Days after a study showed Colorado as one of the country’s most regulated states, Gov. Jared Polis rescinded 208 executive orders Thursday — a move toward boosting government efficiency that observers lauded but said must be followed by substantial reform.
The Democratic governor nixed executive orders going back as far as 1920 that, while still in place, were “outdated and wasteful”, he said. And, using a table saw to cut them up, he emphasized that such unnecessary laws could keep in place red tape that makes it harder for businesses to launch and to continue operating and whose ends are needed “to make our government more efficient.”
Polis’ move drew some applause from critics who have said that laws he’s signed have added to the state’s unwieldy and mushrooming sets of regulations — particularly business leaders and Republican legislators. But using terms such as “very small step in the right direction,” as the Senate Republicans did, they also urged him to take bigger steps such as going back and reexamining recent laws that company executives say are raising the cost of doing business and limiting hiring.
“It’s about time the governor recognized that Colorado cannot thrive under the weight of excessive regulation and overspending,” House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, R-Colorado Springs, said in a news release. “This is a step in the right direction, but it falls short of undoing the damage caused by policies that have made it increasingly unaffordable for Coloradans to live in our state.”
Study suggests further reform is needed
Colorado state Rep. Rose Pugliese speaks to House Republicans during a leadership election earlier this year.
To be sure, Polis has expressed interest in further regulatory reform and has signed laws in recent years, including one that cut filing fees for new businesses to $1 for a year, that were aimed at easing some regulations on small- to mid-sized companies.
But Pugliese, like other critics, has said it’s taken Polis too long to concentrate on regulatory reform — a result that became even clearer with Tuesday’s release of a study commissioned by the Colorado Chamber of Commerce on the regulatory system.
The report, issued by Maryland-based business and research firm StratACUMEN, said that Colorado will have the sixth-highest number of regulations of any state on its books by the end of this year — a number that grew 7.1% between 2020 and 2023. That growth, more than five times as fast as the increase in federal regulations over that same period, has cost the state tens of thousands of jobs as employers must put resources to compliance rather than expansion, and 45% of the regulations are redundant or excessive, it said.
What got the axe from Polis
Polis’ action specifically targeted executive orders he considered unnecessary or obsolete — some because they later were incorporated into laws and others because they sought to address problems that are no longer issues for the state, he said. Those range from the 1957 creation of a governor’s committee to improve television reception in Colorado to a 2000 order to ensure that government policy strengthens and supports families via six questions that agencies must ask before taking actions.
Some of the repealed orders actually dealt with reducing regulations, such as a 1988 order from Gov. Roy Romer directing the departments of health and natural resources to oversee the mining industry “through reasonable regulations … recognizing that unnecessary and duplicative regulations and extended time frames add cost and risk to mining ventures.” Others, however, created new rules or advisory boards that could have “stifled innovation,” Polis said.
But now that the governor has rolled back rules put into place specifically by him and his predecessors, observers are asking what he could do to try to roll back regulations created by legislators or state agencies.
Colorado Chamber of Commerce President/CEO Loren Furman speaks at the organization’s 2023 annual meeting about keeping the state competitive.
Loren Furman, president/CEO of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, said upon release of the regulatory study on Tuesday that her organization is preparing a “bold legislative package to tackle this growing burden.” And she said she plans to work with both legislative leaders and Polis’ office on the issue.
Could Colorado adopt other state’s reform efforts?
The study cited several precedents in other states that could be copied in Colorado. Those include an Idaho law requiring two regulations be removed for every new rule going into law and an Arizona act that required the review and scaling back of a series of regulations.
Doug Barr, president/general manager of window-shutter manufacturer Hunter Douglas, said the growing number of regulations around employer-employee relations, along with the growing cost of doing business in the state, has led him to move nearly 20% of his production out of Broomfield to other states and Mexico. He also finds it difficult to recruit workers and executives to a place whose costs have gone way up, and he said the removal of two regulations for every new one could boost Colorado’s currently sagging level of business competitiveness.
“Even though a lot of regulations may not affect us directly, it raises the cost of doing business in Colorado,” said Barr, a member of the Colorado Chamber’s board of directors. “I love the idea of two gone for every one proposed. Then you have to make a decision: Is this new regulation worth dropping two others?… It’s moving in the right direction.”
Senate Republicans offered a list of laws signed by Polis that they would like the governor to go back and consider reforming as a way of reducing regulations. Those include the 2019 law that’s led to a significant boost in energy-industry regulations and a 2022 law requiring more environmental regulations around new housing, which critics said has exacerbated the state’s housing-affordability crisis.