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More Reasons To Pay Sick Leave
Colorado employers would have to allow workers to use paid sick leave for more reasons other than personal illness under a bill that is on its way to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.
Since the 2022 implementation of the Healthy Families and Workplace Act, all companies are required to allow workers to earn an hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, up to a maximum of 48 hours a year.
In addition to dealing with their own illnesses, workers can use the time to take care of ailing family members, to deal with domestic abuse or to care for their children if schools and daycare facilities close due to a public health emergency.
Senate Bill 17, sponsored by Sen. Faith Winter, D-Westminster, would permit use of the earned time for three more reasons.
Workers could take paid sick leave to care for kids whose schools are closed due to inclement weather or power outages, evacuate their residences during natural disasters or deal with the death of a family member.
More Reasons For Paid Leave
Unemployment Fund Under Debate
Once again, Colorado’s Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund is the subject of major debate.
After a month of discussions around the potential use of unemployment-tax revenue for funding enforcement of labor laws, Colorado legislators sent a bill to Gov. Jared Polis this week that limits such funding now but not necessarily in years to come.
That effort, meanwhile, comes as the Colorado Chamber of Commerce and other business groups that pushed for the change fight a separate but related battle on a proposed expansion of unemployment-insurance benefits that would pay a stipend to recipients’ children. That proposal, House Bill 1078, received preliminary approval in the House last week.
What links the two debates is an overriding concern that the UITF, which went broke in August 2020 under a crush of pandemic-related benefit applications, is nowhere near solvency and shouldn’t have its limited reserves used for purposes beyond existing benefits.
Until the fund reaches actuarial solvency of more than $1 billion — a milestone not expected to be hit until between 2026 and 2030 as the state continues to repay federal loans — employers must pay a solvency surcharge beginning next year that will add to their debt to the UITF.
Solvency Of Unemployment
Air Quality Permitting Bill Undergoes Changes
Sponsors bumped significant portions of a bill that sought to ramp up air-quality permitting requirements down to a study though provisions that would require state agencies to investigate a wide range of pollution-related complaints remained significantly troubling enough that even two agencies in Gov. Jared Polis’ administration opposed the effort.
Still, the House Energy and Environment Committee voted along Democratic-led party lines to advance the bill to the full House after a six-hour hearing, setting up a potential showdown with the Democratic governor in the waning weeks of the 2023 legislative session. The bill also drew condemnation from business and oil-and-gas groups that complained that both the continuing legal requirements of House Bill 1294 and the potential regulations that could come from the study committee would serve as a back-door method of shutting down a key state industry.
HB 1294, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Jennifer Bacon of Denver and Jenny Willford of Northglenn, sprang from frustration with long-standing air pollution along the Front Range, particularly in the low-income communities surrounding Interstate 70 that Bacon represents.
The upper Front Range, which experienced 73 days of ozone alerts in 2021 and 46 in 2022 that forced people with respiratory ailments inside often, received a downgrade last year from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to being in “severe” non-attainment of ozone regulations.
Permitting Bill
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