Business advocacy organizations including Good Business Colorado, the Small Business Majority and the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC are watching for business-friendly legislative action during the 2025 Colorado General Assembly, which convened Jan. 8.
The leaders of these organizations are concerned with many issues like the ones they championed last year: healthcare, childcare, housing, construction defects reform, overregulation and preserving economic development incentives. But with legislators facing a $1 billion budget shortfall, they know that discretionary funding will be very limited.
“Defending funding for current programs and resources that support small businesses will be critical,” says Hunter Nelson, Colorado director of the Small Business Majority. The organization delivers resources to empower entrepreneurs and advocates for public policies that support small-business growth.
Civic engagement organizations need to figure out the most strategic options for their advocacy, says Yolanda Richard, executive director of Good Business Colorado, a grassroots organization of employers and entrepreneurs who value equity, sustainability and a prosperous economy.
“A lot of the bills that have been passed in the last couple of years have required some type of regulation or rules,” says Jeff Thormodsgaard, the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC’s vice president of government affairs. “In the absence of dollars to make that happen, we’re concerned about how some of those laws are being executed.”
With about 100 bills introduced on the session’s first day and hundreds more to follow, these organizations will have a lot to monitor. But Thormodsgaard is already seeing some hopeful signs.
“I’m not seeing a great deal of bills bludgeoning business,” he says, “and half the bills that are out are agreed upon by the two [party] caucuses. I don’t know if that’s going to persist, but it’s not a bad start to a body working together.”
Commercial property tax reform is among the top legislative priorities for the Small Business Majority. Small-business owners have a hard time balancing their budgets under the current system, with taxes due in mid-January and April.
“We’re hoping to make that into monthly installments,” Nelson says.
The organization also wants to see legislators address common-area maintenance fees in commercial leases, which aren’t always fully clear to small-business owners.
“We support requiring more transparency of these fees and the services they are going toward,” she says.
Another top priority is support for legislation requiring Medicaid to cover abortion care. The organization’s female entrepreneurs have indicated through polling that they view access to reproductive health care as essential to their economic security and business success, Nelson says.
Small Business Majority also supports additional tax credits that help small businesses, including extension and expansion of the Employee Ownership Tax Credit and tax incentives for childcare providers, she says.
At press time, Good Business Colorado’s new policy council was reviewing early legislation and planned to announce its legislative priorities at the end of January, Richard says.
However, “our overarching priorities have remained consistent over the years,” she says. The organization and its member entrepreneurs support policies that promote sustainability and environmental stewardship, ensure equitable access to opportunities for all, promote affordable and accessible healthcare, address housing affordability and availability, and stimulate small business growth, create jobs and foster local economic development.
Good Business Colorado originated its own bill for the first time last session. Senate Bill 24-152 would have incentivized Colorado food and beverage businesses to purchase products from suppliers that practice regenerative agriculture with a 25% income tax credit. The bill gained support but ultimately was a casualty of a midseason budget shortfall.
A similar measure could resurface this session, but this time will be led by the Western Colorado Alliance for Community Action, Richard says.
Both Richard and Thormodsgaard will be following the Worker Protection Collective Bargaining bill, SB25-005, which would eliminate the current requirement for a second election during collective bargaining over a union agreement.
The current two-stage process involves an initial election to approve a union and a second vote to authorize deduction of dues from employee paychecks, Thormodsgaard says.
The bill represents “a substantial change,” he says and, in the Chamber’s initial polling, most business respondents did not support it.
“This was a great negotiated deal that business struck with labor,” he says. “There’s not been a problem that we could see, so why are we changing this now?”
Thormodsgaard is hoping to see business advocates work with the labor community to reach a compromise on the bill.
The Chamber also is taking a passive/opposing position on HB25-1001, which would make changes to the state’s wage hour laws including expansion of the definition of “employer” to anyone with at least 25% of ownership interests.
Thormodsgaard also will be watching the incentives coming from the Office of Economic Development and International Trade.
“We want to make sure that they’re not striking any of the business incentives or the economic development incentives that we enjoy right now,” he says.