Are your legislators doing business in the dark? HB25-1107, requiring rulemaking to include cost-benefit analysis. Plants roots and the human gut.
Are your legislators doing business in the dark?
One of the things not covered often in the debate over last year's SB24-157, the bill that the Democrats passed to exempt the legislature from Colorado Open Meetings law, is the fact that nothing in this law requires that legislators NOT open their meetings to the public.
It just gives them the ability to do so without penalty.
As I write in my op ed below, this ought to give some insight into what they truly think of you and your knowing what they are up to.
After all, you can, as Speaker McCluskie did at the most recent hearing on the issue, talk all you want about how transparent you are, but what I'll pay the most attention to your actions. Are they actually transparent? E.g. are you opening your caucus meetings to the public?
I asked the leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties in the state senate and state house and pass what I was told (or not) along to you in the op ed.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/01/16/gaines-colorado-democrats-doing-business-darkness/
HB25-1107, requiring rulemaking to include cost-benefit analysis.
I want to present you an analogy before I talk about this bill. Let's say that you were going to buy a new car. In one case, your rich uncle lets you pick and then he pays the bill, never bothering to check or ask. In the other case you still pick, but you shell out your own money.
Which of the two do you think would require a more thoughtful balancing of cost and benefit?
While this isn't a perfect analogy to what goes on with rulemaking in this state by unelected boards, I think you get the point: it's a different thing when you spend your own money. It's a different thing when you have to be accountable to someone for your choices.
Rep Gonzalez's bill, HB25-1107, would (among other things--see the bill summary in the bill's page linked below) require rulemaking bodies in this state to undergo a cost-benefit analysis for new rules, or amendments to existing.
It also requires, a look at the cost burden on Colorado citizens when the agency reviews its rules.
I'm surprised we'd have to require this, but here we are.
This bill is up for committee on Mon Feb 10th. I urge you to read through the bill and give serious consideration to supporting it with an email or testimony.
In case I'm unable to testify in person, I wrote an email to the committee and sponsor. The email went out today and its text follows the link, feel free to use any or all of it if helpful.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb25-1107
An open email to the sponsor of HB25-1107 Rule Adoption & Review Requirements and the members of the House State, Civic, Military, & Veterans Affairs Committee
Hello to all,My name is Cory Gaines.
I am writing today in support of HB25-1107 and asking for a yes vote when it comes up in your committee.
For far too long, and with the consent and support of both parties, the legislature of the state of Colorado has indulged in abdicating a big share of its normal responsibilities to unelected boards and committees.
These boards all too often have powers to do the kinds of things I was told as a child were the things we elect people to do: collect money, and decide where and how to spend it.
When the various enterprises and other boards around our state impose a fee on me, how can this be called taxation with representation? When a board pays out tax money to someone or some group, is this an example of elected officials holding the power of the purse?
I have no illusions that this state will ever return to balance in terms of reining unaccountable and unelected officials acting in ways electeds should, but I do believe that HB25-1107 is a step in the right direction.
How could it be anything but common sense that we have rulemaking bodies do a cost benefit analysis? They are spending our money and this is something everyday families have to do regularly.
We all, you all, routinely weigh out whether or not something is worth the money, and routinely revisit spending decisions. I urge a yes vote to bring some of what we all learned in civics back into the operation of our state government.
I urge a yes vote to help nudge the pendulum back to the center.
Cory
Plants roots and the human gut.
That time of the week again. It's the last post til Sunday, and that means a curiosity, something to learn on that's not related to politics.
I have been watching something lately about the science of plants and soils. Just passed the section on bacteria and fungi colonization of plant roots.
I was (and likely you are too if you've gardened at all) already aware of the prototypical example: that legumes are nitrogen fixers. Legumes form a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship with soil bacteria where the bacteria live on nodules in the roots of the plant, take gaseous nitrogen from the air, and put it into a form the plants can use.
The plant gets nitrogen to help it grow. The bacteria get sugars and (I think) B vitamins from the plant. I put a link to the Wikipedia page on this topic first below. Oh, and as a side note the picture included with this post is of soybean roots, soybeans being very much a legume. Note the little bumps. Those are the bacteria colonies.
There's more to the story, however, an interesting detail that makes this analogous to the human gut. I wasn't aware of it before and thought I'd share.
It isn't that the bacteria and fungi hang out AROUND the roots in the soil. They are, some of them, for some plants, actually welcomed INSIDE the body of the plant.
Those nodules on the soybean roots are actually a part of the plant; the bacteria are hanging out in the interior of the plant.** The same thing happens with other species of colonizing bacteria in other plants. The same thing happens with some species of fungi with other plants.
The plant's roots send out a chemical message in the soil that effectively lays out the welcome mat to these special bacteria and fungi and they move inside the plant, either in between plant cells or inside the cells in special chambers of the cell.
These bacteria help the plant get water and nutrients out of the soil (e.g. the fungi filaments are smaller than the smallest roots and can thus seek out smaller gaps in soil to get nutrients from), and they can sometimes also defend the plant against other bacteria and fungi that would be harmful to the plant (e.g. the bacteria give off toxins that repel other, would-be invaders).
In this way they are analogous to the bugs living in your gut right now. When you were born, you picked up some of the bugs from your mother as you moved out of the birth canal, and then you got more as you nursed. As you grew you added more from food and refined your internal biome.
You have bugs living inside your body, bugs which often have a mutually beneficial relationship with you.
If you're interested in learning more I put a couple links below the Wikipedia thing on the Nitrogen cycle. The second link is a YouTube video. The presenter is a bit crunchy-granola, back to nature (I don't agree with her that ALL modern farming practices kill soil health), but it gives a decent overview without being overly technical. The third link is a little more technical, but still understandable (mostly) to a lay audience. It's also more precise.
One last thing, and this comes from the video I saw. If you're a gardener, and you see the plant supplements which tout giving your soil beneficial bacteria and/or fungi, don't spend money on them. They are, to use the lecturer's words, like carrying coals to New Castle. Your soil, unless it's dead, already has plenty of spores. You needn't buy and add more.
That's it for today. Hope you have a good rest of your Friday. Back at it Sunday!
**There is a good reason for this: the bacteria that fix nitrogen out of the atmosphere cannot do their work in the presence of oxygen. They must thus be walled off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation