By Ed Sealover | The Sum & Substance
After Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a 2024 construction wage-theft-enforcement bill that he said could trip up law-abiding contractors, proponents are back with a follow-up that doesn’t single out one industry — but that may harm many sectors, some business leaders warn.
House Bill 1001, sponsored by House Majority Leader Monica Duran of Wheat Ridge and fellow Democratic Rep. Meg Froelich of Greenwood Village, is scheduled for its first hearing Thursday afternoon before the House Business Affairs & Labor Committee. And its compromise efforts already have gotten a shout-out from Polis in his State of the State Address, starting it on much firmer ground than that on which last year’s effort began.
A major reason that the bill is getting praise from both the Democratic governor and the construction industry is because it doesn’t include the primary provision of the 2024 proposal that led to its veto. That bill sought to require general contractors to pay workers of subcontractors if an unscrupulous subcontractor stiffed them, essentially mandating that large contractors may have to pay wages twice for offenses they did not commit.