On November 5, Colorado Common Cause filed individual complaints against seventeen state legislators alleging that an interest group, One Main Street Colorado, paid $25,000 for the legislators’ resort hotel stay for a “retreat” where lobbyists presented to and mingled with them.

At the core of our complaints is the Colorado Constitution’s ban on giving gifts to legislators. This “gift ban” dates to 2006, when voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 41 by a 25-point margin. Colorado Common Cause spearheaded the drafting of Amendment 41 and played a key role in getting it on the ballot and approved. Twenty years later, our mission remains the same.

At the time, we published a report with the Center for Public Integrity on how much special interests and  lobbyists spent to influence public policy. That amount had tripled in just one decade to $22.1 million per year. Lobbyists were spending $1.6 million annually on gifts, entertainment, and other expenses to influence legislators and the Governor, including hand-held computers, Broncos tickets, expensive meals, international travel, and other freebies. 

That was all legal, until Amendment 41 capped gifts to legislators and public servants ($50 then, $75 now), and created the Independent Ethics Commission (IEC) to investigate complaints and remedy violations. If a complaint is deemed non-frivolous by the IEC, respondents are given a chance to respond, and a public hearing is set.

The Colorado Sun broke this story, backed with screenshots, photos, and testimonials, after the Opportunity Caucus’s Vail retreat in October. Later news coverage disclosed yet more photos and details. This moment marks an unprecedented discovery of alleged dark money gift-giving in Colorado legislative politics since the 2006 passage of Amendment 41 made these activities illegal. 

This is exactly the sort of threat to “public trust” that Amendment 41 prohibits, instructing public servants to “avoid conduct that is in violation of their public trust or that creates a justifiable impression among members of the public that such trust is being violated; any effort to realize personal financial gain through public office other than compensation provided by law is a violation of that trust.”

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The work Colorado Common Cause does is multi-faceted. 

This year, we worked with legislative voting rights champions to draft and pass the Colorado Voting Rights Act (COVRA). The COVRA will protect Colorado from federal threats to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and will make it easier to challenge restrictive local election practices and unfair systems of representation that make it harder for disenfranchised communities to have a fair say in who represents them. Each major election, we run nonpartisan voter protection efforts to monitor the process and work with election officials to solve problems in the best interest of voter accessibility, security and public safety. On Election Day 2024, we sent out 350 nonpartisan volunteers to 200 different voting locations, spanning 62 cities and 8 college campuses.

For those who only know us for our more recent work, our complaints may seem unexpected. Cependant, Common Cause is one of the United States’ largest and most effective government watchdog groups. We take that responsibility seriously. Our complaint filings did not stem from any individual legislator or group, but from our commitment to the public interest. 

To put an even finer point on this: as a nonpartisan good government watchdog, our allegations of wrongdoing did not stem from any electoral motivation, but because those named in our complaints are legislators.

Beyond Amendment 41, Colorado Common Cause has a rich history of fighting successfully for good government protections and reforms, including:

• spearheading the nation’s first Sunshine Law in 1972, which requires all meetings on public business by state public bodies to be open to the public;
• fighting for a stronger Colorado Open Records Act (“CORA”), which guarantees the right of every Coloradan to access public records;
• leading the effort to pass the GAVEL Amendment, followed by litigation to put a final end to the practice of forcing members of the same party to vote together.

We value our extensive history of working with legislators and advocates of a wide range of views and political affiliations. But above all, there are times when political goodwill must be put aside to defend the public’s interest. That is why, after no action was taken following credible reports of these violations, we asked the IEC to investigate.

From this unfortunate incident, the best possible outcome is the restoration of public trust, and unity of understanding and respect for the important principles that Amendment 41 put in place — which we see as readily achievable here. 

An illegal gift is an illegal gift, whether the legislator knew their hotel stay’s illegal funding beforehand, or instead learned it soon after. The IEC long ago warned that legislators can’t use a Caucus to evade the gift ban; because legislators “cannot use an association to do something on their behalf that they are otherwise prohibited from doing.”

More broadly, Colorado Common Cause will celebrate and support any actions that advance accountability and transparency — including for this Caucus whose funding with undisclosed “dark money” drives the risk of violations like these. 

Our goal is simple, and we hope our message is, too: Colorado must maintain a government that serves the people, not special interests. This moment is an opportunity to strengthen the sacred promise between the people and their elected officials, and we are hopeful for a resolution that does exactly that.