March 11, 2019 04:05 PM UTC

The Methodical Truth About SB-181

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• by: Colorado Pols

The oil and gas industry is now 0-for-2 in its primary arguments against Senate Bill 181, which would prioritize health and safety concerns in regulating oil and gas operations in Colorado. After initially claiming that the legislation was a big secret — nevermind the humongous press conference that preceded its introduction — the bill’s opponents focused their complaints on a process they claimed was too fast for proper discussion.

As we wrote last week, this “too fast” argument conveniently ignores the fact that SB-181 will be heard in 6 different legislative committees with at least 2 separate floor discussions before it can advance to the Governor’s desk. In order to put this ridiculous reasoning in the proper perspective, we took a look back at how much time lawmakers spent discussing some of the more controversial bills of the last two legislative sessions:

The State Senate has dedicated more than 16 and a half hours of testimony and debate to SB-181…and it isn’t even scheduled to be discussed on the Senate Floor until Tuesday.

In fact, SB-181 should have no trouble surpassing the amount of time dedicated to one of the most controversial bills of the last decade. The ammunition magazine ban of 2013 (HB13-1224) was discussed for a total amount of about 23 hours combined (House and Senate) before it made its way to the desk of then-Gov. John Hickenlooper. Senate Bill 181 will speed crawl past that total within the next couple of days.