Romanoff keeps tight rein on number of bills

Proposals drop 14 percent during speaker's tenure

By Ed Sealover , The Gazette

Published December 26, 2007 at 12:30 a.m.

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Falling trend

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House Speaker Andrew Romanoff is winning the impossible war: He has gotten the gaggle of lawyers and business people known as the Colorado House of Representatives to stop writing so many bills.

The number of measures that have been introduced in the House since Romanoff took over leadership in 2005 is down nearly 14 percent from the three years before then. The numbers of potential laws sent to committees in 2005 and 2007 - 353 and 379 respectively - are the two lowest totals of the past decade.

This is not mere coincidence. The Denver Democrat has made it one of his goals to limit the amount of bills coming out of the House, so debates can be more focused and the session can operate more efficiently.

In addition to cutting down the number of proposals, Romanoff teamed with former Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald to send the legislature home early the past three years, breaking a record five days before the constitutional deadline this year.

"I think there is an inverse correlation sometimes between the quantity and the quality of our work," said Romanoff, who is term-limited at the end of 2008. "The more bills you introduce, the less time you have to think them through."

Lawmakers are allowed to introduce five bills a year, with the deadline very early in the session. They can, however, ask permission of the speaker to introduce "late bills," usually targeted at an issue that has come up since the start of the year.

Where former speakers tended to be more relaxed on late-bill requests, Romanoff is not. If the legislator has argued successfully that he or she can't accomplish the same thing by amending another bill, the speaker still will reject pretty much any measure that doesn't have a way to pay for itself and can wait another year to come forward.

In doing so, he has had to fight against popular stereotypes that the legislator who introduces the most potential laws is the best one. Some organizations still rate lawmakers' success by the number of bills they pass, and Romanoff said that misses the point of whether those bills make a difference.

"I think those score cards are fairly misleading because I think they're measuring the wrong outcome," he said. "I suppose they tell you what your batting average is and how many times you've been at bat, but they don't measure whether you hit a home run or won the game."

He has obtained bipartisan support for his effort.

Rep. Larry Liston, a Colorado Springs Republican who has introduced a total of 11 bills in his three years in the General Assembly, noted there has been no shortage of discussion on myriad subjects despite Romanoff's holding more tightly to the five-bill limit.

Those who put forward the most bills often are looking to impose more governmental rules, a concept Liston disagrees with. And some legislators who are the most prolific in writing measures sometimes don't know exactly what their bills do, he said.

"It's not like I lie awake at night thinking of things to regulate or tax or otherwise impede just because I have the ability to propose bills," Liston said. "I don't believe in it."

Romanoff even has toyed with the idea of reducing the number of bills that legislators can introduce each year. Doing so would require a rule change that must be passed by what would surely be a divided House, and it wouldn't take effect until 2009 at the earliest.

While the speaker said pushing the idea is not one of his top priorities in 2008, he noted that he hasn't ruled out bringing it forward.

Falling trend

The number of bills introduced in the House has averaged 381 a year for the past three sessions, down from an average of 433 in the previous seven sessions:

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