State Sen. Cathy Kipp Kills Data Center Bill After Union Demands Stall Deal

“Last year I told everybody at the end of the season that I was planning to run this bill. We have spent a full year working to craft something that works for Colorado’s reality, drawing lessons from other states, responding to feedback, and trying to build something genuinely groundbreaking.”

State Sen. Cathy Kipp’s voice carried that specific weight of exhaustion you only hear when a legislative marathon hits its final mile. She said it on a Monday evening, sitting in the shadow of the Capitol dome, waiting for the Senate to reconvene. But the truth of the matter is that she hadn’t just been waiting. She’d spent nearly all of Mother’s Day hunched over the text of SB26-102, the “Large Load Data Centers” bill, working through the night so that it might survive the committee review scheduled for Monday afternoon.

“Everybody busted their butts all of the weekend,” Kipp said later, recalling a family dinner that was more of a working session. Time was bleeding away. By law, the session ended on Wednesday. If this bill didn’t pass, it died. Simple as that.

Kipp walked into the Capitol Monday morning thinking she had the votes. She saw the path clear, the ink dry on the compromise she’d hammered out over the last forty-eight hours. But then she stepped out of an elevator and saw the opposition waiting. Representatives from the electricians’ and pipefitters’ unions were already there, lobbying other legislators to kill the deal.

The snag wasn’t in the technicalities of grid capacity or zoning. It was in the money. The labor unions wanted Colorado to adopt aggressive incentives to draw these massive, power-hungry facilities to the state. That wasn’t part of Kipp’s original vision. It had been the central feature of a different bill entirely — HB26-1030, “Data Center and Utility Modernization,” introduced back in January by Rep. Alex Valdez, a Democrat from Denver. Valdez had tried to push his version through the committee he chaired, but he couldn’t find the votes. On May 7, he killed it. In the informal jargon of the Capitol, they call it “postponed indefinitely,” or PI’d.

Kipp’s compromise was supposed to bridge the gap. It offered incentives, though not as generous as Valdez’s original proposal — just two per year from 2029 through 2034. It ensured that builders would have to hire union trades. It kept community review mandates intact, a direct response to the friction in Denver’s Swansea neighborhood, where a data center went up without consulting the neighbors who lived in its shadow.

Yet, when Kipp addressed the House Energy and Environment Committee, the frustration was palpable, tinged with anger and sadness. She looked at the numbers. She mentioned a poll commissioned by Conservation Colorado, released in April, which found that 91% of 800 likely voters agreed with the statement: “Colorado should implement common-sense rules to protect ratepayers, communities, and our natural resources like air and water from unrestricted data center growth.”

The data was messy, sure. Democrats agreed at 94%, unaffiliated voters at 80%, Republicans at 70%. But the sentiment was clear. The people wanted protection. They wanted rules. They didn’t necessarily want the massive industrial subsidies that labor unions were demanding to make the projects viable.

So, the bill died. Not with a bang, but with a procedural sigh. Kipp requested to PI it herself. The year-long effort, the late nights, the compromise on union labor, the community review safeguards, it all evaporated because the political geometry didn’t align. The unions wanted too much, or perhaps the voters wanted too little, and the middle ground collapsed under the weight of competing interests.

If you look closely at the text of the bill that died, you can see the fingerprints of every stakeholder who touched it. You can see the electricians’ demands for job security woven next to the residents’ fears for their air quality. It was a document trying to hold together the future of Colorado’s energy grid and the present comfort of its people.

Now, the Capitol quiet settles back in. The lobbyists go home. The text of SB26-102 sits in the archives, a ghost of what might have been. Outside, the afternoon light hits the limestone walls of the Capitol, warm and indifferent to the political failures within. The hum of the servers that will eventually power the state’s digital life continues somewhere in the valley, waiting for the next time someone decides to try again.