Legislators came back to House Chamber of Colorado State Capitol for a special legislative session to address property taxes issues in Colorado in Denver on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2024. yesterday — dumbfounded.
But Colorado is now being used as a petri dish for high risk regulation – with multiple unintended consequences – by outside interests at the expense of Colorado’s companies and citizens. This is what struck me. Microsoft flew in from Seattle to testify. Amazon is from Seattle, too. IBM came from New York. Google and Salesforce are from California. And they all said pleasant things about small changes they’d like to see in Senate Bill 205, but they mostly commended the bill as a generally sound approach.
Meanwhile, the out-of-state special interests have found a surprising ally. In their case, they are theoretically pursuing regulation in the name of AI safety – when they are really trying to use the AI bill to push an agenda that has nothing to do with AI, but which they cannot win any other way. But fortunately, there’s good news. Gov. Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser and Senate Majority Leader Rodriguez all recognized that Senate Bill 205 had many flaws and needed substantial revisions. Gov. Polis said so in his signing statement, and the three of them reiterated, with more specificity, what had to change in a letter they published on June 13th of this year.