Photo: Illinois Tollway/Flickr
Denver — The Colorado House has passed a bill aimed at protecting workers from extreme temperatures.
At press time, H.B. 26-1272 had moved to the House Appropriations Committee. It would direct the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to collect data – beginning no later than Jan. 1 – on work-related injuries, illnesses and emergencies caused by heat or cold stress.
It also would require the department to develop by Jan. 1, 2028, a model temperature-related injury and illness prevention plan, or TRIIPP, and make it available on the department’s website.
This is the second attempt by state legislators to pass the bill. H.B. 25-1286 was tabled in March 2025 by the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee.
“We heard that last year’s bill was too prescriptive, and we adjusted accordingly,” Rep. Meg Froelich (D-Greenwood Village), one of the bill’s sponsors, said during a March 18 hearing. “We heard that [extreme temperatures] really [aren’t] a problem, so we’re suggesting that we collect data. We ask you to let us begin this journey, to listen to workers, to consider workers when we think about our increasingly hot summers, our crazy cold days that seem to come from nowhere. ‘Prevention’ is one of the P’s in the TRIIPP. If we can plan ahead, we can keep workers healthy. We keep Colorado going.”
Colorado has heat illness and injury prevention requirements for agricultural workers and is one of seven states with some form of heat regulation. The others are California, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
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Original article published by Safety+Health an NSC publication