. This week, the American Lung Association placed metro Denver, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs on its top 20 list of American cities with the worst air pollution. And the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed the metro area and northern Front Range to be inA similar bill was killed in a backroom deal in 2021 and then the primary sponsor resigned from the legislature after facing criminal charges.
Trisha Oeth, director of environmental health and protection at the state health department, said the bill’s proposed investigation requirements would be a burden on her department. “We value responsiveness and investigating complaints,” Oeth said in written remarks provided to The Denver Post. “However, the prescriptive deadlines related to enforcement activities are fundamentally unworkable and drive a large component of the fiscal impact for implementation.”of the latest version of the bill said it would cost $22 million over the next two years to implement.
The oil and gas industry said the original version of the bill would be a back-door ban on new drilling permits because it would have made the permitting process so cumbersome and time-consuming. The bill “is unworkable and the policies it seeks to compel would do no less than shutter the industrial processes upon which hundreds of thousands of Coloradans rely for work, let alone the millions who depend on the products and services they provide,” Lynn Granger, Midwest and Mountain West Region director for the American Petroleum Institute, said during Thursday’s hearing.