DENVER — The James Merrick State Parking Facility, the state’s prized 199,400 square-foot paradigm of premium parking construction just south of the Capitol, offers Capitol Complex employees 660 spaces and a central hub for parking amidst their daily hustle and flow between the various state buildings that run Colorado’s government.

Unfortunately for citizens trying to participate in the legislative process, the parking garage, which won an award for excellence in public parking structures, is exclusively for state employees — adding to the already-high cost of civic participation in Colorado.

More than 80 responses to a State Bill Colorado survey sent to registered lobbyists and trade group representatives showed how much of an inconvenience Capitol complex parking becomes when dealing with it on a regular, or even irregular, basis.

Parking is, according to one respondent, “a problem that is only getting worse each year” that “stymies the public’s opportunity to attend hearings and provide input.”

“Getting my members to testify is hard enough so it’s a hassle for them to search for parking. Two-hour parking surrounding the Capitol is totally inadequate,” another respondent wrote.

“Citizens who don’t go to the Capitol on a regular basis find this very [frustrating] and inhibits them from participating in the process,” wrote another.

Completed in 2006, the Merrick parking garage is reserved for state employees, who either personally or through their agencies pay $95 a month to $110 a month for covered parking.

The garage cost just under $9.5 million and generates $600,000 a year in fees, said Julie Postlethwait, public information officer for the Department of Personnel & Administration. The department expects the building to bring in money for the state once the loan is paid off in 2025, Postlethwait said.

In addition, the state also reserves a block and a half of metered street-side spaces for legislative use during the session. The meters, on the 1300 block of Sherman Street and the west side of the 1400 block of Grant Street, are closer to the Capitol than any other parking meters.

These additional spaces seemed excessive to one lobbyist who responded to State Bill’s survey.

“The legislature is adding to the problem by blocking off street parking during the session,” the lobbyist wrote. “Given there’s a state parking garage there’s no reason to do this.”

The public parking lots surrounding the Capitol typically charge a flat rate of $8 to $12 a day, which adds up if you’re at the Capitol four or five days a week.

DENVER — Modernizing Colorado politics is said to be a priority for legislators, although more so for Colorado’s House than for its Senate.

Unlike the House, Senate proceedings aren’t televised, and votes in the chamber are counted the old-fashioned way: by voice. While the House has a big screen that lets observers see votes, the Senate has … nothing. And a system to help count votes, live in the House, isn’t yet working in the Senate.

The vote-counting system, built by LVW Electronics of Colorado Springs and costing more than $530,000 to design and install, will allow both chambers to continue to use their traditional voting methods — push button in the House and voice in the Senate. It updated the aging technologies that were in operation.

In the House, the system includes two large projection screens that display the votes of each representative on each bill. There’s also a new sound system.

The decision was made to install the new system in the House because of recurring problems with an outdated system in place since the 1970s, House Chief Clerk Marilyn Eddins said. With the new system, voting in the 65-member House takes on average about 20 seconds — half the time it takes in the 35-member Senate.

“Our old system … was breaking down occasionally, so we worked out a way to get money to install a new system,” Eddins said. “We had to do that.”

The new system has been operational in the House since the beginning of this year’s session. There have been a few software problems, such as a morning session when House Speaker Terrance Carroll had to audibly call out his votes.

“There have been some minor glitches, which you can expect whenever you have new technology, but [the new system] makes us more efficient,” Carroll said. “It needed to be upgraded.”

In the Senate, LVW’s vote recording system hasn’t been tested and consequently isn’t yet operational. It’s intended to replicate and upgrade an older program that was developed in-house.

Improvements have been made to electronically record votes, allow vote counts to be printed and allow data to be imported directly into the daily Senate Journal. The new system also will allow each legislator’s voting record to be imported into a database, a feature the old system did not have.

The Senate will not have a large screen projecting votes and will not vote electronically, Secretary of the Senate Karen Goldman said.

Addressing the issue, Senate President Peter Groff said, “The Senate has always been a more traditional body. It is smaller so there really isn’t any need to have a Jumbotron. We just don’t think it’s necessary.”

The House has also leapt technologically ahead of the Senate by implementing a live television feed of floor sessions onto the web and on Comcast Cable Channel 165.

The project, dubbed “The Colorado Channel,” began broadcasting at the start of the 2008 legislative session. It was the pet project of former Speaker Andrew Romanoff. Romanoff and his fellow representatives raised $260,000 of private funding and in-kind donations from Denver, the Gay and Lesbian Fund of Colorado and the Rose Community Foundation, among others, Eddins said.

“Speaker Romanoff felt it was important to the state of Colorado to see what was going on in the legislature,” she said.

Yearly operating and production costs for the broadcast, totaling $112,000 in 2008, come out of the state budget. The Senate has a like amount budgeted but isn’t spending it because TV cameras haven’t been installed.

The Senate did not install cameras because it was unable to raise the money to fund the project, said Deb Lastowka, the director of the Colorado Channel, which is operated by Colorado-based nonprofit De Production.

“We couldn’t raise the money [for a Senate floor broadcast system] because of the economy,” Groff said. “It was also hard to do it during an election year.”

Lastowka said, “As far as I know, the Senate tried to raise the money and was unable to. The hope is that eventually Senate and committee meetings will be included in the broadcast. It would be great to have viewers access both chambers.”

DENVER — State legislatures have long been ahead of the curve on adopting wireless Internet, the Denver-based National Conference on State Legislatures says. But so far as the public is concerned, Colorado isn’t one of them.

Colorado is in a minority of states that provides wireless access at capitols to its staff but not to its citizens, according to a 2008 NCSL survey.

The reason is cost and security, says Michael Adams, director of the legislature’s information services division. A few years ago, the legislature estimated that setting up a separate public wireless network would cost $60,000.

With Colorado’s current budget crisis, it’s unlikely the state will shell out cash now to give laptop users a little more “uptime” down at the Capitol. Current Internet access is minimal: There’s a computer lab in the legislative library with six computers connected to a printer.

Sentiment: We want wireless

But the demand for public Internet is high, according to a State Bill Colorado survey of 68 frequent Capitol participants, including lobbyists, chamber and nonprofit association personnel, law firms and agency personnel.

A staggering 96 percent of respondents — 65 in all — thought Colorado should provide wireless Internet to the public. And a majority, 58 percent, said they’d be willing to pay for it.

A majority of the respondents, 64 percent, said they were already connected to the Internet, typically through a Blackberry, iPhone, Treo or air card. But half said the connectivity through those devices was either “average” or “poor.”

According to NCSL, Midwestern or Western states with legislator and public wireless networks are Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington.

“The entire business of the Capitol is now web-based,” one State Bill Colorado survey respondent wrote. “Amendments are posted, calendars, etc. One can listen to hearings on the Internet. It would make sense to have public access to maximize availability of the legislative process to the public.

Another said, “It is a public place where members of the public come to interact with policy-makers. Those interacts could be facilitated and enriched by free wireless.”

As to the price they’d be willing to pay, basic answers included a price range per month, from $10 to $25. Others suggested that wireless access fees should be charged on time usage, not a monthly fee.

It was also suggested that the fee should be for the legislative secession: “Most legislatures charge you per session. Wyoming is $150 but that also includes other services, like having a lobbyist area where you can go to work on your laptop between hearings, etc.”

Other services would be nice

A final survey question asked participants if there were other services should be offered at the Capitol. While only 45 percent said yes, this question received some of the most detailed responses.

Many respondents commented on their inability to bypass security: One said, “I think a security pass through the metal detectors would be great. I am in and out of the Capitol several times a day, and think that a ‘clear card’ concept for lobbyist would be worth pursuing.” Another said, “There is no reason for registered lobbyists to have to go through screening every time we come to the Capitol, sometimes multiple times each day.”

Other suggestions included more restrooms, lockers, access to printers and fax machines, and a Starbucks. One final point lobbyists made was that a lounge or separate meeting place for lobbyists should be offered. They often referenced the Wyoming Capitol Club.

The Capitol Club (see story on Page 17) provides a number of member amenities, including office space, workspace, meeting rooms, wireless access, wireless printing capabilities, bill service, and House/Senate audio capabilities. A similar club in Colorado’s Capitol would serve the purpose of compiling current services into one easily accessible area.

DENVER — On a recent Thursday morning, Kit Carson School District Superintendant Gerald Keefe packed up his car and prepared himself for a three-hour commute to Denver.

He had two pieces of business to attend to. He had an appearance in front of the state Board of Education. He also wanted to testify against Sen. Chris Romer’s SB09-131, a bill requiring 250 minutes of physical activity a week for elementary-school students. Keefe felt the bill threatened Colorado’s constitutional provision of local control of school curricula.

The six-hour roundtrip is a hassle, but he says it beats the alternative, which is submitting written testimony.

“Sometimes, you have to have your face in the room,” Keefe said. “It’s important we were there because if we weren’t, they might have passed something much worse.”

As technology improves and provides people with more ways to communicate across great distances, most state legislatures, including Colorado, are sticking with old-fashioned, face-to-face or written communication. That’s despite the hassles it causes for those living outside the capital and the abundance of technologies offering simple solutions to bridge the gap between legislators and their rural constituents.

Idea explored, but abandoned

Videoconferencing and teleconferencing from remote locations to lawmakers in Denver would save people like Keefe loads of time and money. But hearing testimony from offsite poses legal, administrative and financial obstacles for our cash-strapped state.

Last year, then-Speaker Andrew Romanoff asked the capitol’s technology staff to look into what it would cost to set up a videoconferencing system. Systems Analyst Zack Wimberly, who had previously worked with videoconferencing technology in the state’s higher education system, drew up a rough report for the speaker. Estimates put the cost of video teleconferencing at more than $100,000. And that’s just for the equipment. There are problems with the building’s technology infrastructure that would drive the cost up.

“The existing network structure could not support” videoconferencing, Wimberly said.

There is also the problem of archiving the witness testimony. The state would have to figure out how to record the audio or the video of the witnesses giving remote testimony. Storing audio is cheap, but storing high-definition video of witness testimony is expensive and requires lots of storage space, forcing the state to pay for data storage space somewhere, Wimberly said.

Since term limits forced Romanoff’s departure at the end of 2008, no other legislator or state official has called about videoconferencing, Wimberly said. And with the state’s current budgetary crisis, no one is likely to. Yet, as Wimberly pointed out, many state agencies — community colleges and school districts, for example — already have videoconferencing systems in place, and some of the places he has talked to are open to including the state legislature in their network.

“The more people you have on the system, the more useful this would be,” Wimberly said. “Some people I’ve talked to are very amenable to doing this.”

Other states embrace it

Yet some other states have begun to offer citizens ways to participate in public hearings from outside the capital building. Alaska and Nevada offer residents the ability to testify on hearings from outside their capitols.

In 1972, Alaska began establishing Legislative Information Offices that give constituents easy access to the legislative process inside the capitol at Juneau, said Jake Carpenter, a Web/audio specialist with the Legislative Affairs Agency.

Today, Alaska maintains 22 such offices across the state. They provide teleconferencing capabilities as well as other legislative information services. Eleven of Alaska’s LIOs operate only during the legislative session while the other 11 operate year-round.

“The primary rule is that everybody gets their piece,” Carpenter said.

While only three offices are set up for video conferencing, the state has begun a project to expand video teleconferencing to every LIO, Carpenter said.

Nevada’s legislature allows testimony to occur from either within the Capitol in Carson City or from a state building in Las Vegas equipped with teleconferencing technology. “It allows literally thousands more citizens to express their opinion during legislative hearings without having to incur the expense of traveling to Carson City,” said Barbara Prudic, a research analyst with Nevada’s Legislative Council Bureau.