Rural ag, education highlight 2017 session

In a legislative session where rural issues around schools, hospitals and roads topped the biggest accomplishments, agricultural issues took a much smaller chunk of lawmakers’ time.
    The most successful bills on ag out of the 2017 session turned out to be on industrial hemp or marijuana, responsible for three of the dozen significant bills pertaining to the agriculture industry.
    Those three measures, now all signed by the governor, dealt with whether to allow industrial hemp in animal feed, how to measure the level of active ingredient in industrial hemp and excluding marijuana as a farm product. Really.
    Beyond that, lawmakers looked at a bill to require grocery stores to put a “country of origin” label on beef, a measure that would have benefited Colorado beef, according to its sponsor, Republican Rep. Kimmi Lewis of Kim.
    But the bill failed to win support from those it intended to help, including the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, Colorado Farm Bureau and the corn growers groups, who raised concerns that the labeling could increase costs for retailers. The measure failed to clear the House Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources Committee in early April.
    The highlight ag bill of the session was on creating a loan assistance program for those entering into veterinary medicine in rural Colorado. As its Senate sponsor, Senate President Pro Tem Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling, explained, the program is designed to help out those who go into large animal vet medicine, a concern for eastern Colorado where long-time vets are approaching retirement age.
    Bill supporters noted that those who include livestock in their practices struggle to pay their student loans when they move to rural areas, and the measure would assist up to four vets per year with loan repayments of up to $70,000 over four years.
    Representatives of Colorado State University’s vet med program testified that as many as 70 students are currently interested in livestock medicine and would prefer to work in rural areas.
    The bill initially would have relied on gifts, grants and donations for its funding, but the Senate decided to put $140,000 into the program for its first year. It now awaits a signature from Gov. John Hickenlooper.
    
    Education sees both good and bad in 2017 session
    Education, as always, was a contentious issue for the 2017 General Assembly. But for rural Colorado, education funding was better than expected.
    Topping the list of bills benefiting rural schools is the measure to save rural hospitals, known as the hospital provider fee. That measure, once signed by the governor, will provide a one-time-only boost of $30 million for school districts defined as rural by the Colorado Department of Education. That’s districts with enrollment of 6,500 or less — 147 out of the state’s 178 districts.
    Best of all, those dollars are unrestricted, meaning the bill doesn’t tell the districts how to spend them, a frequent complaint among school superintendents of districts of all sizes. Those dollars could be used for facilities, school buses, curriculum, computers or other needs as defined by the district.
    The School Finance Act, which lawmakers passed on the last day of the session, will provide a 2.8 percent increase in per-pupil funding, to $6,546.20 each.
    What’s also significant is in what didn’t happen. At the beginning of the session, members of the Joint Budget Committee warned that a looming cut in property taxes could mean a big cut in school funding, based on the intersection of two constitutional amendments: the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and the Gallagher Amendment, which sets the balance on property taxes levied for commercial and residential properties.
    Because of the way Gallagher is set up, residential property tax revenues are expected to drop, and that means less money for school districts that rely on those dollars. But it also means the state is responsible for backfilling those cuts, to the tune of about $135 million in the 2017-18 budget.
    It could have been a lot worse. The initial projection was for a $170 million cut. Lawmakers will have to wrestle with that issue next year, when Gallagher is expected to trigger larger property tax revenue cuts.
    Money wasn’t the only issue the Legislature looked at in education. For rural schools, the teacher shortage continues to weigh on the minds of lawmakers, and they passed several bills to continue addressing that problem.
    The first, sponsored by Fort Morgan Republican Rep. Jon Becker, allows rural school districts to hire back retired teachers whose pensions are covered by the state pension plan, for a full school year. Current law allows retirees to work for up to 140 school days per year, short by about six weeks of a full school year. That bill is waiting on a signature from the governor.
    Lawmakers also pushed forward a bill to come up with a strategic plan to address the rural teacher shortage, a collaborative effort between the state’s departments of education and higher education and rural school districts. That plan is due back to lawmakers by Dec. 1.
    One measure that failed to cross the finish line is a tax credit program to assist employers in rural areas in housing for their employees. The bill would have allowed for up to a 20 percent income tax credit on donations made by employers into employer-assisted housing. But the measure’s price tag of $1.5 million in 2017 and $3 million in 2018, in a year when lawmakers had to find ways to fill holes in the state budget, was too much to bear, and the measure died in the Senate.
    Finally, change may be coming for the School Finance Act. During the next two summers, lawmakers will attempt to figure out what, if any, changes should be made to the state’s formula for funding public schools.
    Democratic Rep. Millie Hamner of Dillon, who is vice chair of the Joint Budget Committee, has noted that the School Finance Act hasn’t been updated since 1987.
    Since 1987, two big amendments have changed state finances: TABOR and Amendment 23, which requires the state to hike education funding by the rate of inflation every year. A 10-member bipartisan committee is expected to begin that study sometime after July 1.