Landlord Tenant relations in Colorado

Warranty of Habitability is what in legalese is considered 'commonlaw' or common sense - that is implied - you know if you rent an apartment, it should be implied that the apartment is structurally livable. Well, apparently here in Colorado, in 1977 one of our 'activist' judges ruled that there is no implied Warranty of Habitability in our laws, and there would not be one without a Legislative ruling. Fast forward 31 years, and you will have seen numerous attempts to get a basic level of protection for tenants and rentors in this state, only to be blocked in one of the two chambers, or vetoed, as was done by our former governor in 2004. Why has this happened? Well apparently, this issue is a partisan one, and it seems that our Republican collegues view this as interference in the marketplace and oddly enough, don't think rentors need the basic guarantee of a livable space. They also have deffered to the lobbying wing of the Apartment Association on this issue and have sided with the owners of the buildings rather than the tenants, never mind that this puts us in the bottom 2 states in terms of tenant protections. And, I remind you, this bill does not target the 95% of landlords and property owners that are decent and run a respectable business (I am a landlord myself), but only targets those landlords who should be seen as serial 'slumlords' who prey on the most vulnerable tennants with little access to recourse - the elderly, disabled, impoverished rentors, and nowadays, those who have already been victims of the mortgage crisis and have lost their homes. For more on this subject, here are the folks who have been in the trenches working on this subject, Laurie Jaeckel and Paul Tygan of the D.U law school program, and Randall Loeb who has been the attorney donating his time and expertise for literally years on this subject.