Live updates: Housing bills advance as Colorado legislative session enters final week

The Colorado legislature is a week out from the end of the 2025 session and is working Wednesday to push bills through committee and the House and Senate floors. Several ongoing policy discussions remain unresolved, and Wednesday’s debates will include lengthy testimony and likely amendments to a transgender-rights bill.

This story will be updated throughout the day.

10:47 a.m. update: A bill that would allow jury trials for some tenants facing eviction narrowly passed the House on Wednesday morning as the legislature got underway on its penultimate Wednesday of the 2025 session.

House Bill 1235, which passed with the bare minimum of 33 votes, is the legislature’s answer to a question left hanging by a strange state Supreme Court saga last year. In October, the high court ruled that tenants have a right to jury trial in eviction proceedings. Two months later, though, the justices abruptly reversed themselves and direct the legislature to decide.

Under HB-1235, tenants facing eviction would be able to pursue a jury trial if they had a material dispute with their landlord. That would mean a disagreement over an alleged lease violation — but it would not include when a tenant was late on rent, the most common cause of eviction.

The bill was previously hung up in legislative limbo amid fears of the financial cost. That was greeted with frustration from advocates and legislators, who felt the courts were placing a prohibitive price tag on a policy question that the judicial system asked the legislature to solve.

In any case: HB-1235 now heads to the state Senate.

Speaking of the Senate: That chamber on Monday fully passed Senate Bill 20, which seeks to crack down on chronically neglectful landlords by allowing government authorities to temporarily take control of run-down apartment buildings. The policy was directly inspired by the messy saga involving CBZ Management last year: That company has had three buildings enter receivership — two sought by creditors, the last by the city of Denver — amid chronic disrepair and the company’s claims of gang takeovers.

SB-20 would give more authority to cities, counties and the state to enforce a variety of housing laws, and it would allow them to seize control of buildings and use tenants’ rent to fix dilapidated conditions.

“Frankly, the lack of an adequate remedy for a really, really bad situation like (CBZ) is very much part of what inspired this bill,” Sen. Mike Weissman, a Democrat who represents parts of Aurora that are home to CBZ buildings, said in January.

The measure will head next to Gov. Jared Polis.

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