A Democratic lawmaker has revived his unsuccessful 2025 bill to require companies to list reportable emissions on their websites — a measure he says is about transparency but that companies call an unnecessary duplication of reporting they already must do to the state.
House Bill 1121, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Bob Marshall of Highlands Ranch and Lorena Garcia of Adams County, features a few changes from Marshall’s 2025 bill that died in the House Appropriations Committee without a hearing because of its large fiscal note. Mainly, this new version does not require the rulemaking that would have required additional state resources, and it proposes that compliance oversight by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment would be funded exclusively by fines.
The aim, said Marshall, is to make the reports that these emitters must maintain and must produce only upon request to the state and federal governments accessible to the public, as well as those records that they have submitted already to the agencies. Beginning in 2028, those firms must put a link on their corporate websites taking viewers to downloadable data reports that have been submitted to CDPHE or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
While the state may collect some of that same information already, it is not easy for residents to find those figures that the government agencies do have, particularly because they are only required to be given to the public upon request. The Trump administration’s reversal of a federal directive to make the information more accessible showed that the state needs to do more, he said. He is on the bill with three cosponsors very active in the environmental movement, but his aim is to allow people to learn with just the click of a button what kind of pollution may be coming from rigs and factories around them, he said in an interview.
Good governance or duplicative regulation?
Colorado state Rep. Bob Marshall speaks on the House floor in 2023.
“If you’re throwing stuff off of your property into someone else’s space, they ought to know what the hell it is,” Marshall said of his proposal, which passed last year through the same House Energy and Environment Committee to which it’s again been assigned. “I got into it because I’m really big into good governance and transparency.”
The companies that are the targets of the new regulations, however, say the bill doesn’t represent good governance so much as duplicative regulations that will cause them to do more work without demonstrating how it will benefit the public. And they question whether the plan represents a violation of the 1st Amendment.
The extensive reporting required of emitters is done in a format that would be very hard for the average person to decipher, meaning that its mandatory inclusion on company websites would seem to benefit few people, said Carly West, executive director of American Petroleum Institute Colorado. Yet the double-reporting would still require resources from the companies, rendering it an “unfunded mandate” that could trickle down to increase costs to consumers, said Rep. Carlos Barron, a Fort Lupton Republican who opposed the bill last year.
West also expressed confusion about why the current reporting process to CDPHE isn’t enough, as the department makes these records available to anyone in the public upon request. And, she noted, Colorado recently was one of just two states to receive an “A-list” designation from CDP, a global nonprofit operating an independent environmental disclosure system, for its data transparency in environmental reporting.
Could emissions bill lead to more lawsuits against companies?
Carly West is executive director of the American Petroleum Institute Colorado.
“If the state and outside organizations are bragging about what a great job we are doing on environmental reporting and transparency, it really begs the question of what problem we are trying to solve here,” West said.
In its fiscal note last year, the independent Legislative Council suggested that CDPHE would have to open more investigations of potential emissions violations reported by people who saw the data on companies’ websites. That’s led some observers to believe the bigger impact of the bill would be to create more legal action against Colorado companies.
Marshall said he believes the $864,000 cost for CDPHE to ensure compliance, as estimated in that same 2025 fiscal note, could be covered by fines on regulated firms. HB 1121 proposes to assess civil penalties that are already set in law for similar reporting violations — fines that can reach a maximum of $47,357 per day for each violation.
The bill proposes that the first $900,000 generated in a full year by the fines go to CDPHE’s costs to run the program, then puts the next $1 million to create a new fund that would give individuals financial assistance in fixing high-emitting vehicles or getting them off the road. The threat of the fines, he believes, would lead to more self-policing by companies whose emissions records are easier to find — and reduction of emissions overall.
Not the only bill on emissions expected to be coming
“The cost of data storage now is minuscule, and these are records that they are already required to maintain and to provide to government upon request or on a cycle,” Marshall said, explaining that he feels company compliance costs will be low. “We know we have a serious air issue in Denver, even if we’re reducing our per-capita emissions … If this results in more self-policing of what should already be happening, companies will clean up.”
West, however, called the size of the fines “incredibly excessive” and argued that penalties of that magnitude should be reserved for companies that endanger public health, not those that do not post reports as required by the state. She also said she believes there is a constitutional issue with the state forcing companies to put something on their privately maintained websites.
“The idea that the state could mandate and compel information to be posted on your website raises questions,” West said.
Other bills are expected to be introduced this session that will have a more direct effect on emissions, including a coming effort from the Colorado Energy Office that would require utilities to hit new emissions-cut goals after reaching 80% reductions by 2030. But HB 1121 revives a short-lived debate from 2025 on just how strenuous regulated companies must be in reporting pollution totals to the public and whether that public disclosure is properly the job of state regulators or of the companies themselves.
The bill has yet to be scheduled for its first committee hearing.