Politics & Government

As it turns out, the mayor is no more immune to traffic woes than the rest of us are.

“Lift The Label” is a statewide movement to reduce the stigma for individuals with opioid addiction through education.

On Thursday, May 10, the North American Aerospace Defense Command invited journalists to come celebrate its sixtieth birthday. The tour guides never told us what made sixty any different from 59 or 58, but when NORAD sends you an invitation (via “unclassified” email!), you don’t turn it down.

If you would like to learn about how you can participate in the struggle for detained immigrants, attend the people’s tribunal to be held in Del Mar Park at 2 p.m. on May 18. Members of Detention Watch Network, along with AFSC-CO, will be hosting the event as part of the ongoing #ICEonTrial campaign.

Talk about a crazy ride. This year has been filled with controversy and hot button issues, like sexual harassment allegations, gun reform, basic LGBTQ+ civil rights and, who can forget, angry teachers storming the Capitol as part of the #RedforEd campaign. Of the more than 700 bills legislators considered this session, here are the most significant pieces of legislation that passed and failed.

Virginia’s Law aimed to protect Colorado immigrants, but the bill sponsors spiked the effort last legislative session after realizing Republican lawmakers in the State Senate were never going to pass it.

And Polis baaaarely eeked out of the radical left.

The City of Denver disagrees with some of the key findings in an explosive new report about laws in the Mile High City affecting the homeless. The University of Denver is defending its report.

Today is the last day of the state legislative session. Normally, that would mean that it’s time to party — not for the legions of Colorado legislative fans (if those exist, please let us know), but for the legislators themselves, along with the lobbyists and the interns and the staff and the hangers-on.

It took 119 days to pass what is arguably the most important piece of legislation to come out of the Capitol this year. After unanimous support in the Senate and an almost exclusively Democratic push from the House, a multibillion-dollar transportation bill was finally pushed out of the legislature and onto the governor’s desk.

The Homeless Advocacy Policy Project at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law has just released a report showing that thousands of Denver’s homeless are being displaced under the city’s urban camping ban.

A political movement is recruiting centrist-minded Coloradans to run in eleven state legislature seats this fall.

Although Lisa Raville has worked hard to build the Harm Reduction Action Center into the Colorado’s largest syringe exchange, she feels strongly that even more good could be done if the state had supervised use facilities, where individuals could inject drugs in an environment that put safety first, as opposed to the Denver Central Library branch, where six people overdosed during the first three months of 2017.

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless is seeking a restraining order and preliminary injunction from the U.S. District Court of Colorado to prevent a federal agency from selling 59 acres of government land in Lakewood that had been awarded to the nonprofit to build permanent supportive housing for the homeless.

The state says Brad Levin is 1,521 signatures short on his ballot petition to be a Democratic primary candidate for attorney general. Levin mounted every argument he had in court to get his name on the June primary ballot, but he was shot down. Now he’s asking the state’s highest court to intervene before Colorado starts mailing out ballots this month and he’s completely knocked out of the race.

The Colorado Civil Rights Division is at stake this legislative session. The House passed a bill to reauthorize the agency. The Senate amended it, but representatives in the lower chamber were not keen on those changes. House Democrats have said the proposed changes to the civil rights agency would overly politicize and radicalize it. Now, the two have to negotiate their differences before the end of session. But the House Democrats seem to have all the leverage.

Everyone is buzzing about Colorado’s proposed red-flag law, which might have the strongest due process provisions of any state in the country that currently has red-flag legislation. In other instances, the American Civil Liberties has been an outspoken opponent of red-flag laws, which would allow law enforcement to seize an individual’s firearms with a court order. So what does the ACLU think about Colorado’s proposal?

Last night, May 1, the Castle Rock town council voted unanimously to adopt a new animal ordinance that effectively ends the community’s prohibition on pit bulls. Advocates for pit bulls are overjoyed by this turn of events and feel optimistic that the move will trigger new efforts to overturn similar bans in six other Colorado cities.

A committee that advises the city on issues of homelessness has been revised and rebooted; its initial lineup consists of fifteen individuals, including people who have experienced homelessness.