EMERGENCY POWERS

• Jurisdiction: Colorado

C. EMERGENCY POWERS

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 highlighted the difficulties experienced by Colorado's local governments and special districts as they struggled to maintain governance, administration, and service delivery during an emergency. These challenges included the inability to meet in person to make decisions, dated rules on required types of public notices and quorum requirements, the difficult of obtaining equitable and meaningful public comment on proposed decisions electronically, and uncertainties about the limits of executive powers in the absence of express grants of authority from governing bodies. The pandemic also brought attention to the scarcity of state law on emergency powers, or the limits on those powers. While the Governor issued numerous executive orders authorizing, requiring, or limiting local government powers, those actions were all temporary in nature, and are not reviewed in this book.

While home rule cities and counties likely have broad powers to decide on local responses to emergency conditions (if they can manage to satisfy meeting, quorum, and voting requirements to authorize their use) the range of possible emergency responses is narrower for statutory cities, towns, and counties. The most clearly applicable state law addressing emergency powers is found in C.R.S. § 24-33.5-709, which authorizes the principal executive officer of a political subdivision to declare a local disaster, with such declaration not to be continued or renewed for a period exceeding seven days, except with the governing board's consent. A local disaster emergency declaration activates the "response and recovery aspects of any and all applicable local and interjurisdictional disaster and emergency plans and to authorize the furnishing of aid and assistance under such plans."²⁶ Declaring a local disaster emergency can qualify the jurisdiction and the people and entities within its boundaries to receive related federal and state funding and other aid.

Additional authority to adopt emergency measures specifically related to zoning may be found in the Colorado Local Government Land Use Control Enabling Act²⁷ (discussed in § 1.5.4). In a 2007 decision that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic, the Colorado...