-party control and a budget shortfall approaching $1.5 billion. Even with lawmakers talking constantly about scarcity, more than 120 bills still headed to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk before adjournment.
But after a few months, the fights started pointing in the same direction.
By mid-session, even unrelated fights started sounding familiar.
More decisions kept moving away from local governments and into statewide systems. Public hearings became obstacles to “streamlining.” More decisions moved toward administrative processes and away from neighborhood-level input.
Housing legislation became one of the clearest examples.
House Bill 26-1001, known as the HOME Act, created a faster approval path for affordable housing projects built by qualifying nonprofits, school districts, housing authorities and transit agencies. The measure passed largely on party-line votes before Polis signed it March 25.
Colorado Senate advances bill limiting local control over housing projects
Supporters framed the measure as a statewide response to Colorado’s housing crisis.
“The number of Colorado households spending more than 30 percent of their total income on rent or mortgage payments went from nearly 700,000 in 2014 to nearly 900,000 in 2024,” Sen. Julie Gonzales argued during debate.
Opponents said the bill treated public hearings and local objections as problems to work around instead of part of the process.
“So then why not partner with local governments instead of preempting them?” Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer asked.
Sen. Scott Bright introduced an amendment that would have restored a public-hearing opportunity before major qualifying developments moved forward.
“All it does is guarantee that before a major development changes a neighborhood, the people who live in that neighborhood know about it and have one opportunity to be heard,” Bright said.
The amendment failed.
HB26-1001 emerged in the middle of an already-running fight over local control and state housing mandates.
The year before, six Colorado cities sued the state over earlier zoning and parking laws while Gov. Jared Polis warned that cities refusing compliance with state housing policies could lose access to up to $280 million in state funding.
Six cities sue Colorado over zoning and parking laws as state stays silent
Similar tensions surfaced again in election policy.
House Bill 26-1113 expanded ballot timelines and revised voter-challenge procedures while grassroots-backed amendments dealing with voter-roll verification and cybersecurity protections failed on the floor.
Grassroots-backed election amendments fall short as House advances HB26-1113
Rep. Mary Bradfield introduced an amendment using credit bureau address verification data to identify outdated voter registrations and reduce undeliverable ballots.
“This is a tool,” Bradfield argued. “It simply gives clerks another way to identify addresses that may no longer be current.”
The amendment failed.
At the same time, RMV reporting documented counties such as El Paso and Las Animas using outside verification tools to identify thousands of outdated voter records and reduce undeliverable ballots.
Cleaning the rolls, cutting the cost: How Las Animas County found a better way
The argument wasn’t really about ballots anymore. It was about what problems the majority lawmakers believed needed fixing—and which ones they didn’t.
Colorado lawmakers also spent part of March debating whether phones, tablets and other devices should indicate when a user is under 18.
Senate Bill 26-051 proposed creating a digital signal tied to a user’s age. Supporters called it a child-safety measure. Critics warned teenagers would quickly find ways around it. Lawmakers were willing to debate devices “signaling” whether users were minors, but a separate proposal requiring actual age verification for pornography websites died in committee.
Colorado bill would require devices to signal when users are minors
After a father’s warning, lawmakers block porn age-check measure
“If you raise teenagers like I have, you know that they are digital geniuses,” one parent testified. “They will find a way to maneuver around these digital signals.”
The same institutional-expansion pattern appeared in firearm legislation.
Senate Bill 26-004 widened Colorado’s red flag law by allowing educators, healthcare workers and other institutional petitioners to seek extreme risk protection orders. Gov. Jared Polis signed the measure April 6 after mostly party-line votes in the House and Senate.
Colorado Senate moves to widen red flag authority despite due process warnings
During debate, Sen. Lynda Wilson warned lawmakers they were expanding a process she argued already sidesteps basic due-process protections.
“No speedy trial, no jury, no cross examination—just a judge’s quick decision based on a one-sided claim,” Wilson said.
Immigration legislation exposed another collision between centralized authority and local operational control.
Sheriffs warned about operational problems. Activists accused local agencies of enabling federal immigration enforcement. Attorneys argued over subpoenas, detention oversight and public disclosure requirements while House Bill 26-1276 kept moving through the Capitol.
Colorado House panel advances immigration bill after hours of testimony
Rep. Matt Soper raised concerns that public disclosure requirements tied to subpoenas could expose law-enforcement activity before operations occurred.
“You’re basically saying to any sort of bounty hunter, private investigator or other person who wants to make a point or even scare off certain Coloradans, you’re giving them carte blanche authority to do so,” Soper warned.
The bill still advanced.
The process itself increasingly became part of the story.
Rep. Matt Soper warned early in session that most citizens never see how legislation actually moves through the Capitol.
“There’s the textbook version of how a bill becomes a law,” he said, “and then there’s how things actually work.”
How Colorado laws are really made: What Rep. Matt Soper says voters rarely see
Soper estimated that “probably 80 to 85 percent” of introduced legislation originates outside the legislature through lobbyists, trade groups, NGOs and advocacy organizations.
“The pace of the legislative session leaves little room to slow down,” he said. “I definitely don’t read every bill.”
Sen. Janice Rich spent much of the session warning that fiscal notes frequently conceal downstream costs buried in “pages two, three, four and five.”
Behind the zero: What Colorado’s opening day didn’t say about the true cost of lawmaking
Those warnings became more difficult to dismiss once lawmakers started cutting services and reshuffling priorities.
At the same time lawmakers approved a Medicaid sustainability commission without specifically tasking it to investigate fraud, federal audits questioned more than $285 million in autism-therapy payments in Colorado’s Medicaid system.
Colorado’s $500,000 Medicaid commission has no mandate to investigate fraud
RMV reporting documented that Colorado approved higher reimbursement rates for autism therapy providers while audits identified $77.8 million in confirmed improper payments and an additional $207.4 million in questioned payments.
Colorado saw red flags in autism therapy billing and approved higher rates anyway
Meanwhile, the legislature debated cuts to disability services while continuing funding for Colorado’s $96.3 million Cover All Coloradans program for undocumented children.
Casey Barrett described caring for her disabled daughter Olivia while home-care hours were reduced under budget cuts affecting medically fragile Coloradans.
Colorado somehow discovered there was no money for everything and enough money for very specific things.
On criminal justice issues, lawmakers revisited sentencing rules involving murder, child trafficking and sexual assault while survivors and victims’ families repeatedly testified that existing systems still leave too much room for plea deals and probation.
Buyers walk free, survivors carry the scars: Colorado debates sentencing for child traffickers
Colorado law allows probation for child sex assault: A third attempt to require prison time
Colorado murder bill advances: Sentencing cuts collide with voter mandate
Rep. Brandi Bradley described one hearing involving child sex assault legislation beginning witness testimony around 1 a.m. and stretching toward 3 in the morning.
“I sat next to a woman who stayed with me till three o’clock in the morning,” Bradley recalled. “I drove her to her car. That was a victim of child rape.”
After years of watching similar proposals die in committee, organizers took the fight outside the Capitol and onto the ballot.
Even as lawmakers rejected bill after bill, activists had already begun building a statewide ballot campaign. If the Capitol majority wasn’t going to stop the agenda, the next fight would happen somewhere else.
Protect Kids Colorado mobilized 3,320 volunteers, nearly 2,000 notaries and more than 500 churches while gathering over 500,000 signatures for child-focused ballot initiatives. Volunteers carried petitions through grocery stores, church foyers, hockey games and youth sports tournaments across the state.
Some had never participated politically before. Some had never voted.
Erin Lee said many volunteers believed lawmakers were no longer reflecting the concerns they were hearing in committee rooms.
“Our representatives are not truly representing the majority of their constituents,” Lee said.
Lee said the campaign sent a message back to the Capitol:
“We the people are gonna take matters into our own hands.”
That may ultimately become the defining takeaway of Colorado’s 2026 legislative session.
Not simply which bills passed.
Not simply which party won.
Not even which controversies dominated headlines.
But the growing belief among many Coloradans that by the time testimony starts, the outcome is already moving.
Lawmakers adjourned in May.
The organizing didn’t.
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