“Pundits are saying this session will be a partisan brawl,” he said from the House well. “I expect vigorous debate and disagreement. The opinions in this room are as varied as the topography of our state… We can show a skeptical public that the Colorado General Assembly is not the United States Congress… We can be partners not partisans. We can get things done for the people of Colorado.”

It was an historic day, a presidential-election-year session starting just as the presidential primary contests get underway and just as the state and national economy seem to be crawling out of recession. It is also Ferrandino’s first day as minority leader, the first openly gay man to hold a leadership spot in the House. He began his remarks with a knowing gag.

“The Democratic caucus this session is committed to maintaining a laser focus on jobs. Thank you,” he said with authority and then stepped down from the dais to a loud round of applause. It was a mock ending. He then rose again from his seat to finish his speech.

“You won’t do any better than that,” came a celebratory call from the Republican side of the chamber.

Members of the legislature this year will wrangle over contentious issues such as Medicaid reform, the education budget, property tax exemptions for seniors, the right for public employees to collectively bargain and the right for same-sex couples to enter into state-recognized civil union– the last the topic of a bill spearheaded by Ferrandino last year that was killed after gaining much momentum by Republican members of the Judiciary Committee. Yet, as has become clear to Americans watching the Republican presidential primaries unfold, “jobs” remains the political rallying cry here as it does in state capitals coast to coast.

Indeed, campaign politics are sure to play into the work of the state legislature. The question is to what degree. The state endured rancorous reapportionment and redistricting efforts last year and at least three members of the legislature– Democratic Reps Sal Pace and Joe Miklosi and Democratic Senate President Brandon Shaffer– are all running for Congress. Republican Senator Kevin Lundberg is also weighing a congressional run.

Ferrandino, played all of that down. Creating jobs is a bipartisan goal, he said, and one that should take top priority. He pointed to bills on the slate for this session that would encourage venture capital investment, cut red tape for small businesses, bolster entrepreneurial efforts and move research and development more efficiently to the market.

Ferrandino said he was looking forward to partnering with Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty to land much meaningful legislation on the governor’s desk this year.

“I said I wanted to partner with you, Mr Speaker. I never said anything about partnering with the Senate,” he said sarcastically after a delegation of senators wrapped up introductory remarks to the House.

Former Minority Leader Pace interjected.

“To clarify, Mr Speaker, when the minority leader says ‘partner’ in this context, it has nothing to do with civil unions.”

“Thank you for that clarification,” said McNulty, laughing.

Later, closing the day’s work, McNulty told a few straggling staffers and lawmakers that the first day seemed to go well.

“Everything went fine,” he said. “Everything went fine.”

[Image: Members of the Republican caucus cheer on Denver Democrat Mark Ferrandino during his Colorado House opening-day 2012 remarks. "Jobs!"]

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper participated in an ABC News governors roundtable this weekend, where he talked with host Jake Tapper and Governors Deval Patrick (D-Mass.), Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) and Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.). The short segment spotlights the cross talk on events in Wisconsin, a combination of spin and willful non-engagement.

Hickenlooper was typically Hickenlooper: He wasn’t knee-jerk; he was conciliatory as he tried to move beyond the narrow left-right politics world view that dominates talk shows like Tapper’s. Hickenlooper suggested Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was simply exhibiting bad leadership, that the discussion over public union collective bargaining should never have come to such a stand-off.

“Well, you know, when I spent a number of years in the restaurant business and sometimes we took over failing restaurants, the first thing we did was reach out to the workforce, to the workers, and say, ‘All right, if we’ve got to cut costs and try to find new ways of making difficult decisions and delivering services with less, you can – you’re the ones who have to help us.’ And I think it’s a challenge to have that kind of division and adversarial relationship…it’s going to make it very tough for them to get to the point where they can make their government smaller and yet, more effective.”

The facts are on Hickenlooper’s side. Walker isn’t working incrementally with lawmakers to get the budget in line or to build jobs. On the contrary, he has staked out radical ground on a topic sure to inflame partisan passions.

Hickenlooper, who won kudos from Republicans and groans from Democrats last week when he introduced a school-funds-slashing budget, talked about how he has approached the split legislature here in Colorado, where the Senate is controlled by Democrats and the House by Republicans.

“I think the key– and again this is the restaurant background where you learn real early there’s no margin in having enemies– but we’ve been trying to reach out to Republicans from before the inauguration and say, ‘All right, how can we work together? We need your ideas, we’ve all got . . .’ I mean, this country, we shouldn’t be talking about these polarized topics. We should be talking about jobs and how do we all make the investments in education and infrastructure and technology and innovation to move this– All 50 states, we should be competing against each other to see who can drive our economies the fastest. And, you know, the budget’s tough. It’s difficult. But if everyone’s at the table, we’ll get through it.”

Walker is clearly not looking to keep everyone at the table in his state. He has driven Democratic lawmakers away from their homes and families and drawn thousands of people to Madison from around the state to specifically protest his agenda and his leadership style.

Back at the ABC roundtable, Republican governors Haley and Brewer didn’t even try to see events in Wisconsin from a minority-party point of view. They kept calling the Democratic lawmakers who fled to Illinois “cowards” — as did host Tapper– ignoring the fact that those lawmakers have become heroes to their many supporters, who see them as having acted bravely and creatively in response to the no-win situation in which they found themselves.

Haley, who said she talks to Walker regularly, treated the facts of the matter like filthy rag dolls unworthy of respect. She said the Wisconsin public employee unions wouldn’t accept benefit cuts to help trim the budget in the state. That’s more than a misreading of the situation and none of the governors on the panel nor Tapper called her out on it.

“These employees opposed the health care cuts; they opposed the benefits cut; so they’re saying no to everything. The collective bargaining is a combination of all of that,” she said.

The first sentence is an untrue discredited GOP talking point and the second is intentionally reductive.

In fact, as has been widely reported, the public employee union members in Wisconsin agreed to accept all the cuts Walker asked them to accept. The sticking point in the matter and the reason people are protesting in Madison is the fact that Walker will not budge on wanting to end the public workers’ legal long-established right to collectively bargain, and collective bargaining is not about a “combination of all of that,” as Haley said, whatever that means, it’s specifically about wages and benefits and working conditions. Collective bargaining is about having the power to negotiate how much work you can do in how much time and in what kind of space and with what kind of equipment and for how much money and benefits. Collective bargaining is about not having to drill rivets for fifteen hours a day without a break or proper security gear. It’s about not having to teach 40 kindergartners in a tiny improperly ventilated windowless room for ten hours a day.

A Wisconsin cancer ward nurse told NPR this week that her union negotiated how many chemotherapy patients it would be legal for her to treat simultaneously on the job. The union capped the number at four. The nurse said that any more would have been too much, that more than four would have strained patient safety and nurse sanity.

It’s consideration of those kind of details that Hickenlooper’s approach (“the restaurant background”) seems to place at the front of political-governmental discussions and they’re the kind of details that Haley seems to care about not so much at all.

—
Hat tip to Who Said You Said.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“As our state and federal government head toward a fiscal apocalypse, the influence that would curb reforms, that would limit necessary efficiency is that growing advocacy for public employees above other considerations,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell’s bill would have closed the books on a long-time feud between former Gov. Bill Ritter and Republicans over Ritter’s decision to enact an executive order that enabled state employees to form collective bargaining agreements. The order stated the partnerships did not have the ability to strike or use binding arbitration. Mitchell’s bill would have made such relationships illegal in the state.

There were several problems with Gov. Ritter’s executive order,” Mitchell said. “It invited state employees to organize, to create units, to apply to the state for recognition, and then have the state director of labor certify and recognize a bargaining representative and in effect open the door of the state to organized labor.”

Mitchell said the executive order was given to fix a problem that didn’t exist. He said it is only because Colorado has been within an “economic catastrophe” that it has not yet seen a ballooning state government as a result of organized labor being introduced into the public employee sector.

“In that environment we are not fighting very hard over salary increases, we are trying to minimize cuts and pain across the state budget including in the ranks of public employees, but those conditions won’t last forever,” Mitchell said. He said that state employees’ unions will likely use their ability to collectively bargain to increase their benefits and wages.

Diane Kruze, a member of Colorado Workers for Innovation and New Solutions (WINS) and a social work manager at the Colorado Mental health Institute in Fort Logan, said that Colorado WINS and the executive order has allowed state employees to generate considerable improvements and efficiencies in programs for both workers and clients of governmental programs.

“I almost think that you should be thanking Colorado WINS, because what we have done is put that communication tool in place. I have worked for the State for 20 years and I have not seen this much direct communication from line staff to management ever before,” Kruze said.

While agreeing that Ritter’s executive order had led to some positive improvements in the way state employees communicated with management, Mitchell argued that the flow of information would not be impeded by now cutting off the impetus for that communication.

“I think it sounds like there has been some useful changes that were spurred by some of the processes involved in this bill, but collective bargaining and recognition of a collective bargaining units aren’t necessary for those changes,” Mitchell said. “It sounds like enlightened management has been lacking for a long, long time and as part of this process we are now having useful discussions.

“It is my firm conviction that the effect of this bill would not bar any additional communication that happens. It addresses only whether there needs to be a collective bargaining unit that negotiates.”

Sen. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, agreed with Mitchell, “It sounds like from your twenty years there you have created a new and efficient and effective way to communicate from your group of shared concerns and issues and it sounds like you are solving problems because of that… but this bill doesn’t prevent that.”

He said that the new working environment generated by Colorado WINS would not be impeded by the bill.

In the end Democrats voted to kill the bill in committee, but Sen. Bob Bacon, D-Fort Collins, said ultimately Gov. John Hickenlooper would decide on the fate of a unionized employee work force.

“It is my belief that this is really in the governor’s court regardless of what we do.”

(Photo/johngiovanni1, Flickr)

“We’re going to have to take a hard look at where we stand with Gov. Ritter,” executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO Mike Cerbo, a former Democratic state representative from Denver, told the Denver Post.

Tensions between labor and Ritter have mounted in recent weeks after the governor vetoed a bill that would have restored unemployment benefits to workers locked out during a labor dispute. On Tuesday, angry grocery workers shouted down Ritter at another bill-signing ceremony, calling him a “liar” and asking, “Sir, why did you lie?”

Some labor activists are looking for a candidate to challenge Ritter in a primary next year, the Denver Business Journal reports. A group called Labor Initiatives Against Ritter, or LIAR, has formed to raise money opposing the governor, The Denver Post reported last week.

“When he campaigned, he made it clear he was behind the labor movement. We’re tired of seeing bill after bill falling to his pen. He’s not the man we thought we were electing,” Steve Vairma, secretary treasurer of Teamsters Local 455, told Channel 7 after Ritter vetoed the firefighter bill Thursday.

Ritter said he vetoed Senate Bill 180 because firefighters in a handful of cities already have the right to collective bargaining but the bill would thwart local voters who have opted against it. Ritter also said he would order members of his administration to work with local governments and firefighters to develop a statewide fire safety program.

“Despite making campaign promises to support fire fighters, Governor Bill Ritter has turned his back on us,” said the Colorado Professional Fire Fighters union in a statement. “His promises to the men & women who risk their lives for others have turned out to be no more than empty words designed to deceive us and give fire fighters the illusion that they were voting for a man that truly cared those that perform this dangerous profession.”

“As the son of a union member, and a union member myself in earlier years,” Ritter said in his veto message, “I have long believed that collective bargaining can create a positive working relationship for public sector employees and local governments. But there are other issues I had to consider when deliberating on this bill, issues that led me to the difficult conclusion that a veto of this bill was in the best interests of the people of Colorado.”

“I am very disappointed,” said Senate Bill 180 sponsor state Rep. Ed Casso, an Adams County Democrat, in a statement. Casso called firefighters “our heroes” and slammed the governor’s objections to the bill.

“Senate Bill 180 had significant guardrails built into the framework of the legislation that would have guaranteed fair and stable negotiations,” Casso said. “SB 180 had an explicit no-strike clause, there was no binding arbitration, and all impasses would require a vote of the people paid for by the entity that refused concession.” He vowed to continue working to “expand opportunity for all Coloradans including our critical emergency services personnel.”

Ritter was joined at the Thursday news conference by mayors and a fire department chief who applauded the veto.

“The state should not be telling local voters or local elected representatives what to do when it comes to personnel matters like this,” Littleton Mayor Doug Clark said.

“Governor Ritter has let us down tremendously today,” said Littleton firefighter Mark Rogers in a statement after the veto. “We work in inherently dangerous jobs and today the Governor failed to let us have a seat at the table to make our jobs less dangerous.” Rogers’ fire department has a union but doesn’t have collective bargaining rights.

Firefighters and other union members planned a rally at 11:30 a.m. at the state AFL-CIO headquarters, 140 Sheridan Blvd., in Denver.