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The Colorado House and Senate have entered the final two weeks of the 2026 legislative session, and both chambers were set Friday for lengthy floor votes on several hefty bills, including legislation dealing with credit card swipe fees, state labor laws and other issues.
This story will be updated throughout the day.
5:26 p.m. update: Colorado lawmakers are embarking on their third attempt in the past 12 months to rewrite the state’s beleaguered artificial intelligence regulations, with the latest go-round introduced Friday after months of closed-door negotiations.
Senate Bill 189 would overhaul the antidiscrimination protections that were passed in 2024 but have never been implemented. The proposal would require companies to disclose to people that AI is being used to make a consequential decision about them — like in hiring or financial lending. The bill would also give consumers the ability to request additional information about the technology and the decision it was used in, and to request corrections to data involved in the decision.
“This bill strikes an appropriate balance of protecting consumers while not being onerous on developers or the businesses who use AI technology,” Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, the Denver Democrat who wrote the initial regulations and is sponsoring SB-189, said in a statement.
The initial law — which sought to curb discrimination by AI systems that are used to influence hiring, banking and other “consequential” decisions — has been consistently criticized as unworkable by just about every group with an interest in the rules’ existence.
The law’s effective date was most recently delayed until June to allow the legislature to make another attempt at overhauling it.
Previous efforts to do so have been bitterly unsuccessful: Lawmakers first attempted a rewrite last session, only for Rodriguez to suddenly and voluntarily kill it. Another effort, launched during a special session in August, collapsed after lawmakers reached a deal that was quickly opposed and scuttled by business and tech groups.
That collapse was partially fueled by disagreements over who should bear liability if an AI system is used to discriminate against someone. Under SB-189, liability would be assigned to either the AI’s developer or the tech’s deployer — companies or agencies that use the technology — depending on the circumstances.
This latest — and potentially final — swing is the product of a Gov. Jared Polis-created task force that brought together tech groups, industries and agencies that use AI, and progressive and consumer protection organizations. While those groups have repeatedly been at odds in previous AI debates, SB-189 represents their attempt at a unified rewrite.
Whether that truce — and the bill itself — holds for the remainder of the session remains to be seen. If lawmakers don’t rewrite regulations before the session ends on May 13, then the pending regulations will kick in next month — and they’re already under challenge in court by Elon Musk’s xAI and the U.S. Department of Justice.
1:33 p.m. update: Veto watch begins.
The Colorado Senate passed House Bill 1005 on a party-line vote today, sending it to a governor who has made clear he won’t sign it into law. The bill would remove a unique provision of Colorado labor law that requires that newly organized workers pass a second election before they can negotiate the provision of union contracts that describes dues collection.
“We’ve heard from the opponents of the measure that this is a balanced system that works so well for the state of Colorado,” Sen. Jessie Danielson, one of the bill’s sponsors, said from the Senate floor. “Well, they’re right — in part. It works very, very, very well for the billionaires, for the corporations, for the elite, for the wealthy. It does not work for the workers.”
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A nearly identical bill passed last year, and Gov. Jared Polis vetoed it. The governor has said he wants labor unions to strike a deal with opposed business groups. Those negotiations failed last year, and they didn't even get off the ground this time around. The governor told reporters last week that, to his knowledge, no negotiations were underway.
That means another veto is likely imminent. Theoretically, lawmakers would have enough time to override that veto -- but only Democrats supported the bill, and they're one vote shy of the threshold needed to stiff-arm Polis in both the House and the Senate.
The coming veto won't be a surprise to Democratic lawmakers or to the labor groups backing the measure.
This year's effort served two intertwined purposes: to push the candidates vying to be Polis' (likely) Democratic successor to take a position on a priority labor bill, and to put that next governor on notice that the proposal will keep coming until it's signed into law.
"We've been told a lie that it has to be (economically) hard to survive in Colorado," Dennis Dougherty, the executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, said in a statement, "and workers, our members, aren't buying it. If we want a strong middle class, we need strong worker protections."
12:12 p.m. update: Colorado lawmakers’ attempt to shrink the lots of single-family homes died a second, quiet death Thursday night. The Senate Local Government and Housing Committee killed House Bill 1308 as its sponsors asked for the bill to be put down and acknowledged that they didn’t have the votes to advance it.
The bill would have allowed homeowners to split and sell off parts of their lots, largely without having to get approval from local officials. The proposal was part of a now yearslong effort by Gov. Jared Polis and a coalition of legislative Democrats to rewrite local zoning rules in a bid to make it easier to build housing, including on smaller lots.
While that broader reform push has scored more victories than losses in recent years, it's also created some amount of land-use fatigue in the state legislature. Just last week, another bill that would’ve put a limit on local governments’ ability to set minimum lot sizes was also voluntarily shelved in the same Senate committee.
“We have done a lot in this space, and I think in some ways, there’s some fatigue around that,” Sen. Judy Amabile, who sponsored HB-1308 and has backed prior zoning reform bills, said Friday morning. “Maybe we need to see how all of the bills that we’ve passed are going to play out and how they’re going to interact with each other."
In 2024 alone, the legislature kneecapped local parking requirements, required denser zoning in urban areas and gave many homeowners the right to build accessory dwelling units on their properties. Those reforms were all brand new to the state, and they upended the traditional power of local governments -- and, more acutely, of local groups opposed to development -- to control their own zoning.
It will take years for the impact of those changes to be felt.
Amabile said supporters of those reforms “got a message that we need a little bit of a pause.” That message, she said, came “from my colleagues, and from the (Colorado Municipal League) and from the cities. Even the city of Boulder, which has been leading the charge on land-use reforms, was resistant to this bill."
11:44 a.m. update: Despite well over $500,000 spent on digital ads in opposition, the Colorado Senate has passed a measure that would generally prohibit credit card companies from charging certain kinds of fees on businesses.
Senate Bill 134 passed in a narrow 18-17 vote Friday morning and now heads to the House. The bill seeks to limit "swipe fees," which are a small, flat-percentage fee charged on retailers by financial services companies when you use a credit card to buy something at a store. That fee is based on your total bill -- including the sales tax you're ultimately paying to the state.
SB-134 would prohibit companies from factoring sales taxes in the swipe-fee charge.
It's a small amount of money per transaction, but over the course of a year, carving out sales taxes from the fees would amount to thousands of dollars saved by small businesses -- and far, far more for giants like Target.
"This is real money, and right now, every dollar of it is leaving Colorado and landing on the balance sheets of the most profitable financial institutions in human history," Sen. William Lindstedt, a Broomfield Democrat and the bill's sponsor, said ahead of an earlier vote this week.
The legislation, then, is essentially a fight between two large business interests, pitting financial companies -- including Visa, Mastercard, airlines and banks -- against retailers, from Target and Home Depot to local restaurants and smaller businesses.
The lobbying on the bill has been intense. The Electronic Payments Coalition, a lobbying group whose governing board includes national banking officials and a senior vice president from Visa, has papered Instagram with advertisements alleging that the bill would cause "chaos" and force people to pay sales tax in cash or by check.
According to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, the EPC has spent more than $566,000 in digital ads in Colorado since late January, and that total doesn't include the lobbyists the opponents have hired. The Colorado Restaurant Association, which supports the bill, has also spent several thousand dollars on digital ads backing SB-134.
Friday's vote was technically the second time the bill had passed the upper chamber after it cleared on a similarly tight 18-16 vote Wednesday. But Sen. Robert Rodriguez -- the chamber's majority leader -- moved for a revote Friday, essentially to give Sen. Julie Gonzales an opportunity to talk more about it.
One Senate Democrat, Sen. Jessie Danielson, was absent for the first vote but was present -- and supported the bill -- on Friday. Rodriguez, however, changed his vote to no.
In her speech on the bill, Gonzales told her colleagues that it was "important that y'all show up and take this vote today." Most of Gonzales' comments, though, were focused on the lobbying. She said she'd been "threatened that if I vote a certain way, I'll get blown up about it and my other bills will suffer as a result."
"When this policy was first introduced, I had to get my head wrapped around how this bill might save everyday Coloradans money," Gonzales, a Denver Democrat, said. "The simple fact is it doesn't. This bill has unfolded as a proxy battle that has taken place here in Colorado and across the country, between the financial services industry ... and business."
As she did in the earlier vote this week, Gonzales supported the bill, which now heads to the House. In that chamber, it's sponsored by both House Speaker Julie McCluskie and Majority Leader Monica Duran, giving it solid odds of passing before the legislature wraps for the year on May 13.
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