The Colorado legislature has fewer than two full days left before it finishes its regularly scheduled work for the year, as lawmakers take final action on remaining bills and send more legislation to Gov. Jared Polis for passage into law. Here’s the latest on Tuesday’s action.
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This story will be updated throughout the day.
10:52 a.m. update: A Hail Mary effort to let the quasi-governmental workers’ comp insurance program Pinnacol Assurance go private has officially fallen short.
House Speaker Julie McCluskie announced the latest attempt to privatize Pinnacol at the beginning of April — giving backers about a month to push through a bill before the mandatory end of the legislative session on Wednesday. Pinnacol serves as the workers’ compensation insurer of last resort, providing coverage to high-risk industries that traditional insurers don’t touch.
But the latest effort was doomed, before the bill was even introduced, by opposition from union members who worried about losing affordable coverage, legal wranglings around whether the state could even take the money from a Pinnacol sale and, ultimately, the legislature’s looming deadline to adjourn.
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“Unfortunately, I don’t think I got a good deal until the last week or two that would have kept Pinnacol as an insurer of last resort and saved (the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association) and allowed Pinnacol to compete in other states,” Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, a Denver Democrat, said. “I just don’t know that the timing was there. I don’t know if labor would have been on board.”
Spinning off the program has been a longtime goal of some policymakers, including Gov. Jared Polis. Pinnacol’s share of the workers’ comp market has dropped from about 60% in 2015 to 49% in 2024, as more companies work across state lines.
Pinnacol, as a quasi-state agency, can serve only Colorado businesses. Allowing Pinnacol to go private, and thus serve clients across state lines, could help the insurer remain viable, backers argue.
The state’s tight budget is also a factor that has fueled the effort. Allowing Pinnacol to go private could land the state a one-time windfall worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Rodriguez said concerns that the state couldn’t afford a property tax exemption for seniors spurred him to work on the issue. Lawmakers were able to find other money to pay for that property tax exemption.
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The next stage of the fight over Pinnacol’s future may go to voters this November. Supporters of Pinnacol privatization are gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would turn Pinnacol into a fully independent insurance company. In return, the state would receive a one-time $150 million payment, plus an estimated $10.5 million annually, with the money going into a new fund for skilled workers in the trades.
Rodriguez said he hopes the ballot measure doesn’t pass, citing “a lot of unfortunate ramifications.”
10:23 a.m. update: Welcome to the penultimate day of the 2026 regular session. Let’s start with a quick summary of what happened last night.
In case you missed it, Democratic lawmakers dropped their last-minute plans to try to neuter a proposed ballot measure that would give Coloradans broad rights to use and sell natural gas. In the Senate, lawmakers gave final approval to Senate Bill 135, which would let the state keep billions of dollars in additional revenue for education and other spending — so long as voters approve it on the ballot in November.
The Senate also waved through Senate Bill 189 — that’s the legislature’s much-awaited rewrite of Colorado’s artificial intelligence regulations. That bill now goes to Gov. Jared Polis, who is expected to sign it into law.
Elsewhere, given the late hour of the session, bills that have quietly languished on the calendar are going to start dying. Among the condemned is House Bill 1046, which would’ve carved out paycheck advance services from Colorado’s payday loan regulations.
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