News this week that the Denver area's Regional Transportation District is now an all-union shop has given renewed urgency to a Republican bill prohibiting public employees from striking, its authors say.

They say their measure, soon to be introduced in the Colorado House, is crucial to keeping key sectors of the state's economy from "grinding to a halt" in the event of another RTD strike like the one that hit the state's biggest metro area two years ago.

About half of RTD's transit routes have been run by private contractors, but employees at the last holdout of the agency's three contractors recently succumbed to a campaign by the Amalgamated Transit Union and joined the union.

The pending Republican measure, sponsored by Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, and assistant Senate GOP leader Nancy Spence, of Centennial, is a response to Gov. Bill Ritter's controversial executive order last fall allowing unions to collectively bargain for state employees. That move, say Gardner and Spence, actually made it more likely that state employees would go on strike.

"Without our proposal," Gardner said, "the only way for RTD to end the next strike would be to surrender its budget to the unions."