How SB19-180 opened the tap: The funding stream behind Colorado’s eviction defense network

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

SB19-180: Eviction Legal Defense Fund gets the money going

This will be the first part of a twofer on state grant money going to defend people against eviction. This first part will cover the legal background. The second will cover how a nonprofit got in on the ground floor of an initial trickle of state money and soaked up what would eventually become a firehosing of federal money into our state. In the process of that ballooning, one of their own got into the Colorado statehouse where he sits now and is running for reelection.

About a year or so prior to COVID being a thing, in Spring 2019, lawmakers passed and the governor signed SB19-180 (linked first below). The bill created a grant fund which would pay for, among other things, defense attorneys for those being evicted. Screenshot 1 is from the bill’s fiscal note and fleshes out the bill in more detail.

The website for the state program created by this bill is linked second below. Per that site, what began as a relatively small bit of money on a yearly basis in 2019 has ballooned into a sizeable and well-settled state grant program. Screenshots 2a and 2b spell out the actual application of the 2019 law; they give the rules established for the program and how it is implemented.

You get a sense of the amounts involved by looking at the five-year report prepared by the program. Screenshot 3 is taken from that report.

Some of the money in the fund comes from taxes, some from grants, and the fund administrators have done a good job of making most of that money flow right back out. According to the 2024 report, the expenses taken by the fund managers to run things stayed at about 1%. A look at cash in vs. cash out on a yearly basis up to 2024 is in the report and copied here as screenshot 4.

State money is not the whole story, however. That watered the plant. Federal money gave it the mega-doses of Miracle-Gro.

Think back to the halcyon days of COVID and how the money flowed like wine. Lots of things in COVID became part of the health emergency, being evicted became one. Federal money flowing to Colorado was, in part, diverted to stop evictions.

Links 3-6 below list bills that enabled federal and other state money to be used to stop evictions. Screenshot 5 is from the 2024 report and it summarizes what each bill did along with how much federal money passed through the state and into the grantees of the Eviction Legal Defense Fund.

As an aside, when you read about our state government spending one-time money on things (and this resulting in budgetary problems down the road), you have here an example but by no means the only one. As federal money poured into the state our lawmakers and governor used it to fund a whole lot of things that later became expectations. Additionally, general fund money was diverted into funding programs like eviction defense while the federal money got used to fill the hole. If you go and look at the bills linked at bottom, you’ll notice also that there is Republican sponsorship on some. Spending money without thought for the future is not entirely a partisan issue.

The 2024 report details a wide range of data breakdowns for tenant issues, demography, outcome, etc. I will leave it to you to read through those and note any patterns of interest. If you see something there worth mention, please feel free to add to the comments.

Some quick things I noted:

Tables 4 and 7 show that, yes, when you subsidize representation, people will take it. More people had lawyers and more filed answers to eviction actions.

COVID policy around evictions greatly curtailed court/eviction activity. This held regardless of legal representation.

Beyond this, things start to get more speculative, even down to the level of what grantees did and/or accomplished. Part of the reason is that the state’s data-taking and oversight was flawed; another case of state money getting watched like a hawk I suppose. Screenshot 6 from the report outlines the issues around data collection and oversight.

The other reason that things become speculative is that you cannot, with simple tallies on self-reported data, arrive at any causal connections. This is acknowledged by the report writers in a few places, but on the whole there are a lot of confounding factors at play here. Did lawyers prevent more evictions of the law-abiding? Did landlords not try for a just eviction because they knew that with a free lawyer they’d have to go to court, whereas without the free lawyer the threat of court would bring the tenant to the bargaining table?

In part 2 today, I will start on p 24 of the report, look at some of the groups getting grants, and focus in specifically on the one that I know for sure hit the big time with the influx of government money, the one associated with socialist Rep Javier Mabrey.

**See “Related” on post 2 today.

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB19-180
https://www.coloradojudicial.gov/financial-services/eviction-legal-defense-fund-grant-program
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb20-1410
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb20-1427
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb20b-002
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb21-1329

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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