“Welcome to Colorado. Now go home,” reads the bumper sticker popular with Colorado natives frustrated with the stop-and-go traffic wrought by population growth.
That snarky sticker now belongs on legislators’ cars, native or not, because that’s the message the General Assembly is sending anyone coming to the Centennial State to start a business or invest in housing. Several bills making their way through the legislature make it clear entrepreneurs and investors are not welcome. Neither are the Coloradans who currently provide jobs and homes for the rest of us.
If the colder-than-average winter doesn’t make Florida look good, these bills, should they be signed into law, most assuredly will. The cost of doing business in Colorado is about to go up. Last week, a House committee held a hearing on House Bill 1118 which would require employers give shift workers their schedule two weeks in advance and would charge “predictability pay” for schedule changes. The law would have a particularly pernicious impact on restaurants and retail establishments where customer demand ebbs and flows depending on factors outside of the employers’ control.
According to a survey of 200 restaurants conducted by the Colorado Restaurant Association, HB 1118 would force Colorado restaurants to cut hours, understaff the schedule, limit expansion, and raise prices. With compliance costs of $70,000 per year per location likely, some restaurants would have to close. This bill is as bad for employees as it is for employers. Rather than pay employees not to work, businesses will schedule fewer hours and keep scheduled employees on deck through the slow times doing less remunerative work. I know from my years as a pizza delivery driver and waitress, you don’t make tips folding pizza boxes and cleaning baseboards. When it gets busy, fewer employees on the floor means hustling even harder and frustrated customers don’t tip as much.
Think restaurant service is slow now? Just wait.
This is no mere conjecture; studies of schedule predictability mandates found businesses responded by “offering employees less freedom to make schedule changes, offering fewer full-time jobs, increasing the share of part-time jobs, and scheduling fewer people per shift,” noted a recent Common Sense Institute analysis.
In addition to targeting Colorado businesses and their employees with counterproductive scheduling mandates, the legislators are going after landlords and renters. They’re considering bills that would limit fees and make it more difficult to evict renters or proscribe pet policies all of which would make it less likely those who own property will rent it out. Worse, the legislature is flirting with rent control. House Bill 1115 would end the state preemption on rent control mandates devised by cities, counties and towns. Most economists agree that rent control reduces the quantity and the quality of housing in a city. It’s one policy on which economists Thomas Sowell and Paul Krugman agree. According to the Brookings Institution, “While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood.”
If the legislature’s goal is to have fewer businesses and fewer jobs, then fewer available rental units is consistent. Less is the new more. The legislature is telling business and property owners and those considering such investments, their presence is not welcome in Colorado. There is an exception. Legislators are considering allowing illicit drug injection sites where addicts can dope up under medical supervision. Lucky neighborhoods where injection sites open will see an influx of enthusiastic entrepreneurs peddling their products.
Krista L. Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer
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