Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce officials and business leaders on Thursday singled out the biggest issues impacting businesses in 2022, including “economically damaging” Environmental Protection Agency rules that will come down on Colorado soon over air quality standards, construction defect laws that business leaders say are ineffective and don’t prevent lawsuits in condominium developments and the potential move of U.S. Space Command headquarters.

The comments came during a panel discussion during the chamber’s State of the City event at the Seawell Ballroom in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in front of more than 700 businesses leaders.

If the EPA determines Colorado’s air pollution control region reaches the “severe” non-attainment category, it will require motorists to use a more refined, and expensive, gasoline that creates less ozone.

“Sustainable growth comes when the private sector works together with our public partners to innovate and imagine, letting new ideas succeed or fail in the competitive marketplace free from over-regulation and cumbersome, if not sometimes impossible-to-achieve political mandates,” chamber President and CEO J. J. Ament said. If the EPA determines that Colorado’s air quality is severe, “it will impact every single person in this room.”

Ament pointed to the “45 pieces of legislation” in the last three years surrounding air, water and oil/gas regulation.

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“We’re literally swimming in new rules and regulation and policy. … These rules need time to work,” he said. “And now policymakers are encouraging new federal mandates through the EPA that, among other things, would ban the sale of traditional gasoline for parts of Colorado … adding maybe $1 or more to the price of a gallon of gas, which is already at inflated prices.”

The chamber plans to lobby Gov. Jared Polis to ask the EPA for an extension if the EPA designation happens. 

Ament said another good way to combat inflation is to curtail government spending, so the chamber will urge U.S. Sens Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper to add an amendment to President Joe Biden’s proposed Inflation Reduction Act keeping the U.S. Space Command Headquarters in Colorado.

“That can be both a national security imperative as well as the first step in reducing inflation by saving that billion or more dollars” it would cost to move the headquarters to Alabama, Ament said.

Colorado lawmakers have two federal reviews confirming “fundamental flaws” in the process that led to former President Donald Trump awarding U.S. Space Command headquarters to Alabama, and that the decision defied the recommendation of top military brass, who preferred the headquarters remain in Colorado Springs.

A Bennet aide said they had not heard from any chamber official on the proposal.

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“No one has suggested this idea to our office because it’s not even possible under reconciliation,” a Hickenlooper spokesperson said. “If it were, we would have absolutely insisted on space command’s inclusion in the bill.”

Ament, in an email to the Denver Gazette after the event, stated: “Understand complexity of reconciliation, and if a billion-dollars-plus isn’t big enough to address this issue now, then we will certainly support our Senators using their unique positions in an equally divided Senate to advance this important Colorado and national security interest at their next legislative opportunity.”

Meanwhile, Lone Tree Mayor Jackie Millet said the 2017 measures that the state legislature took to entice more condominium construction has failed, and Lone Tree residents need that housing product.

“When I started on the planning commission, 20% of the new buildings were condos,” Millet said. “That’s zero at this point. And any condominiums that are being built now are in that $800,000 to $1.2 million category — that is not attainable or affordable.”

Builders have told her that they would need three full-time employees on any condominium project to deal with legal issues for up to a year-and-a-half after completion of a project, and they’re not willing to pay that extra expense, Millet said.

“I appreciate the action that was done, but it is not driving the effect that was desired,” she said. “I’ve had multiple conversations with builders telling me they’re not going to not build them in Lone Tree. There’s nothing different in Lone Tree than there is in Thornton or Englewood or Denver … so this is a statewide issue.”

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