How long does it take to read a 2,023-page bill? Lawmakers find out

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    How to write about what happened at the Colorado state Senate last week almost defies description.
    Monday, March 11: Senate Republicans, in an effort to slow down the process for passing Senate Bill 181, an oil and gas bill that is among other measures they’re adamantly opposed to, asked that the reading clerk in the state Senate read at length a 2,023-page bill. The measure in question is a technical cleanup of state statutes.
    When you watch the proceedings of the General Assembly for the first time, one thing that stands out is the speed by which the reading clerk reads bills. Most can read a bill at 150 words per minute or more, and most of the time, it’s more or less unintelligible.
    Reading a bill at length is a formality, but an important one that is required by the Colorado Constitution. In fact, it’s required that bills be read at length twice: once before the bill is debated — what’s known as second reading — and once before the final vote. Those readings are almost always, by unanimous consent, dispensed with. But the Constitution does not require the reading be intelligible.
    When someone asks for a bill to be read at length, it’s generally done as a delaying tactic, and a 2,023-page bill is going to cause a big delay. Initial estimates pegged the reading of House Bill 1172 at somewhere between 40 and 60 hours.
    The Senate reading clerk got through about 50 pages per hour for about two hours (and he was coughing most of the day) until the Senate Democrats came up with a creative solution: have a computer program read it. And if one was good, five was even better. So there were five computer programs, all reading aloud different sections of the bill, going at once. Unintelligible? Absolutely.
    It took about seven hours total for the reading to be finished. Almost nothing else got done that day as a result, including the debate over Senate Bill 181.
    Tuesday, March 12: Senate Republicans fought back, obtaining a temporary restraining order in Denver District Court against the Senate president to ensure he didn’t try that computer program thing again.
    Wednesday, March 13: Despite a raging blizzard and pleadings from virtually every public safety agency east of the Continental Divide, and an emergency declaration by the governor, the Senate convened at the order of the Senate president (the rest of the General Assembly and all of state government in Denver and surrounding counties were closed).
    The vote on the oil and gas measure, which was introduced on March 1 and went through three committee hearings in the following week in what could be considered a rapid pace by the General Assembly, was strictly on party-lines, 19 to 15, with one Republican senator excused.
    Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling argued against the bill during the March 12 debate and the next day’s final vote. He pointed out that despite claims by Democrats and anti-oil and gas allies that the bill is not a ban on such activity, the General Assembly’s own legislative staff wrote that the bill allows restrictions, which could include “an outright prohibition of oil and gas development.”
    Sonnenberg, a longtime advocate for water projects, also pointed out that severance taxes used for those purposes, including safe drinking water, come from oil and gas activity. Would those projects be jeopardized, he asked, or would communities have to hike water or tap fees to cover those costs? Small communities wouldn’t be able to do that, he claimed, and asked that the bill be amended to allow voters to decide the fate of the bill. That was rejected by the chamber’s majority Senate Democrats.
    Senate Bill 181 does three things:
    1. It modifies the mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
    Current law requires the commission to “foster the responsible development of Colorado’s oil and gas” industry in a manner consistent with the protection of public health, safety and welfare, and the environment and wildlife resources.
    But over time, the bill’s sponsors claimed, the COGCC instead has imposed a balancing test between those two provisions, and opponents of the oil and gas industry have claimed that the COGCC is too industry-friendly.

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