Gov. Jared Polis stopped in Glenwood Springs and Edwards on Friday as part of his statewide bill-signing tour to enact laws that will impact residents on Colorado’s Western Slope. 

In front of the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority’s new housing project in Glenwood Springs, Polis signed a bill aimed at helping lower employee housing costs for transportation organizations. He also signed a language access bill that will help ensure Colorado’s linguistically diverse populations have access to critical state services.

The bill signing in Glenwood Springs brought together several transportation and government leaders, including representatives from the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, Eagle County’s Core Transit, House District 57 Rep. Elizabeth Velasco (D-Glenwood Springs), and several Glenwood Springs City Council members.

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The transportation bill comes during a time when some transit authorities are struggling to hire and retain employees, sometimes leading to the elimination of routes due to driver shortages. High living costs and limited housing availability have historically contributed to driver shortages and were at the center of negotiations between the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority and the Amalgamated Transit Union 1774 in 2024.

After the Glenwood stop, Polis headed to Colorado Mountain College in Edwards to sign two education bills and another aimed at increasing cell phone coverage in rural parts of Colorado. All three pieces of legislation were sponsored by Rep. Meghan Lukens (D-Steamboat Springs), whose House District 26 encompasses Moffat, Rio Blanco, Eagle and Routt counties.

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The first of the education bills signed Friday ​​creates a statewide pilot program that integrates experiential learning into college curriculum and prepares students for the workforce through skill development and meaningful work experiences. The second removes the 10-year limit on leasing of school district land for solar and energy storage and housing. 

The initial idea for the latter bill came from the Eagle County School District, which wanted to lease land it owns east of Eagle for solar gardens, Lukens said.

“I’m thrilled that we’re signing this bill into law here in Eagle County,” she said. “With the signing of this bill, school districts will be able to negotiate with investors or developers to build solar or housing on their land without state law getting in their way, opening the door for additional income, increased energy sources, and creating affordable housing opportunities, all of which I know are a huge priority of ours at the state legislature.”

The last piece of legislation Polis signed was House Bill 25-1080, which is among a slate of new laws that aim to improve cellular connectivity and broadband networks in rural swaths of Colorado. The bill allows local municipalities to offer property tax incentives to telecommunications companies to build in underserved areas.

Here’s how the new laws will impact Western Slope residents:

A win for language accessibility

House Bill 25-1152 requires the Department of Personnel and Administration to conduct or commission a statewide language access assessment covering all principal departments except the departments of law, state, and treasury.

The language assessment, done in collaboration with the Office of New Americans in the Department of Labor and Employment, will evaluate whether different departments comply with language access standards outlined in the language access universal policy, assess existing language services for efficiency and recommend improvements. A report summarizing the findings must be published online by the end of the year.

Colorado is home to several linguistically diverse jurisdictions, with over 300,000 Coloradans identifying a language other than English as their primary language.

Upwards of 10% of Coloradans identify Spanish as their primary language, making it the second-most common primary language after English. Chinese, Vietnamese and German follow closely behind, Polis said.

“Here in our district, we have a 30% Latino population, and we know that a lot of people speak different languages at home and are more comfortable speaking those languages,” said Velasco, a Democrat from Glenwood Springs. “We want them to be able to access the resources of the state and to be able to reach us — not only elected officials, but also any services or questions or needs that they have.”

Language access is considered a federal civil rights requirement for all state agencies that receive federal funding. Failure to provide essential services to residents with limited English proficiency can lead to investigations by federal civil rights offices and even termination of federal funding.

“If you’re a resident of Colorado, we want to make sure that all of our information is accessible to you, whatever your language is,” Polis said. “You might even speak English, but you might not be as comfortable having to go through documents in English as you would in your native language.”

The bill includes an appropriation of $100,000 to the Department of Personnel and Administration for fiscal year 2025-26 for the purpose of contracting a third-party entity for the assessment. While the bill only covers one initial assessment, Velasco said the state hopes to create a position to manage language access efforts for the whole state.

“I’m very, very excited that we’re starting with this work, and there’s so much more to do,” Velasco said.

A door to more affordable workforce housing

Senate Bill 25-272 allows regional transportation authorities to construct housing for employees and contractors and exempts the purchase of those construction materials from the state sales and use tax.

The sales tax exemption only applies to municipalities, counties and special districts with a contract approved by the Colorado Department of Transportation to address transportation needs within a specific geographic region of the state.

“We’re all hands on deck for housing. … But one area of need is worker housing for people that work in our regional transportation districts,” Polis said. “It’s critical if you want to be able to succeed in being able to attract and retain workers.”

Of the seven regional transportation authorities in the state, two operate in Colorado’s northwest mountain region: the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority and Core Transit in Eagle County.

The Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, serving riders across 70 miles from Aspen to Rifle as the state’s second-largest transportation district, has multiple employee housing complexes, including Iron Mountain Place in West Glenwood, where the signing took place. Formerly a Rodeway Inn, the 42-unit employee housing project opened to occupants in March of this year for $1,298 per month.

Michael Yang, chief executive officer of the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, said around $60,000 of the project’s overall cost came from sales tax on construction materials. The organization is undergoing an appeal process with the Department of Revenue to get the funds back.

“When we were doing this project, the Department of Revenue denied our sales tax exemption. They did not feel that the provision of workforce housing was within our purview,” Roaring Fork Transportation Authority CEO Kurt Ravenschlag said. “We didn’t agree with that interpretation. We felt that, as anybody that lives in a mountain community knows, the need to provide workforce housing is critical for us to be able to deliver our services.”

Core Transit, formerly known as the Eagle Valley Transportation Authority, has two purchased buildings and multiple leased units, providing housing for roughly two-thirds of its employees, according to the bill’s fiscal note. The authority has said it has plans to expand housing in the future.

“More and more folks are getting into the housing game, which we like,” Polis said. “Whether it’s school districts, whether it’s transportation districts, we all need to solve this together. This helps our transportation districts be able to build housing for three, four, five percent less.”

Improving cell service in rural Colorado

Reps. Lukens and Matt Soper (R-Delta), co-sponsors of House Bill 25-1080, told anecdotes Friday that drove home the point of how spotty cell service can be on Colorado’s Western Slope. Lukens’ district is one of the largest geographically in the state, and she said she starts every phone conversation in the car the same way: “I say, ‘I’m driving, and I’ll probably lose cell phone service,'” she said. 

Soper said he got a ribbing from Rep. Jennifer Bacon (D-Denver) when she visited the Palisade Peach Festival a few years back.

“She said, ‘Man, you guys sure have bad cell phone coverage in Western Colorado,'” Soper said. 

“But great peaches,” Polis interjected, drawing laughs. 

“Yes, excellent peaches,” Soper said. “Buy peaches.”

Soper said all the feedback from constituents and colleagues at the Capitol led to the creation of an interim committee in 2024 that met ahead of this year’s legislative session to identify solutions to cell service problems.

The centerpiece of three bills that came out of the committee is House Bill 1056, which holds local governments to a timeframe for approving permits for new wireless infrastructure in the hopes of planting new cell phone towers in underserved districts. 

House Bill 25-1080 takes a different approach to the same problem, empowering local municipalities to offer a property tax incentive or a business personal property tax incentive to attract cellular and broadband infrastructure. 

“It’s really good policy, but it came about from being really, really creative,” Soper said. “Our local governments kept saying, ‘Well, can you find some grant dollars or maybe just some nickels and dimes under the couch cushions?’ And we said, ‘Not this year. There’s no more state money this year.'”

Facing down the state’s budget crunch, Soper said the idea finally emerged to incentivize local governments to take action themselves. 

“Instead of complaining to state legislators or the governor, now our local government officials can actually negotiate an incentive with cell phone companies and landowners to be able to improve not just cell phone coverage but broadband,” he said. 

“I certainly hope that our local governments use this new tool in their toolbox to increase cell phone connectivity in rural Colorado,” Lukens said. “We know that we all rely on our cell phones in this modern era. And so increasing connectivity is so important for our communities, as well as a major safety issue.”

“I’m super excited,” Soper added, looking at the governor before he put pen to paper. “And that’s why we drove all the way here. I would have called you, but there was no cell phone coverage.”

Helping students gain workplace experience and helping school districts solve issues

Lukens, a teacher herself who chairs the House’s Education Committee, said House Bill 25-1186 will make students more prepared for the workforce by providing them with meaningful, real-world experiences. It will also be a boon for employers in a state facing a significant labor shortage. 

“I know how important it is to prioritize work-based learning, and that’s exactly what this bill does,” she said. “I’m so thrilled that we have the support of our higher ed institutions across the state.”

As for House Bill 25-1006, Eagle County School District Superintendent Philip Qualman was on hand for its signing, and said afterward that the legislation will allow the district to move ahead on a plan to lease land for a solar array. It should also open up possibilities for other districts to do the same or attract housing developers. 

“We own a property just east of Eagle, 40 acres,” Qualman said. “And we’ve considered it for housing. We’ve considered it for a school. But there are no utilities there, and it would be very expensive to develop. But it’s a land asset, and we want to hold onto it. We thought, ‘How could it be useful?’ And the use that we considered was passive solar because it doesn’t require any water — or they can connect to the utility grid themselves.”