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SB280 offers millions to tech giants—some say it’ll leave ratepayers holding the bill
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

SB280 offers millions to tech giants—some say it’ll leave ratepayers holding the bill

By Brian Eason | Colorado Sun With the help of generous corporate tax breaks, the state of Virginia has built up a data center industry that’s the envy of some Colorado lawmakers. The tax incentives helped bring Virginia over $9 billion in economic investments and some 75,000 jobs. In some communities, data centers make up as much as a third of the local tax base. But in the wake of a 2024 state audit detailing the growing environmental and financial costs for Virginia residents, public officials there have growing doubts over whether those jobs were worth the price. A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants Colorado to follow in the footsteps of states like Virginia that offer big tech companies a blanket sales tax exemption for data centers, the energy-hungry server far...
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Colorado lawmakers pass budget cutting roads, aid to keep health care afloat
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Colorado lawmakers pass budget cutting roads, aid to keep health care afloat

By Brian Eason | Colorado Sun Colorado lawmakers on Monday gave final approval to a $43.9 billion spending plan that cuts funding for transportation projects, local governments and dozens of social programs in order to keep up with the rising costs of health care and education. But as difficult as this year’s budget was, there was widespread acknowledgement that — one way or another — the state’s financial picture is only expected to get worse from here. “Next year is going to be very bad,” said Sen. Jeff Bridges, the Greenwood Village Democrat who chairs the Joint Budget Committee. “The cuts will be much more deep and much more painful.” The main budget bill passed the state House 43 to 21 and the Senate 24 to 11, with most Republicans opposed. From here it heads to Gov. Jared...
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Colorado legislature passes bill punting to local governments on how much restaurant servers are paid
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Colorado legislature passes bill punting to local governments on how much restaurant servers are paid

By Tamara Chuang | The Colorado Sun A contentious bill pitting many restaurant owners against workers over how much tipped employees should earn was approved by the Colorado legislature Tuesday, with the restaurant industry feeling like it had achieved a small victory.  While the industry sought to offset tipped workers’ paychecks with more of their gratuities, therefore reducing their base pay in some scenarios, the decision has been punted to local governments.  Under House Bill 1208, which now heads to Gov. Jared Polis, relief won’t come immediately — if ever. Especially not in Denver, where dozens of restaurant owners testified that high minimum wages exacerbated their struggles to survive and keep up with rising food, rent and insurance costs. Some members on Denver...
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Colorado Parks and Wildlife settles with hunting groups that sued claiming commissioners violated open meetings rules
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Colorado Parks and Wildlife settles with hunting groups that sued claiming commissioners violated open meetings rules

By Tracy Ross | The Colorado Sun Two influential hunting organizations that sued members of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission claiming they violated Colorado Open Meetings Law and spread false information about mountain lion hunting say they agreed to a small cash payment and the promise that commissioners would be trained in open meetings law and the agency’s rules around hunting lions, lynx and bobcats.   CPW spokesperson Travis Duncan confirmed the groups had reached a settlement but said once the state proved the commissioners had never communicated outside of an official meeting, the hunting groups decided to settle for “a modest amount of $2,332 to avoid the expense of litigation.” Commissioners did participate in an open meetings training, he said, which “was also ...
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Coal-fired power plant in northwestern Colorado still set for 2028 closure despite Trump administration orders
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Approved, Local, The Colorado Sun

Coal-fired power plant in northwestern Colorado still set for 2028 closure despite Trump administration orders

By Mark Jaffe | The Colorado Sun The coal-fired Craig Station is still set to close in 2028 — even as the Trump administration is making a drive to keep coal units going — according to the operator’s electric resource plan filed with Colorado utility regulators on April 11. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which runs the plant, says in its preferred plan that the Craig Unit 1 will close by the end of this year and units 2 and 3 will be shuttered in 2028.  Battery storage and a natural gas-fired plant will be added in Moffat County as part of the plan. Three days before Tri-State filed its plan with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to expand production of “beautiful clean coal” a...
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State bill rewrites how Colorado decides school vaccine mandates
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

State bill rewrites how Colorado decides school vaccine mandates

By John Ingold | Colorado Sun An amendment slipped into a bill by Democrats would shift reliance away from a key federal committee in determining which vaccines Colorado schoolkids are required to get Colorado lawmakers have quietly moved to shift the state’s school immunization requirements away from the recommendations of a prominent federal committee, in response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The move comes in an amendment to a bill, House Bill 1027, currently awaiting Gov. Jared Polis’ signature. The amendment makes a change to how Colorado decides which vaccines to require. Colorado’s Board of Health sets the rules for which vaccines schoolkids need to receive or to have a valid exemption for. The current law sa...
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Colorado’s backlog leaves sexual assault survivors without answers, without closure
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Colorado’s backlog leaves sexual assault survivors without answers, without closure

By Bente Birkeland | Colorado Sun, CPR and Andrea Kramar Editor’s note: This story contains details of sexual assault and might be difficult for some readers. Originally published at cpr.org. It’s a situation Miranda Spencer never thought she’d find herself in. The Denver mom was going through a divorce in November of 2023, when she decided to try a dating app for the first time. She used Bumble.  “That’s one I thought was safe,” she recalled. After a few uneventful first dates, Spencer agreed to meet a man who had been persistently messaging her.  “So I let a friend know, ‘hey I’m gonna go out,’ and the exact words that I used were, ‘on this pity date. You can come over afterwards and hang out.’” Those ended up to be fateful words. She said she only remembers the fi...
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Taxpayers could foot the bill—twice—for Democrats’ lawsuit to dismantle TABOR
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Taxpayers could foot the bill—twice—for Democrats’ lawsuit to dismantle TABOR

By Jesse Paul | Colorado Sun Colorado taxpayers may foot the bill twice if Democratic lawmakers manage to pass a resolution directing the legislature to sue the state in an attempt to invalidate the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.  That’s because not only will taxpayers likely be responsible for paying the lawyers hired by the legislature to bring the case, but they’ll also be on the hook for the costs incurred by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to defend against the legal challenge to TABOR, a constitutional amendment voters approved in 1992.  If House Joint Resolution 1023 passes as expected, the General Assembly’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Legal Services would likely hire a group of attorneys to file the lawsuit. In the past, the legislature’s third-par...
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Ghosted by USPS: Crested Butte faces losing its only post office
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Approved, Local, The Colorado Sun

Ghosted by USPS: Crested Butte faces losing its only post office

By Jason Blevins | Colorado Sun For three years, the town of Crested Butte has labored to find a new place for its overwhelmed U.S. post office. The town bought a parcel and began negotiating with builders, offering plans that involved the town either leasing the land to the Postal Service so it could build its own facility, the town building a new $12 million post office and leasing that to the service or even selling the land outright to the Postal Service.  “We drafted a cost-sharing agreement with the Postal Service and they told us a year ago, ‘We can’t do this,’ and then we have heard nothing from them since. Every plan we offer, we do not hear anything back. They are silent and nonresponsive,” said Dara MacDonald, the town manager of Crested Butte. “So we are stuck. We can’t r...
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Trump greenlights AI data center at Colorado’s NREL to ‘win the AI race’
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Approved, National, State, The Colorado Sun

Trump greenlights AI data center at Colorado’s NREL to ‘win the AI race’

By Mark Jaffe | Colorado Sun The Trump administration is looking to locate a private data center and power plant on land owned by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of a broader plan to site such facilities at 16 national laboratories. “Private data center companies, that’s where the capital is, that’s where the investment is and on federal land, we make a commercial arrangement with them,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a press conference Thursday at NREL. The arrangement could be a combination of lease payments and an allocation of data center computing to the lab. “It is using our land to get some value out of it with a private company,” Wright said. “It helps the lab and helps the country by getting more data centers built.” The underlying goal is to ke...
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