DENVER — A new bill proposed by Colorado lawmakers would tighten oversight of their own security while removing their personal and financial records from publicly available databases, a move that comes nearly a year after a gunman killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in their home.

House Bill 1422, introduced Wednesday by a bipartisan trio of legislators, would create a new security administrator position within the legislature. It would task that person with fielding security concerns from legislators and acting as the General Assembly’s point person for safety issues.

Capitol security is now overseen by the Colorado State Patrol. While the bill would not alter the patrol’s duties in the building, the new security official would act as a liaison with the patrol while also monitoring threats and advising lawmakers on how to handle them.

The legislature recently received a grant from the National Conference of State Legislatures to help pay for security improvements for every lawmaker. The new security official would help advise on how best to use that funding, lawmakers said.

“It’s just an ability to have a tapped-in, day in, day out view of what’s happening and to help coordinate those efforts,” said Rep. Chad Clifford, a Democrat sponsoring the bill. He also runs a home security company. “… This will be a person that has more daily dialogue and discussion” with lawmakers about security concerns.

The other main sponsors of the measure are Senate President James Coleman, a Democrat, and Sen. Lisa Frizell, a Republican.

Lawmakers have been increasingly worried about their security in recent years, particularly on social media. Some lawmakers have filed restraining orders against people who’ve threatened them, and others say activists and political opponents have approached them at their homes.

After the Minnesota shootings last summer, state officials temporarily shut down a campaign finance database while 31 elected officials requested that the state redact their addresses from the website. In June, a gunman shot and killed Rep. Melissa Hortman, a Democrat who was a former House speaker, and her husband, Mark, at their home. Earlier that day, the same man shot another Democratic lawmaker and his wife at their home, but both survived.

Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie, who knew Hortman, has repeatedly spoken about security concerns, and the legislature’s executive committee organized a briefing on Capitol security in June, shortly after shootings.

Sen. Faith Winter, a Democrat who died in a car crash late last year, was on an extensive list of other lawmakers and public officials found in the Minnesota shooter’s car, McCluskie said in an interview Thursday.

“It’s a ridiculous world we live in, when that’s the reality for public servants,” said McCluskie, a representative who is entering the final weeks of her fourth term in the House. “Having a security officer for the General Assembly isn’t enough, but it’s a start.”

But in the quest to improve lawmakers’ security, the bill would also reduce some public transparency.

HB-1422 would place elected officials in a special class of “protected persons” whose personal information cannot be published online. Under current state law, lawmakers must file annual disclosure statements that describe their finances, debts and property holdings, alongside financial information about their spouses. Candidates also must file affidavits that include addresses and contact information. (Two of the four legislators who have signed on to support HB-1422 have not filed a financial disclosure this year.)

Under legislation adopted in 2023, those documents are publicly filed on the secretary of state’s campaign finance website. That law also gave the secretary of state’s office the ability to redact a candidate’s address and other personal information.

If passed, HB-1422 will remove those records from the website and make them available upon request. Clifford said he wanted the records to be available only to certain people, like journalists, who would be unlikely to publish a lawmaker’s address or personal information.

Lawmakers — as well as other elected officials, like the governor — file the financial records to provide transparency on their economic interests, allowing the public to vet them for conflicts of interest. Since legislative districts were redrawn in 2022, the databases have also been used to determine if lawmakers live in the districts they seek to represent; Clifford says he’s done his own “sleuthing” on candidates using the information in the past.

He acknowledged that his bill would make those efforts more difficult.

“I hate that,” he said. “But I also don’t need you to be able to go find (a lawmaker’s) house real easy on a whim someday when somebody tells you that you should. … That is where we started getting concerned.”

McCluskie and Clifford raised concerns about the level of detail that must be included in the financial disclosures. McCluskie acknowledged the tension between increased threats to lawmakers and a need for those officials to be transparent.

She said legislators did accept a higher level of public scrutiny, given their positions, and that she previously had not minded that her address was available publicly.

“When it comes to my family, they haven’t been elected to office. They shouldn’t be exposed to the same level of scrutiny,” she said. “They shouldn’t be exposed to threats of violence that we’re seeing directed at elected officials. It’s an extraordinarily challenging dynamic that we are facing in our society right now, and I was stricken the day that Melissa was shot.”

Jeff Roberts, the executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said in an email Thursday that his group’s governing board had not yet taken a position on the bill. But he noted that financial disclosures have only recently been published online.

“What’s most important is that these records remain publicly available so that journalists and others can adequately background candidates for public office and look into whether candidates actually live in the districts they’re running in,” he wrote.

HB-1422 is scheduled for its first committee hearing Monday in the House’s State, Civic, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. The legislative session is set to end May 13.

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