The House Agriculture, Water & Natural Resources Committee advanced two Senate bills to the Committee of the Whole: SB 26-122 (fuel standards and petroleum storage tank fund) unanimously, and SB 26-121 (agricultural worker overtime threshold) on a contested 10-3 vote after hours of testimony from dozens of witnesses sharply divided over whether raising the overtime threshold from 48 to 56 hours would help or harm farm workers.
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Representative Martinez cited UC Berkeley researcher Alexandra Hill and Oregon University research showing ag overtime laws reduced worker hours and earnings. Hunter Knapp countered that those studies examined 40-hour overtime thresholds in California and Oregon, not Colorado's unique system, and that the California study excluded dairy and livestock sectors representing 50% of Colorado's farm labor expenses.
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“The agricultural industry appears to have convinced two Latino legislators to sponsor a bill to take away overtime protections for a predominantly Latino workforce based on a narrative that overtime is causing Colorado farms to go bankrupt and that workers don't want overtime. Neither of these things are true and neither of them are supported by actual data.”
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Sign in to subscribeAgriculture, Water and Natural Resources Committee will come to order. Ms. Kelly, please call the roll. Representatives Garcia, Sander. Present. Goldstein. Excused. Johnson. Here. Lindsey. Excused. Lukens. Here. Martinez. Here. Smith, Stewart. Here. Story. Excused. Sukla. Excused. Winter. Here. Tomorrow. Here. Madam Chair. Here. Thank you all for joining us today. We have two bills to hear in this order. Senate Bill 122, Senate Bill 121. For those of you here in the building and perhaps joining us later, we do have an overflow room available for those in person, which is really room 109 right next door to us because there will be no standing in this room except for any needed interpreters. So just so you know, there's an overflow room. And we do have our bill sponsors for our first bill here, Senate Bill 122, Representative Winter and Representative Lukens, who would like to begin. Representative Winter. Thank you, Madam Chair and committee, we'll start off. I'm going to kind of give you the setup to where this bill came from and I'll let Rep. Lukens dive into more of what the bill does. So as we saw the standards change, the ATSM standards around fuel tank…
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