Committee on Legal Services approves Office of Legislative Legal Services budget, sends package to Executive Committee

The Committee on Legal Services on Feb. 7 approved the Office of Legislative Legal Services (OLLS) budget for fiscal 2025–26 and forwarded it to the Executive Committee.

Director Ed Dechecho told the committee the OLLS request totals $11,255,494 from the general fund, a $298,440 (2.7%) increase from the prior year. The Office of Legislative Workplace Relations (OLWR) budget request is $435,457, a $49,640 (12.9%) increase; together the two requests total $11,690,950, about a 3.1% increase overall.

Dechecho said personal services dominate the request, accounting for roughly 87% of the OLLS budget (about $9.7 million), and that wage and benefit common policies — including a 2.5% across-the-board increase and a 0.6% step-like increase — produce a cascading rise in PERA, Medicare and paid-family-leave costs. "The employer will pay" a larger share of rising health-care costs under the common policy, he said, explaining a roughly $60,000 increase tied to employer health premiums.

The director identified two operating pressures: contract publishing (LexisNexis produces and prints the Colorado Revised Statutes and session law supplements) and outside legal fees. He said the publishing line needs about $31,000 more to anticipate higher supplement costs since 2021, and characterized legal-fee spending as volatile across years. "Our current hourly rate is $250 and that was updated in 2021," Dechecho said when asked about the outside-counsel rate.

Members pressed staff on workforce and recruitment. Several lawmakers noted recent retirements and the office's loss of institutional drafting experience. Dechecho described training and onboarding investments, including a new training position filled by Rebecca Hausman, and said the office added a modest annualization for prior-session staffing (typical 0.1 FTE increments when interim committees require drafting). He also explained a $19,581 transfer from OLLS to OLWR to repurpose an FTE and hire a workplace-relations consultant and thus strengthen a two-person OLWR office.

Committee members asked staff to gather comparative data on outside-counsel hourly rates. Representative Soper suggested benchmarking against metro legal markets rather than a simple 50-state average; Representative Camacho and others proposed collecting information from National Conference of State Legislatures contacts and comparable metropolitan areas.

On publishing costs, Dechecho said supplement printing has "almost doubled" since 2021 and that the budgeted increase will likely cover one full supplement; if both a special session and an initiated/referred measure supplement were required, the office could need additional funds. He clarified that other special-session costs (per diems, sergeant staffing) typically appear in the House and Senate budgets, not OLLS.

Representative Mabry moved to amend the proposed OLLS budget as it appears in the budget request dated 02/05/2025. The committee then conducted a roll-call vote; members present voted unanimously in favor and the motion carried. The chair said the budget will move forward to the Executive Committee for further action.

In a brief litigation update after the vote, Dechecho thanked Deputy Director Barry for successfully securing the withdrawal of a subpoena against Jason Gallagher, saying "that case is closed." The committee adjourned and noted no meeting will be held on 02/14.

What comes next: the approved request will be incorporated into the legislative-branch appropriation process and may be adjusted by the Executive Committee or the Joint Budget Committee during the long-bill process. Committee members indicated they will revisit the outside-counsel hourly-rate question with comparative data before the next budget cycle.