Interim committees to consider new legislation

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My September finished with another round of interim committee hearings, including on data collection of police-initiated contacts, considering possible ways to improve statewide racial profiling data, and the final series of the water committee’s public meetings in Walden, Greeley and Aurora on the proposed state water plan.

As chairwoman of the Colorado health insurance exchange oversight committee and as a member of the wildfire matters committee, I’ve also attended numerous hearings on these issues as well this interim. All of these interim committees will pick up again at the end of October to consider what, if any, new legislation will be proposed in the next session as committee-sponsored bills.

With the interim committee workload on a temporary pause, in early October, I joined a two-member bipartisan legislator team to India for a program with Indian legislators and academics organized by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and the U.S. State Department in India. Our focus in working with the largest democracy in the world was to share best practices and field questions on how U.S. state legislatures deal with the many challenges encountered in our positions.

I particularly enjoyed the amount of time we spent with young Indians, some studying at the universities in political science, foreign relations and law and others already elected in the provinces in state government. I shared what we’ve been doing in Colorado with our legislative youth advisory council, known as COYAC, which nicely provided a springboard of U.S. youth-identified policy issues to discuss with their counterparts halfway around the globe.

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