Colorado § 24-1-101 - Legislative declaration.

§ 24-1-101. Legislative declaration.

(1) The general assembly declares that this article 1 is necessary to create a structure of state government that is responsive to the needs of the people of this state and sufficiently flexible to meet changing conditions; to strengthen the powers of the governor and provide a reasonable span of administrative and budgetary controls within an orderly organizational structure of state government; to strengthen the role of the general assembly in state government; to encourage greater participation of the public in state government; to effect the grouping of state agencies into a limited number of principal departments primarily according to function; and to eliminate overlapping and duplication of effort. To the ends stated in this section, this article 1 shall be liberally construed.

(2) Since the general assembly enacted the "Administrative Organization Act of 1968", which laid out the structure of the principal departments, assigned and transferred every entity into a principal department, and specified whether the entity was transferred by a type 1 or type 2 transfer or abolished by a type 3 transfer, the general assembly has determined that:

(a) The transfer language used in this article 1 is overly complicated, and the concept that a new entity obtains or retains its powers "as if it were transferred", based on a reorganization that occurred in 1968, is an awkward way of expressing the entity's status;

(b) While the status of an entity is expressed in this article 1, the type 1 or type 2 status of the entity often is not specified in the organic statute that governs the entity, which is where a reader would typically look for this information;

(c) While there were many references to type 3 transfers by which entities were historically abolished, in 2022 the terminology used in the statutes was modernized to simply identify the new entity responsible for the powers, duties, and functions of the abolished entity without the use of the archaic type 3 transfer language; and

(d) The Colorado Revised Statutes would be improved by modernizing the means by which an entity's status is designated and the way in which an entity's powers, duties, and functions are expressed in the "Administrative Organization Act of 1968" and in the organic statute where the entity is created.

Source: L. 68: p. 73, § 1. C.R.S. 1963: § 3-28-1. L. 2022: Entire section amended, (SB 22-162), ch. 469, p. 3349, § 2, effective August 10.

Cross references: For the short title (the "Debbie Haskins 'Administrative Organization Act of 1968' Modernization Act") in SB 22-162, see section 1 of chapter 469, Session Laws of Colorado 2022.

ANNOTATION

Applied in Dodge v. Dept. of Soc. Servs., 657 P.2d 969 (Colo. App. 1982).