Legislative staff in Colorado
While technically the employment of these individuals is approved or denied by the Secretary of the Senate or the Chief Clerk of the House, selections are generally made independently by each elected official.
Most official state documents use the blanket term Legislative Aide to refer to all member staff in Colorado.
Consequently, member staff are classified as session-only employees, meaning they can be paid only for work performed while the General Assembly is meeting, usually from mid-January through early May.
Furthermore, a small secretarial pool is made available to legislators to handle printing, basic communication, and other administrative tasks.
Because of the state's limited budget for paid staffers, most offices rely heavily on unpaid volunteers and interns.
The most-publicized of these is Colorado State University's legislative internship program, founded by longtime statehouse observer Dr. John Straayer.
Administrative staffers also include IT support staff, librarians, and state employees and volunteers who provide tours to members of the general public.
The committees of the Colorado General Assembly employ a small number of specialists as staffers to support their function.
[20] The only partisan staffers employed by the General Assembly are in the House and Senate's minority and majority communications and leadership offices.
These staffers are tasked with coordinating the messaging for members of their respective caucus, as well as providing them with supplemental policy analysis.
These staffers write statutory language, assist in bill drafting, keep legislative records, review executive regulations to ensure they comply with statute, provide a host of publication services to publish new statutes, and make recommendations to legislative leadership.
Responsibilities do vary from position to position, but a typical staffer will:Draft legislation and amendments to legislation that are legally correct, accurately reflect the intent of their sponsors, are written comprehensibly in grammatically correct plain English, and adhere to all other Office style and format requirements; Annotating Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases that apply or interpret the Colorado constitution, the Colorado Revised Statutes, or Colorado Court Rules; Reviewing, editing, and proofreading legislation, amendments to legislation, legal memorandums, and other written Office work product; Conducting policy and legal research; Edits legislation, amendments to legislation, legal memorandums, and other written office work product, including graphical presentation materials, for grammar, spelling, punctuation, comprehensibility, and adherence to all other Office style and format requirements; Prepare charts, tables, and other graphical presentation and research materials; Reviews executive branch agency rules to determine whether they are within the rule-making authority of the promulgating agency.
