Sonnenberg’s faith in conservation easement bills was all for naught

The 2021 legislative session concluded June 8, with the last day featuring a drawn-out debate over a climate change bill and a failed effort to boot the House minority leader by far-right members of the Republican caucus.

The bill that would have provided reparations to hundreds of farmers and ranchers who were cheated out of tax credits by the state Department of Revenue also fell victim to a last-minute request from Gov. Jared Polis, one that resulted in the bill’s demise, to the shock of the bill’s supporters.

Senate Bill 33 was never going to be an easy win in the General Assembly, given lackluster support for reparations by Democratic lawmakers.

The bill would have set up a repayment program for those tax credits, tapping into a pool of money annually appropriated to the Department of Revenue for new tax credits. But years of bad publicity about how donors of conservation easements, with most of them in southeastern Colorado, has resulted in most of those credits going unclaimed for the past six years.

A task force, set up through legislation in 2019, proposed several ideas on how to fix the troubled program, including reparations and boosting the value of tax credits for new easements.

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