Colorado senators gave their final approval to a bill aimed at banning “junk fees” on services from meals to rental agreements Wednesday — but only after removing a proposed private right of action that had been the biggest holdup for most business groups.
House Bill 1090, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Emily Sirota of Denver and Naquetta Ricks of Aurora, now heads back to the House for concurrence with amendments after the Senate approved it on a Democrat-led, 22-12 party-line vote. If it remains in its current form, it is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis.
The measure has traveled a winding road since Ricks first introduced it in 2024 but killed it when she couldn’t come to an agreement with tech-industry leaders about enforcement details that focused on digitally applied fees like concert-ticket and hotel-resort fees. After the Federal Trade Commission enacted its own rule focused on live-event ticketing, hotels and vacation rentals in December, the sponsors reworked the bill this session to focus on fees added on to rental agreements and answered critics with a litany of amendments.
What the new bill on junk fees does
Under HB 1090, businesses would not be able to advertise the price of a product or service without including all required fees, including booking fees or cleaning fees for hotels or utility fees for common areas of rental properties. It wouldn’t bar businesses from charging such fees, as Ricks noted, but it would make them lay the fees out up front so that potential customers could understand them and incorporate them into price comparisons.
Colorado state Reps. Emily Sirota and Naquetta Ricks explain their bill banning junk fees to the House.
Responding to business concerns about vague language and overregulation, sponsors added an amendment in the House to provide safe harbor to federally regulated businesses like banks and airlines that are following federal rules on fees. They also specified that restaurant and brewery service fees are not illegal if the businesses display and explain their existence clearly, and they capped damages that could be requested of landlords at 18% per year, compounded annually.
In the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsors added amendments specific to the telecommunications, airlines and delivery-network-company sectors to try to alleviate their concerns. And with some committee Democrats wavering, Democratic Sens. Mike Weissman of Aurora and Lisa Cutter of Morrison removed a clause allowing parties to file civil actions against businesses for damages and attorney’s fees — a provision that business leaders warned could open the floodgates for lawsuits.
“This legislation creates a process that inserts a government into how a business sets prices and fees,” said Michael Smith, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, in opposing HB 1090 in the Senate committee. “There is no data indicating this problem is rampant in our state.”
Business groups pull back on opposition to bill
Some opponents worried that sponsors may try to reinsert the private right of action on the floor on the Senate floor. But Weissman merely ran an amendment Tuesday to clean up the bill and reinsert a provision allowing tenants to send written demands to landlords for reimbursement of fees as a way of avoiding civil litigation, and the amendment passed without opposition.
Colorado state Rep. Emily Sirota defends provisions of the “junk fees” ban in the House.
It’s possible that the House could reinsert the private right of action, as Sirota defended the provision during debate as one that is important for enforcement at a time when the Colorado Attorney General’s office has just 40 workers in its consumer-protection division. But Weissman’s move seemed to indicate he didn’t want to reignite that fight in the Senate.
“This is still a necessary bill. It’s less of a bill than we would have liked. But it’s still a necessary and reasonable bill,” Weissman said before the final Senate vote on Wednesday. “We need to keep talking about these issues. We need to keep standing up for people just trying to get by.”
As a result of the Senate changes, some business groups softened their pushback on HB 1090. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce, for example, moved from a position of opposition to the bill to a position of seeking amendments to some remaining details.
What is left is still a proposal that Democratic backers say could help the average family to save much of the roughly $3,300 a year that a study estimated they are paying in fees that are tacked onto bills but not included in the advertised price of the goods. The bill passed the House on a fully partisan, Democrat-led vote on March 4.
Why supporters want to ban junk fees
While supporters still mention ticket surcharges and other surprise fees, they have focused most of their discussion about HB 1090 on fees added by landlords for services like garbage pickup, maintenance of common areas and processing of credit-card payments. Some tenants told the House Judiciary Committee last month that such fees added between $150 and $180 a month to the advertised monthly rental cost.
Colorado state Rep. Javier Mabrey, D-Denver
Landlords complained that the new provisions in HB 1090, including a provision limiting landlords from passing along the costs of mid-year property-tax hikes as anything more than a 2% surcharge on agreed-upon rents, would raise the already high cost of housing. But bill backers said that the typically lower-income residents who are renters shouldn’t be forced to pay more if they were lulled into signing leases for a monthly rate that is well below what the rate is when mandatory fees are added.
“We’re trying to defend Coloradans from deceptive practices, from drip pricing, from things they didn’t know they needed to pay for when they signed contracts,” said Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat and supporter.
The battle over the private right of action taken out of HB 1090 is one that has played out in multiple bills this year. Those include an artificial-intelligence whistleblower-protection bill, a bill to make it easier to file deceptive-trade-practice lawsuits and a bill requiring fuel sellers to post warnings about the product’s impact on the environment, among others — all of which still contain that private right of action.