The Latest Legislative Session, Wage Theft, and Other Issues - An Interview with Jonathan Singer

This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

The 2018 election ushered in single-party control of both chambers of the Colorado General Assembly and the Governor's mansion, which had not occurred since the 2014 session. Single-party control typically means it’s easier to pass legislation and the statistics from the legislative session that ended in early May bears this out. Assuming that Governor Polis signs all the bills passed by the Assembly, about 77% of the bills introduced will have passed, compared with an average of 61% bills passed over the previous eight sessions.

We sat down with Jonathan Singer, representative for District 11 which includes Longmont, to ask about this and other accomplishments from the session.

“It was like the policy floodgates were opened,” said Singer. “There were many Democratic bills that had some Republican support, but a lot of those bills just couldn't have made it through a Republican Senate.”

Were there other factors besides single-party control that influenced the volume of legislation passed?

The wonky answer is that when you run a bill three, four, five, even seven times in previous sessions, the bill is going to get refined every time, so when the floodgates finally break, what you've got is really good policy that's been fully cooked and thoroughly vetted. Another factor in this session, especially in the House, is that even though everyone had their pet projects, people found ways to work together, to give a little to get a little, and this happened between and within both the Democrats and Republicans. I ran 27 bills this year and I think there was only 1 bill that didn’t get Republican support. People are less interested in making a point and more interested in making good policy, that is why we show up to the capital.

Speaking of making policy, what do you feel were your biggest accomplishments in this session?

The thing that I care most about as a social worker who worked with people who are struggling is to ensure that everyone gets an opportunity to thrive and if they're not doing well, that we give them a hand up. We passed a series of child welfare and opioid prevention and treatment bills this year that are going to make a huge dent into our opioid crisis and to give an opportunity for our kids who are stuck in our child abuse and neglect system to get the support they need and for their parents to get the support they need to bring families back together. On a personal level, that was very gratifying for me to be able to work across the aisle and work with people who are directly affected by an addiction crisis and to actually put another piece of that solution together this year.

Let’s switch subjects here to the wage theft bill. Can you explain how this bills works?

The problem we were trying to solve is, we have a handful of unethical employers who are not paying the wages they promised to low- and middle-income employees, or they're just not paying wages at all. And we're now discovering that this is a huge component of human trafficking.

What the bill basically does is to treat wage theft like regular theft. If somebody steals your car or your TV, there are criminal charges, and they may very well end up in jail. Before this bill, if your boss never gave you a paycheck after you completed a job, that wasn't a crime, it was an unclassified misdemeanor, like jaywalking. Prosecutors didn't have a serious enough tool to really punish the worst actors and the worst actors knew it. This bill sends a very strong message to this handful of unethical employers to stop putting their competitors at an unfair disadvantage by not paying their workers and to stop human traffickers who use wage theft to victimize vulnerable populations.  

This seems like a simple change that will make a big difference.

Yes, it's a simple change, but it’s so much more. If someone steals a car or TV, that's awful, but if you steal someone's ability to put food on their own family's table or to keep a roof over their head, that ends up being tens of millions of dollars that people are losing out on every year that as taxpayers, we end up bailing out, because folks will end up going to the food stamp line or the welfare line. When we did the bill signing ceremony, we signed it at the Boulder County Human Services Building for a reason. This bill will put less pressure on our human service programs and actually get these real bad guys off the streets and make sure honest employers can keep doing their job without getting undercut.

Was the opposition to any of your bills coming from Republicans or was there a resistance within your own caucus?

It depended on the bill. For example, the one failure I had this year was a bill to start a child tax credit for Colorado. This would be a really important anti-poverty tool. What it would have done is make sure that low- and middle-income people with children under the age of five get a little bit back from the state government when times are good. For a single parent with two kids who earns under $23,000 a year, they would be about $1200 dollars back. That's a car repair, that's a rent payment, that's a pretty big deal. But it was also a little pricey this year and with things like full-day kindergarten coming down the pike, it was tough to convince even my own colleagues that this was a bill we should do and we ended up not passing it, so that was frustrating.

Even with the bills that we did pass, especially on the opioid crisis, the amount of ignorance we heard about addiction is, about what recovery is, the whole spectrum of substance use disorders, was jaw-dropping for me. And what's unfortunate is, even though these bills for the most part passed, there was a stigma that was perpetuated by people saying, for example with the bill that licensed recovery homes in Colorado, people were claiming that if you pass this bill, addicts are going to move into your neighborhood or people will be shooting up drugs in your neighborhood, and the truth is, addiction is literally everywhere; it's already in our neighborhoods, and the fear-mongering they're doing just pushes this stuff further underground, makes it less likely people are going to ask for help, and that's what leads to overdose deaths. We can argue about money and what's the best use of taxpayer dollars, whether something's the most efficient way to do something or whether it needs to sit it out another year and work on the policy longer, but when someone uses the kind of language that stigmatizes a disease, it's really hard for me to take.

Talk about your run for Boulder County Commissioner in 2020.

My term as state legislator will end at the end of 2020, and the election for county commissioner just so happens at the end of 2020. It lines up that if I'm able to convince enough voters that the work that I've done at the capital is something that they'd like to see continue, then there's a real opportunity for me to not only finish my session strong but then take those skills and bring them to the local level.

Is there a legislative body with the Boulder County Commission?

Yes there is. The commissioners basically have all three branches of government melded into one. They make quasi-judicial decisions on things like land use, which means they can only have these conversations in open-meeting discussions, they're not allowed to be lobbied behind closed doors, just like a judge can't, things need to be done in a public sphere. They are also administrative, whether it's running parks and open space, or doing anything with transportation, or working on county jail or coroner issues. Those are administrative things, but it's also policy setting and people forget that you can't administer a good program that has bad policy.

So while my experience has been in the policy arena, I was also a frontline caseworker for Boulder County and I saw when policy did work and when it needed to be fixed, and that's why I ran for office because I got frustrated with people who were getting in the way of helping people.

What would you be your your platform as Boulder County Commissioner?

When I've been going around the county, there are a couple of things that I've been hearing that are huge. First one is, the threat of climate change. I think we can actually propose a green new deal for Boulder County and I want people to start dreaming big about this and that means not only should we be setting climate goals, but actually finding ways to get people involved in our green, renewable energy workforce. And this should drive the other components of what I hope to accomplish.

The second thing that I'd like to focus on is our human services system. In Colorado, we're one of only nine states that administers Human Services at the county level. All that policy work I've been doing at the Capitol to help keep foster kids together, to help create critical investments in our child protection workforce, to help change what we do in our elder abuse laws, I can finally get an opportunity to actually implement those things, because most of that gets implemented by counties not by the state.

The third thing is transportation. We need to make sure that we get what we were promised from RTD and FasTracks, and then build on that. It's not just getting down to Denver, but making sure the commute times are reasonable for people who go between Lafayette and Louisville, or between Louisville and Boulder. Most of most of us who live in Boulder County also work in Boulder County and if we can't figure out a way to make it easier for people to get between our own cities, we lose the social connections and the economic opportunities that brings.

The fourth thing, and this is very personal for me, is affordable housing. My rent was doubled last summer and I almost lost my election because I didn't know if I could live in my own house district anymore. What does that mean for everybody else that lives in the district? So, a huge focus for me is to make sure that everybody in Boulder County can thrive, and part of that means affordable housing and a strong transportation system.

This year has been the most exciting year for affordable housing at the Capitol. There's a bill that's going to change how we calculate a certain vendor fee right now, and it's going to bring in about $30 million to an affordable housing fund that we started a couple of years ago. And the only reason that we even have this affordable housing fund in the first place is because of a bill that I actually passed, that everyone voted for, the marijuana tax, that was the first thing that got this going and has brought in about $15 million a year. One of the opioid prevention bills I sponsored actually focuses on housing and says that if you're leaving the criminal justice system and you have substance use disorder or a serious mental illness, we're going to help you out with housing and wrap-around services to make sure that you're successful and don't return to the criminal justice system.

We also passed something called a warranty of habitability, which ensures that people are not renting in tenement conditions. There was a situation in an apartment complex just south of Denver that hadn't had clean water for over a month. When those things happen, this new law lets you break your lease so you can find a place to live. It protects tenants, it keeps good landlords in good standing and make sure that the worst actors are held accountable.

What do you say to the criticism of rent control that it ends up decreasing the pool of affordable housing because there's less incentive to developers to build more housing?

Rent control by itself is not going to be the silver bullet that solves this problem and we need to think about this in context. That's part of what allowing local control means. Seniors on Social Security will have different needs than folks who have an upward income trajectory.

I understand if rent needs to go up by a certain amount to keep up with the cost of housing, but I think there are interesting things that we might be able to do to incentivize middle-income and workforce affordable housing. Maybe it's rent control plus a tax break, maybe it's rent control plus some element of equity that's put in by the tenant, like helping maintain the property. But those conversations can't even happen right now because we don’t have rent control as an option.

Was there anything else you wanted to add about this session or looking down the road at the county commissioner campaign?

The only thing that I'll say is that I'm fully committed. I've been a very ambitious lawmaker over the last eight years and I'm going to keep my commitment to mental health, to make sure we protect our open and public lands, and to lay the groundwork to solving the climate change crisis. I'm going to keep doing those things as a county commissioner because I've always reached out to constituents to bring those ideas to the seat of power. I don't care what community you come from, you deserve a seat at the table. I've brought them to the table every year, whether it was to enable immigrants to get a driver’s license or to make it easier to keep siblings together in the foster care system. And I'm going to keep doing that as a county commissioner.