The battle over payday loan fees will strain partisan loyalties at the Legislature again this year as new legislation was introduced Friday in the House. While former payday loan bill sponsor Rep. Mark Ferrandino, D-Denver, said the new legislation would roll back last year’s improvements, Senate sponsor of this year’s bill Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, said the new bill does exactly what he meant to do last year.

“It is doing what I thought we had done a year ago,” Heath told the Colorado Independent. Heath, who says he remains interested in creating a fair marketplace for payday lenders and customers, said “the Attorney General’s office misinterpreted what I thought I had negotiated.”

Ferrendino wholeheartedly disagreed with the move made by Heath to strip what he said was the heart of his bill.

“[The new legislation] basically guts the intent of the bill. One of the main reasons that we [made origination fees refundable] is that it disincentivizes the lender to to churn the loan,” Ferrandino said.

Payday legislation passed last year allowed lenders to charge up to $75 for an origination fee. The fee schedule set up in the legislation allows lenders to charge $20 for every $100 up to a $300 ceiling. After $300, it allows lenders to charge 7.5 percent on every hundred dollars up to $500. Borrowers who paid back the loan before thirty days receive a prorated refund of their origination fee. Borrowers who do not pay back the loan after 30 days begin to incur a $7.50 per hundred dollar maintenance fee per month that is capped at $30 over a possible 6-month term. In addition, they are charged a 45 percent annual percentage rate (APR).

Heath said he never meant for the origination fee to be refundable during his negotiations with lenders and reform advocates. He said the bill would fix that problem.

Confusion surfaced on the legislative intent of the bill during rule making last year, when it was finally determined by Laura Udis, administrator of the Uniform Consumer Credit Code at the Attorney General’s office, that the origination fees could be refunded.

Still, she said, if there was any question to her decision, the legislative remedy would be to amend the language this year. Heath plans to do just that.

Ferrandino, however, said whether Heath was clear or not on the agreement, the Attorney General’s office had been correct in its interpretation. He said then-Gov. Bill Ritter’s office was clear in its letter to the Attorney General’s office that the origination fee was refundable.

“To make [origination fees] non-refundable leads to a conclusion that is basically absurd as to what would happen with interest rates. It leads to interest rates going up versus down. That was never the intent of the bill,” Ferrandino said. “I was clear in my intent. The governor was clear in his.”

A chart, provided by Coloradans for Payday Lending Reform, shows the cost of a $300 loan held for 30 days would increase from $21.75 under current law to $71.25 under the new legislation. When figured in terms of APR the loan jumps from 86 percent to 289 percent.

Ferrandino and others fear that allowing lenders to keep the origination fee regardless of how soon a loan is paid back will cause them to develop loan products that would lead to individuals returning time and again for loans.

Corrine Fowler, Economic Justice director for the Colorado Progressive Coalition, said many legislators were considering the proposal because they thought there was a cool-off period. However, she said that wasn’t the case. Fowler said a 30-day waiting period is required between the dates on which the loans are made only if the same lender makes a subsequent loan to a consumer while a prior loan is outstanding or unpaid.

Past payday lending laws required individuals to pay back loans within a single pay period, which caused many borrowers to enter into a cycle of debt as they would acquire a new loan to pay back the one they had already taken.

Despite the potential risks to those in financial dire straits, many legislators at the time of the initial legislation’s passage said lenders were providing needed credit to those who were unable to get it anywhere else.

Ferrandino said the bill that passed last year was a very delicately devised compromise between the House and the Senate, and payday lenders are trying to “blow-up that compromise.”

Supporters of payday reform said  they don’t have funds this year to combat attempts to amend the legislation. However, they said the payday industry brought payday lobbyists on early after last year’s session and provided funds for candidate’s elections.

Fowler said that payday lenders had spent $93,000 since the end of last year’s legislative session in lobbying alone and had given $59,000 in campaign contributions to primarily Republican-oriented war chests. She said that seemed to contradict the image that the industry was struggling.

ACE Cash Express, headquartered in Irving, TX, contributed $26,000 to both the Republican Senate Majority Fund, LLC and Coloradans for a Better Future (CBF), a 527 group registered under Andy Nickel who also was the registered agent of Colorado Citizens for Accountable Government (CCAG). Last year CBF received $50,000 from the Senate Majority Fund, LLC.

The majority of CBF’s money was used for two advertisement expenditures to Strategic Media Placement LLC.

As the Colorado Independent reported, CCAG sent out mailers accusing Democratic House Rep. John Soper of wanting to release sex offenders from prison and implied that Soper would turn them loose in the district’s school yards. Soper roundly denied the accusation by listing off a series of anti-criminal legislation he had supported.

Payday reform advocates said they are targeting the Senate where they feel they have the best chance to stop the legislation from going through.

Sen. Linda Newell, D-Littleton, who voted against last year’s reforms, said she had not seen the legislation yet, but she said she may be amenable to changes that would ensure that the industry survives in the state. Newell voted in favor of Heath’s amendment to the bill last year.

“I understand that it is being negotiated, but I was supportive of the last one. My personal experience with being in poverty before and needing those kinds of services before is that I just don’t want all of those to dry up, but I do understand the compromise,” Newell said.

The bill is being co-sponsored in the House by Rep. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, and Jim Riesberg, D-Greeley, where it will likely pass.

“People approached me to run, my Republican friends too, they feel [Renfroe] is extreme and that, due to my D.A. background, I had to be balanced. I agree; I think he’s not in line with the district,” Storck told the Colorado Independent.

He said people in the district don’t really know what Renfroe represents on their behalf in the senate.

“That’s the question. What does he stand for, on the issues?”

Renfroe didn’t return an email message nor calls placed to his office in Denver and two Greeley addresses. His website provides Denver legislative office contact information but only a campaign land mail address and no other contact information.

Storck said he would take as his communication model his own state representative, Democrat Jim Reisberg.

“Look at Reisberg by comparison,” he said, “he puts forward a non-partisan presentation on the issues every two weeks– on Saturdays up here [in the district]. Renfroe doesn’t do that. He speaks with extreme groups– Tenth Amendment groups, for example– but there are no community forums on the issues, nothing.”

Renfroe, admittedly a member of the minority party, was prime sponsor of 8 bills this session, only 2 of which passed into law. They exempted controlled agricultural fires from arson categories and lowered the age for drivers license permitting from 18 to 16 1/2. He worked with no Democrats as co-sponsors of his bills.

Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, no diluted Republican by any measure, nevertheless this session compiled a strong record of accomplishment, partly by working with Democrats. Penry sponsored 21 bills, 9 of which passed into law and many of those co-sponsored by Democrats. Those bills will rework the faltering public employee retirement plan, move dirty coal fired power plants to clean burning natural gas, install new parole guidelines, and remake higher education funding, among other things.

Renfroe’s Front Range counterpart in the House, Reisberg, was prime sponsor of 29 bills this session, a full 24 of which passed into law, some of them the product of bipartisan efforts. Riesberg worked with Republicans Al White and David Balmer as legislative co-sponsors. Reisberg bills this session covered a range of issues, mostly related to health care. New laws based on his bills will work to determine who can declare patients terminally ill, outline schools efforts to raise child immunization awareness, streamline medicaid hospice payments, reform police and fire departments pensions, license pharmacists and chiropractors to prescribe drugs and make hospitals safer for patients while limiting litigation. He was also House sponsor of the bill that will provide free access for seniors to parklands across the state.

Storck thinks the record demonstrates Renfroe doesn’t place problem-solving as a priority, even this session, when the state faced enormous budget problems in need of creative solutions.

“Take the tax exemptions on businesses. There was discussion about lifting the exemptions. On any of those, in all of those discussions, his response was categorical: just no. These are tough times. I think you have to examine everything.”

What constituents know of Renfroe, said Storck, they see on the news.

“Some of the things he says, I don’t think we agree with it. Last year he said homosexuals were sinners and murderers. This session on April 20th he said the medical marijuana protesters– that their [prescription] cards should be confiscated and the National Guard should have been called out to break up the protests. I mean, this was 40 years almost to the day of the [National Guard] Kent State shootings. For my generation, we remember that. That affected us. And these people [the Denver marijuana protesters] legally got their cards and they have a legal right to peacefully protest.”

During the 2009 session, Renfroe compared homosexuality to murder while speaking against a bill that aimed to extend health benefits to same-sex domestic partners of state employees.

He quoted scripture to call gay sex a “detestable act” and said it would be “an abomination according to scripture” for the legislature to “[take] sins and [make] them to be legally OK.”

““I’m not saying [homosexuality] is the only sin that’s out there. We have sin — we have murder, we have, we have all sorts of sin, we have adultery, and we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal.”

The comments brought local and national condemnation and have left an impression.

“Scott Renfroe is about as far from the ‘mainstream’ as you can get without joining a traveling circus,” said activist group ProgressNow Executive Director Bobby Clark in response to the Greeley Tribune story. “A man who has equated gay people with murderers and has consistently voted with the extremist fringe of the Republican Party can’t call himself moderate with a straight face.”

Storck and Renfroe are so far running even in fundraising, both campaigns holding a little less than $10,000 cash on hand. Storck said he announced his candidacy in November but that he’s rebooting his campaign for the summer.

Renfroe told the Greeley Tribune he has been wrapping up things at the capitol and that he hasn’t spent much time yet campaigning.

Storck said he’s a moderate Democrat although he doesn’t identify himself as a Democrat at his website. He said he’ll be starting to do door to door walks in the district in the coming days.

“l’ve spoken to some state senators. They think I have a good shot.”

[Photo: Ken Storck and Scott Renfroe]

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“Women pay up to 59 percent more than men of the same age with 90 percent of private insurance companies, even though as a whole women tend to have less claims than men, irrespective of maternity coverage.” Mcann told the committee.

Schafer said they intentionally wrote a very narrowly focused bill meant to address loopholes that exacerbate gender imbalance.

Insurance companies say that they have reason for charging women more. Maternity is seen strictly as a women’s health problem. This bill, however, is aimed at addressing coverage discrepancies that exist outside of maternity coverage. That issue is being tackled by another bill introduced by McCann this session.

“Basically just being a woman is a pre-existing condition… We wouldn’t discriminate against an African American who needed insurance because we are an equality state,” Schafer said. She added that insurance companies agreed not to oppose the bill. No one had registered with the committee to offer opposing testimony. Eleven people had signed up to speak in favor of the bill.

Members of the committee, however, raised concerns that ant attempt to increase equality would raise rates for men.

Schafer said that in states that had passed these kinds of laws, there was no significant data either way yet on whether rates had raised.

Rep. Jim Riesberg, D-Greeley, said “Men get sick and die. Women get sick and live.” His point was that women as a group end up costing insurance companies more based on biological and health realities. He listed higher costs associated with treating women. He said that more women suffer from chronic conditions and depression than do men and pointed again to women’s reproductive health needs.

Yet maternity care isn’t covered in private plans. Women pay more for existing plans without maternity coverage. An Anthem insurance personal plan in Colorado, for example, does not cover any maternity or prenatal care. Yet a women carrying the plan pays more than $120 more than a male under the same plan, even if the male is older. The woman simply pays more for being a woman as a category. As the Colorado Independent has reported, male smokers pay less than women nonsmokers.

Rep. Spencer Swalm, R-Centennial, thought the categories made sense. He said that if gender inequalities are taken away in health, shouldn’t they be taken away in auto insurance. Teenage boys pay more as a group he said, and for well-known reasons.

Swalm voted down the bill, as did Rep. Cheri Gerou, R-Evergreen.

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State Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, staked political ground in the far corner of the Republican-Libertarian right the last few years, voting against proposed tough state-wide drunk-driving laws, which he decried as part of a series of tax and fee-generating “nanny bills.” Now, though, as a candidate gunning for Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey’s Fourth District seat in Washington, Gardner is vowing to sponsor new nanny state-style legislation meant to impose consistent harsh penalties on drunk-drivers. What’s changed?

Gardner didn’t answer messages left by the Colorado Independent over the last two weeks on the matter.

He did however speak to the Denver Post for a lengthy article on drunk driving published Sunday. Gardner was the only lawmaker quoted.

State Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, who plans to introduce legislation in January to make a repeat drunken driving arrest a felony, said some of the sentences [handed down] stunned him.

“We’ve got to address those areas where the law isn’t treating offenders as seriously as it needs to in order to prevent it from happening again,” Gardner said.

The Post also might have contacted Democratic State Rep. Jim Riesberg, D-Greeley, who sponsored HB-1171 in 2006, a bill that dealt with alcohol-related repeat driving offenses and one introduced in the last few years that passed into law. Gov. Bill Owens signed the bill in June of that year. The new law lowered legal blood-alcohol levels; required repeat offenders to install ignition-locking breathalyzers; instructed courts to include repeat offense convictions on driving records; and charged offenders fines to be used to pay for addiction treatment.

Gardner voted against Riesberg’s bill, which was introduced during Gardner’s first term in office. Then as now, Gardner represented state House District 63, which includes Yuma County, where he lives. With the exception of Adams County, only the western half of which is included in District 63, the counties in Gardner’s district have notched remarkably low numbers of drunk-driving fatality cases. A safe estimate for the entire district would be 5 homicide DUIs since 2005.

In the whole of Markey’s Fourth U.S. Congressional District, however, the numbers are sadly elevated, and not just because it’s a wider swath of territory. The Fourth District includes Weld and Larimer counties, sites of high numbers of drunk-driving fatalities. The number of vehicular homicide charges from 2005 to 2009 in the U.S. Fourth Congressional District is safely three times greater than in the state district Gardner presently represents.

The motives pushing Gardner on this issue are difficult to determine. A personal experience? An ideological shift? Pure politics? As mentioned above, he hasn’t returned messages.

Ask cynics and they’ll point to Gardner’s equivocations on the campaign trail over the past months, most notably his seeming manipulation of the so-called birther question pushed by right-wing talk radio hosts and websites such as World Net Daily, where President Obama’s eligibility for office is assailed based on questions surrounding the legitimacy of his birth certificate.

Last month Gardner tried to finesse the topic at a town hall meeting in Fort Collins. “The [Obama] administration is trying to say [Obama] was born in this country,” Gardner said. It was an answer that either failed to satisfy everyone or one that half satisfied all of the people that mattered.

Gardner also made a big show of calling out Markey for announcing her August health-care town hall schedule late. He said she was running from the people and that he was happy to fill the “leadership void” and be the one to communicate with citizens.

Yet Gardner has been notably unavailable to answer questions posed by the media.

So is Gardner selectively endorsing the nanny state? What role does he think the state should play in Coloradans’ lives? The Denver Post should ask him. We want to know.

–
An editing error included parts of Arapahoe and Adams counties in the Fourth Congressional District in an early version of this post. The two counties were removed from the district in the 2000 census. Thanks to Bob Moore at the Fort Collins Coloradoan for the fact check.

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(Photo/SarahConsolacion, Flickr)

During a hearing Monday on the Birth Control Protection Act, five anti-contraception witnesses spoke out as state House Health and Human Services Committee Chairman Jim Reisberg (D-Greeley) tried in vain to keep the hearing room focused on the bill at hand.

Eventually and apologetically, Reisburg succumbed to the committee members’ subtle urging to shut down rambling filibusters and indelicate public disclosures about their personal sexual histories.

State Rep. Anne McGihon and State Sen. Betty Boyd, both Denver Democrats, crafted SB 225 to thwart future legal or constitutional challenges similar to Amendment 48 — the failed 2008 ballot measure that sought to grant constitutional rights to fertilized eggs. The bill would codify “contraception or a contraceptive device as a medically acceptable drug, device, or procedure used to prevent pregnancy.” The duo reasons that having a clear-cut definition that complements current state law defining pregnancy will eliminate a debate over whether contraception induces abortions.

McGihon set the tone, stating straightaway that “this bill is not about abortion” to hearing-room skeptics who believe contraception causes the miscarriage of fertilized eggs.

And, apparently, not only human eggs.

Secondary-school student Samantha Cole urged that oral contraceptives be banned entirely because women taking birth control pills excrete hormones into the wastewater system, which pollutes the watershed, creating intersex fish that are unable to reproduce.

The teenager contrasted the estrogen and progestin found in birth control pills (among many other U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs and products) with the risks of known-carcinogens and neurotoxins such as dioxin, DDT-based pesticides, asbestos, secondhand smoke, and mercury-based vaccines, among other hair-raising health threats.

Cole warned the committee to work toward “getting rid of the poisons in birth control pills or we can all just stop eating fish and drinking water.”

Fort Collins emergency physician Dr. Matt Lutrell rejects the standard medical and scientific determinations of pregnancy at implantation as “a false premise.” Instead, he echoed the conservative Christian interpretation that pregnancy begins at conception — arguments also made in the previous Senate debate that birth control pills are abortifacient.

But what stood out was his off-kilter phrasing of a pre-implantation zygote in terms more reminiscent of a fund-raising plea for a homeless shelter: “All that this new human life needs is a place to live and food to eat.”

Denver lawyer and Catholic antiabortion activist Rebecca Messall, an associate with the GOP power firm Hackstaff Gessler LLC, launched into the abortifacient argument, as well, despite the earlier admonishment of Lutrell by Reisberg for straying off-topic. Messall claimed that pharmaceutical lobbyists conspired with lawmakers to set the “arbitrary date of implantation” as the definition of pregnancy as a defensive tactic to avoid lawsuits for causing abortions in the years before the landmark Roe v. Wade case decriminalized the procedure.

Yet, Reisberg would later have his biggest challenge of the afternoon with the remaining opposition witnesses, who shared highly intimate details of their lives to the obvious discomfort of the committee and gallery.

One witness questioned why the bill didn’t emphasize sexual abstinence after relating her experience on birth control pills and injectable contraceptives beginning at age 11. The young woman told of a difficult home life marred by early sexual activity and teen pregnancy as she sought out “male approval” to replace an absent father.

Vivian Cole also lambasted the committee over the lack of support for abstinence-only education until Reisberg warned her to stick to the bill’s topic. She chose to end her testimony.

Natural family-planning advocates Pete and Marguerite Gormley went into deep detail about their fertility issues and how contraception could have destroyed their marriage. Marguerite Gormley, who counts Archbishop Charles J. Chaput as her hero on Facebook, told the committee, “I had been duped into believing that the pill was helping me [for painful menstrual cycles] for close to 10 years. … Being on birth control never triggered those discussions in our marriage,” she said blaming the convenience of the pill for the delay in starting her family.

Pete Gormley claimed, without any substantiation, that family-planning classes taught him that birth control is not healthy for women and doesn’t constitute medicine. “I never once even considered looking into it and learning what the drug was doing to my wife’s body and potentially to her fertility,” said Gormley, a pharmaceutical chemist by trade and the father of four boys.

Only Evergreen Rep. Cheri Gerou attempted to mount serious opposition by the committee by asking clarifying questions of the witnesses to draw out alternative arguments about contraception conscience clauses and abstinence as a legally defined contraception method. Unlike her GOP Senate colleagues Kevin Lundberg and Ted Harvey, she didn’t mention abortion or conception.

The committee broke on a 6-4 party line vote after McGihon amended the bill to reflect the updated Senate version to exclude emergency contraception from the definition, since it is addressed elsewhere in the state revised code. Affirming the bill was McGihon and Democratic Reps. Reisberg, Sara Gagliardi of Arvada, Gwyn Green of Golden, John Kefalas of Fort Collins and Dianne Primavera of Broomfield. The panel’s Republicans — Reps. Gerou, Jim Kerr of Littleton, B. J. Nikkel of Berthoud, and Spencer Swalm of Centennial — voted no. Aurora Republican Cindy Acree was absent.

The bill moves to the full House for a first reading debate.