Legislators scrambling as session nears conclusion

Legislators scrambling as session nears conclusion

May 3, 2001

Capitol Report
By Senator Jim Dyer

0715 is an unholy hour for legislators to attend a don’t-have-to-go briefing on an obscure topic.

Friday, in the ornate Capitol chamber where the Supreme Court sat until a couple decades ago, only about 10 of the 100 lawmakers chose to attend.

A Columbia University professor presented the topic of zero-emission consumption of coal in the production of electricity.

Coal is a 300-year resource. But good as it is, current technology still dumps unacceptable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The Heidelberg-educated Herr Doktor also posited that hydrogen — a byproduct of the closed-circuit coal consumption process — would be the basis of a future economy and illustrated his findings with sonnet-length formulae.

While this may be as elusive as the dream of a perpetual-motion machine, it does have a certain immediacy with the power problems in California and Wyoming.

The problem is that without heroic measures and spending, these proposals would come on-line when the high-school class of 2001 is eligible for Social Security.

Thus inspired, and having dug myself out of an avalanche of 150 NRA member phone calls regarding Senate Bill 225 (Parental Consent for Underage Purchase of Handguns ... I’m a "no vote) we convened on the Senate floor.

I had one bill up for final approval by the full Senate.

•House Bill 1284 applies to young men age 18 to 26. When the bill becomes law, they will agree to be registered with selective service when they apply for a driver’s license, or not get the license.

Now of course, there is no military draft and it would take an act of Congress to activate it. But the pool of registrees is our third tier of defense, behind the regular active forces and the reserves/guard forces.

Although not enforced, the penalty for non-registration can be a felony conviction, fine of $250,000 and five years of hard time.

More realistically, non-registrees do not get in-state tuition at our colleges and are not eligible for training.

Objections came from the senator from Boulder who thought that an anti-violence dissenter should be able to register his disapproval of things military.

Fine.

But he’ll do it on foot and have the risk of conviction looming. We don’t have the luxury of selectively obeying the law of the land and not paying for the consequences.

Of course, the option of applying for conscientious objector status remains, but that is after being registered.

Later in the dreaded Senate Appropriations Committee I had two bills up:

HB 1345 transfers $2.5 million to establish a Reclamation Trust Fund for historic or abandoned mineral and energy sites.

Only the interest from the Trust would be used, and a list of mines so treated would require approval by the county commissioners as well as the Legislature.

Mineral-producing counties that contributed to the Severance Tax in the first place would get priority.

Southwest Colorado is riddled with defunct mines and all too few active ones. Dolores County has 210 inactive non-coal mines, while Montezuma County has 26 inactive coal mines and 10 inactive non-coal mines.

The bill, sponsored in the House by Rep. Dianne Hoppe, R-Sterling, made it to the floor.

HB 1086 also made it out of Appropriations. Rep. Kay Alexander, R-Montrose, is the House sponsor. The bill creates a fund of up to 44 million from the TABOR surplus to help agricultural producers process their crops and herds, and thus add value and income and participate in the food business rather than the commodity business.

An example is in Longmont, where surrounding wheat producers joined together and bought a bakery that uses the product in making bread nationwide for Quizno’s restaurants.

Jim Dyer is a state senator from Durango. He can be reached in Durango at (970) 259-1942, or at the Capitol in Denver at (303) 866-4884.