Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure Tuesday requiring new compensation contracts with public school employee unions to be negotiated in public.
Proposition 104 received 70 percent of the vote for what may be the first such law in the nation. The Colorado measure requires public negotiations, whereas the handful of states with similar laws only allow open bargaining.
Unions representing Colorado public school administrators and teachers must now forge agreements in public on issues such as salaries, benefits and working conditions — a move the measure’s supporters believe will allow taxpayers to better understand how their money is being spent.
The popular reform was proposed by the Independence Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Denver.
Think tank officials said the measure was needed to open up certain types of meetings that were not subject to existing transparency laws for state and local governments.
Independence Institute President Jon Caldara told the Washington Examiner that the new law will keep collective bargaining decisions, which ultimately account for about 85 percent of Colorado public school budgets, from being made in “closed, smoky back rooms.”
“There are 11 other states that already have similar laws, and we’ll be working with friendly organizations in other states to hopefully replicate this in other states,” Caldara said. “But it’s an easy sell once it gets going.”
Opponents of Prop 104 argued the new law undermines the ability of local school districts to set their own policies.
“In recent years, there’s been more and more intrusion into the concept of local control. This is just one more intrusion into that,” said Ranelle Lang, spokeswoman for an anti-Prop 104 opposition coalition called Local Schools, Local Choices.
“Local boards could already do this. There was not, in my opinion and in the opinion of others, a need for this to become a state law,” Lang said.
Lang’s coalition included the Colorado Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
“The voters have spoken,” Lang said of Tuesday’s defeat. “As we have done as public educators, we will figure it out and we will make it work. We are so highly legislated, this is just one more.”
Lang, a retired public school superintendent, said she guessed the opposition group was “disappointed” Prop 104 had passed.
But the initiative enjoyed widespread support ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
Newspapers around the state, including the Denver Post, the Greeley Tribune and the Estes Park Trail Gazette, endorsed Prop 104 and the increased transparency it aims to establish.
“I think part of the story is how big it won,” Caldara said of the initiative. “It really shows that people value transparency in government, particularly when it comes to the biggest budget item that a school district deals with.”
