Capitol Update for Feb. 20

As Americans went deeper into debt with President Obama's so-called stimulus package, Colorado legislators did their best to keep pace with their liberal congressional counterparts' reckless spending binge.

In fact, this past week in the Colorado Legislature will be remembered by me as the "Great Raid". Collectively, the senate voted to sweep more than $200 million of cash funds --collected through fees for SPECIFIC programs -- into the state's general budget. In short, those fees were treated like taxes -- and yet voters in the state were not asked for permission to raise taxes (which is how those fees, because of the raid, function) as the Taxpayers Bill of Rights requires.

This means that businesses, for example, which have paid millions into special funds for injured worker programs, will be forced to repay those funds again for the same service they were promised. It's double, and in some cases, triple taxation for the same service.

SB 208 and SB 212 were the main culprits of the chicanery. You can see my comments about them in the Denver Post here and on ColoradoSenatenews.com here and in the Rocky Mountain News here.

All this spending was just to get this year's (08/09) budget to work. Although, I use the term "work" loosely. After all, this budget is more than 4% larger than the previous year's budget. That's something you don't hear a lot about amidst the clamor that "we're making huge cuts". We're spending more, not less, than the previous year. I'm not sure how that is a cut.

We also put off making payments we owe to firefighters and police pensions. It's our version of printing money. We'll pay later what we should buck up and pay today. So we pass a bigger obligation along to our kids. I voted against this maneuver in appropriations and will do so again on the final vote. Delaying hard choices won't make them go away.

In other action:

Dems kill plan to produce new Colorado energy (HB 1268)
Colorado's economy, like any economy, is linked to having enough energy to move the gears of commerce. In fact, by 2025, Colorado must produce an additional 4,900 megawatts of power -- which is roughly equal to building seven more large coal fired plants like the Comanche plant near Pueblo, which is scheduled to come on line later this fall. Solar and wind power may be part of the mix of the future, but they cannot affordably produce the kind of power we need. And besides, both wind and solar power plants require natural gas fired power plants as backup, since neither of them produce power on demand. They only work when the sun's shining or the wind's blowing. And storing electricity is incredibly problematic and ineffective at best right now.

The bill also created incentives for converting landfill to clean electricity through Geo Plasma and related technologies, and for siting solar arrays (called Bright Felds) on reclaimed landfills unsuitable for other forms of construction. It created a streamlined process for siting nuclear plants in cities or counties that wanted to build one. It added hydro power to the state's renewable energy portfolio, and directed the government to streamline its transmission line building.

With little explanation, the bill was killed on a party line vote. The most politically problematic portion of the bill -- the nuclear siting component -- could have been easily taken out of the bill through amendment. This was truly a pathetic display of partisanship at the expense of Coloradans who expect solutions to our serious energy production challenges.

School District Spending Transparency (SB 57)
We finally got Sen. Harvey's bill requiring full transparency for school district spending out of the senate yesterday. Now it begins a rocky ride in the much less predictable House of Representatives. Coloradosenatenews.com wrote about it here. It was astonishing to see Sen. Evie Hudak shill for the status quo and try to gut the bill through amendment and fight it until the bitter end. Facethestate.com added a little levity to the matter with a cartoon here .

Morgan County Lincoln Day Dinner
Monday evening I joined Rep. Cory Gardner and Sens. Greg Brophy and Josh Penry for the Morgan County Lincoln Day Dinner. It is good to hear what voters in other parts of the state are talking about, and to introduce myself to them as one of the GOP's senate leaders. It was a long drive in Farmer Greg's Prius.

Conifer Town Hall Meeting
Wednesday night I shared with about 150 Conifer area residents about the status of my wildfire legislation. For those of you who live in wild land urban interface areas, you already know how much work there is to do to protect homes and centers of commerce out in the woods. For those of you who do not, suffice to say, it's a big issue requiring local, state, and federal attention.

One catastrophic wildfire could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, damage watersheds, transmission lines, cut off commerce, destroy homes and communities (that provide tax revenue to counties such as Jefferson), and of course, it could cost lives. The best bet is to reduce the fuel loads in the forest, knock down the barriers to getting commercially viable wood products taken from hazard areas to the market, and create innovative ways to keep volunteer firefighters (who are the backbone of timber country responders) in the fire service.

A big fight about government spending
Our state government can only grow so fast, thanks to a mechanism known as the 6% limit. Essentially, what this means is that as soon as the general assembly takes in 6% above last year's budget, money begins to flow to transportation projects. It's a way to keep a real check on government growth, and to make sure that we invest on highway spending rather than on creating new entitlement programs. Highway and bridge building and maintenance are, after all, core functions of government. The 6% limit is not a perfect solution, but then what government system is or could be? But it does protect the taxpayers by slowing government growth. I bring it up because you may have heard about a dust-up over the issue. Republican budget committee member, Don Marostica, is working on a bill to gut the limit. Obviously, this caused a ruckus. I think it's a bad idea. Here's what I said as reported by KWGN here.

In-state tuition for illegal immigrants (SB 170)
This bill still has not come to education committee, or to the appropriations committee where I serve, or the whole senate. When it does come up for a vote, I will of course vote no, and fight against it.