SB 200, sponsored by Rep. Amy Stephens, R-Monument, and Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, would create a pseudo-governmental board that would develop an insurance exchange from which individuals and small business owners can choose coverage. The pool would presumably drive costs down for those seeking insurance.

“Let’s be honest,” Sen. Jeane Nicholson, D-Black Hawk, said. “This bill is an opportunity for insurance companies to make significant profits…. We need to support this bill because almost a million people are uninsured because they cannot afford health insurance coverage at the rates that are offered to them.”

Despite the bipartisan sponsorship, the bill has come under attack by Tea Party supporters and Republicans, including those on the floor of the Senate Wednesday, who charged that it is little more than the implementation of “Obama-Care.” Despite assurances from House Majority Leader Stephens, who said the bill had been a Republican plan since well before the federal health care plan, Republicans voted against the bill and tried to amend it further in what appeared to be an attempt to link it to the federal program.

“In the end we lose our personal freedom and this is a significant step that Colorado is taking to pass this bill today.” Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, said.

King asked for an amendment that would call for the the Colorado health care exchange program to be reconsidered if the federal act is repealed in order for Colorado to determine whether the national model is still appropriate for the state.

Boyd, however, responded that the bill was a Colorado model and already had a 5-year review provision attached to it. She said that no one was being forced into the exchanges by the bill.

“Sen. King is talking about a Colorado solution created by Coloradans. That is exactly what this bill does. It creates a board of Coloradans who will create this health exchange for Colorado.” Boyd said. “From the beginning we have all been saying that this is a good bill that we should be trying.

“The sponsors of the bill both agree that regardless of what might happen with the federal law, this bill does not depend on it. It shouldn’t be dependent on what happens with the federal law.”

While Tea Party members and other outspoken conservatives have launched an all out attack on the bill, members of the business community have so far been solidly behind it. The Colorado, United States, Grand Junction, and Denver Metro Chambers of Commerce have endorsed the bill. In addition, both the Colorado Competitive Council and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) have signed on to the legislation.

NFIB said during the bill’s first hearing in the Senate that while NFIB remains committed to overturning the federal health care plan, it stood in support of SB 200.

“NFIB opposed the federal health care law because we believe it will increase costs for small businesses,” an NFIB spokesperson told the committee. “Senate Bill 200 is consistent with those principles, consistent with consumer based pricing, consumer choice among plans, portability between jobs, easy insurance comparisons, administrative cost savings, larger, more stable risk pools and a workable marketplace.”

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, opened the debate by acknowledging derisive emails from detractors of the exchange bill.

“They see SB 200 as the first substantial piece of Colorado State policy that is aimed toward implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” Lundberg said.

Stephens took those concerns to heart earlier in the session, calling for an amendment to her own bill that would have stopped the exchange from going into effect until after Gov. John Hickenlooper called for a waiver from the national health care program.

The bill will now head over to the House where Republicans will have the chance to add their amendments.

After extensive and energetic debate, a bill which would allow undocumented students who attended high school in Colorado access to in-state tuition, passed second hearing in the Senate in a 20-13 vote. The bill passed on party lines.

If the Colorado Asset bill passes the House, Colorado would follow 12 other states in enacting in-state tuition legislation for undocumented students.

Bill cosponsor Sen. Angela Giron, D-Pueblo, opened the debate with an emotional call for her fellow lawmakers to support the legislation that she has been vocally pushing since before she began her first year as a freshman senator representing Pueblo.

“This is the issue that helped persuade me to run for Senate,” Giron told the Senate floor. “I come from a community where high school graduation parties rival wedding parties… but sadly, for many the dream of education cannot extend past high school.”

Following Giron’s remarks, fellow co-sponsor Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, presented the economic and fiscal reasoning behind the bill. He argued that the bill would not cost taxpayers significantly, but rather would increase revenue for higher education by increasing enrollment. Under the bill, undocumented Colorado students would not have access to the state subsidized Colorado Opportunity Fund and so there would be no direct state subsidy to undocumented students, supporters say.

“If we are investing in these kids’ K-12 education, then it doesn’t make sense to close the door before they can get a university education,” said Johnston.

Conservative senators countered by saying that the bill would in fact cost taxpayers money, and that it would incentivize more people to illegally cross the border if they knew their children could receive access to a Colorado university education. Republican senators also argued that until federal law is changed, without legal status the undocumented beneficiary students would still have no employment opportunities even if they graduated from a Colorado university.

Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, argued that the bill was misplaced compassion, and that it would be unfair for Colorado taxpayers. “Is it compassionate to reach into the pocketbooks of struggling Americans to pay for the education of illegal immigrants?”

Republican Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, argued that in-state tuition fees do not cover the costs of each university student and that the proposed legislation would place an unfair burden on Colorado’s financially distressed higher education system. In many Colorado universities, in-state tuition fees only cover half of the true costs of educating each student.

Johnston told the Colorado Independent that the Republican fiscal argument against the bill is not well substantiated because it does not take into account that adding the estimated 250 beneficiary students spread around state universities wouldn’t incur substantial extra operational costs for the schools. Rather, he maintains, while pointing to success stories in other states with similar legislation, that it would boost the universities economically by increasing tuition revenue.

“Just because you add a few extra students to each university, doesn’t mean that will increase the lighting bill or the university will necessarily have to hire new teachers,” said Johnston. “But it does mean the universities will see an increase in revenue from the tuition rates… Texas implemented in-state tuition and saw a $27.2 million annual increase in tuition and fees at their colleges and universities.”

Supporting his line of reasoning, Johnston pointed to the multiple colleges -including UNC, Metro State, DU, and Colorado’s community colleges – that have come out in support of the bill. According to Johnston, so far, there has been no open opposition to the bill from any Colorado university.

Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition Organizer Julie Gonzales said that she was impressed by the powerful rhetoric and moral questions that arose in the debate but was disappointed with the Colorado Republicans for being preoccupied only with federal immigration policy and using it as excuse to block state immigration reform. “[GOP Senators] seemed to miss the point that the debate was about the ASSET bill.”

Following the vote, Giron, who was visibly struggling to hold her composure after emotional floor testimonials, said the bill would face its true challenge in the House. “We will make it out of the Senate, but it doesn’t yet feel very celebratory,” said Sen. Giron. “It’s really all about the [House] committee.”

The surplus of  $172.6 million transferred to the education fund in the governor’s 2010-2011 FY budget isn’t expected to do much to save school districts from having to make deep cuts that would see teachers and staff lose jobs.

School officials from across the state testified before the Senate Education Committee Thursday, pleading their case for lighter cuts to K-12 education as $332 million in cuts, scheduled in Gov. John Hickenlooper’s budget, loom on the horizon. The officials provided a tale of systems cut to the bone with only bone left to remove.

They said if Hickenlooper’s proposal was to go through, programs such as international baccalaureate, advanced placement, sports, music and many teachers would disappear from the school system, leaving a generation of children undereducated and a future economy robbed of their still hidden talents.

“I do not believe that the cuts before you for K12 are in concert with the values you have already legislated,” Cherry Creek Superintendent Mary Chesley, said. She said that success in teaching 50,000 students does not come about by teaching the same thing 50,000 times, but from teaching 50,000 different ways.

“Without a change in what is currently proposed there is a possibility of not that 50ish loss of staff last year [of Cherry Creek School District employees], but probably the reality of a 300ish loss of positions for next school year,” she continued.  Chelsey said that the district had saved a reserve fund that has so far helped to dampen the effects of funding losses, however, those funds are near their end and further cuts would cause a compounding visibility of budgetary woes to one of the top tier school districts in the state.

Other programs have not been so fortunate and have made serious cuts for a number of years.     

District 11 in Colorado Springs, which has been suffering for over four years, likened schools to Walmart.  District reps said they had tried to use a business model to streamline the education system. In doing so they had closed schools and shut down products as cuts continued to diminish their capacity to serve their customers.

District 11 Chief Financial Officer Glenn Gustafson said that the district’s job is to serve the customer and in this case that is the students and their parents. He said that, as a result, teachers and other members of the district would likely see pay decreases and furlough days.   

“We saw the way to save money is to work on your facility costs,” Gustafson said. ”You don’t see Walmart keeping  stores that aren’t used open. They close those stores. So we are looking at our school buildings. District 11 actually closed nine different schools.”

Rural districts where per pupil funding will see a considerable dive said they were struggling to keep schools open and teachers in place. Many had already closed school buildings and combined schools under the funding crunch. In one case, a representative of a rural school district said decreasing student numbers were causing families to leave the area all together. 

Rep. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, who sits on the Education Committee, asked a number of those testifying whether they would be amenable to allowing school districts to “swap” PERA fund contributions in the same manner that many public employees are already doing. Most said they worried what the effect to PERA would be in the long term as a result of changing the formula of employer/employee contributions.

In addition, King used the event as a sounding board for a potential state-matched mill levy increase sponsored by local governments that would help to decrease the gap between local and general fund funding of K-12 education.  Gustafson said the complex array of constitutional provisions that lower the local share of education dollars and increase the share the state pays out, often referred to as Colorado’s Gordian knot, was a problem they were greatly interested in solving and a discussion worth having.

It was a position almost all shared in the room.   

Educational mandates were also discussed, as Greeley Mayor Tom Norton said many of those policies were burdening school districts, and he asked for their reduction.  

Former state Sen. Norma Anderson agreed and said the often controversial CSAPs, which she helped to create, need to be eliminated to save money. “Get rid of them,” Anderson said. “I carried the bill, but get rid of them.”

After the hearing, Committee Chair Rep. Bob Bacon, D-Fort Collins, said the hearing had brought a face to the challenges faced by K12 education.

“We have reached a place where we can no longer protect the classroom from cuts, and that is why we chose to hold this hearing,” Bacon said. “The economic future of Colorado depends on how well we educate the next generation. Businesses considering relocating to Colorado want to know their investment in our state will be met by our investment in their future workers. Colorado employers considering expansion want to know Colorado can attract the best talent. Those workers will consider the quality of Colorado’s schools before deciding to come to our state. Therefore, we must continue to fight for our kids and our schools.”

Senate Republicans delivered Pat Steadman’s same-sex civil unions bill to the Republican-controlled House Thursday with momentum and a message. Although the twelve Republican men in the Senate voted against it, the three Republican women in the Senate voted in favor of the bill, making the case to leaders of the Republican-controlled House to take up the bill with good faith and allow it to move beyond committees and onto the floor of the House for a vote.

Democratic Senator Mike Johnston celebrated the Senate vote as another step toward making real the “old promise” that “all men are created equal,” a statement tinged with irony given the role played by the Republican women in advancing the bill.

Durango Republican Ellen Roberts signaled her support early on as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She told the committee members and the Colorado Independent weeks ago that Steadman’s SB 172 reckons with the reality that unmarried gay and straight Colorado couples are committing themselves to one another and raising families and have been doing so for years. She said that the laws on the books neither provide these couple with basic legal protections nor require them to live up to the legal responsibilities that come with committed partnership and child rearing. It’s just good policy to reckon with that reality, she said, and that’s the case she said she was making among her caucus members. It’s a case that appears to have persuaded her female colleagues Nancy Spence, from Centennial, and Jean White, from Hayden.

“I believe the moral debate about whether this is right or wrong belongs in our faith communities, not in this building and not in this chamber,” Roberts said. “You need the children [of gay couples] to know that they will be cared for. My core beliefs are that I believe strongly in protecting all people’s individuals rights, freedoms and liberties, and for me this bill advances that.”

The rest of the caucus voted against the bill, including Broomfield small-government libertarian champion Shawn Mitchell. Arguments made against the bill have been that it might diminish or “misdirect” marriage, as Berthoud Republican Kevin Lundberg has said, and that a majority of Coloradans voted down a similar proposal at the ballot box in 2006.

“Is Senate Bill 172 good for the people of Colorado or is it a diminishment?” Lundberg asked. “The question is, Is this good or is this not good? I say it is not good.

“Marriage is not an institution that anyone of us in this room has established. Indeed it is the supreme ruler of the universe who established it. Even if you don’t accept that, human experience shows us that marriage has always been seen and understood as between a man and a woman,” Lundberg said.

Highlands Ranch Republican Frank McNulty, House Speaker, will now assign SB 172 to a House committee for review. The scenario that has haunted the bill since it was introduced in February is that it would pass the Democrat-controlled Senate and then be assigned to a hard-line Republican committee on the House side where four or five members could vote it down and kill it.

That’s still a strong possibility. Yet the bill has garnered much media attention and public polling suggests large majorities of Coloradans support it. McNulty has signaled in the past that he believes the bill deserves a fair hearing and a vote in the House, where Republicans enjoy a one-seat majority. The strong bipartisan vote tally in the Senate bolsters that case.

Gay rights organization OneColorado celebrated the Senate voice vote Wednesday, where all three Republican women supported the bill, in part for the fact that it strengthens the case for McNulty.

“We look forward to working with House Republican leadership who have promised a fair hearing,” said Brad Clark, executive director of OneColorado. “Issues of significant importance with overwhelming public support like civil unions deserve a full and fair hearing with an up-or-down vote by the entire House.”

House Sponsor Mark Ferrandino, a Denver Democrat, has said for weeks that he believes the bill has enough support among Republicans in the House to pass should it make it to the floor.

Supporters of the bill might take heart from the fact there are nine Republican women serving in the House this legislative session, at least two of whom have already signaled they would vote for the bill.

Joseph Boven contributed to this report.

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The bill offering in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants passed out of the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday under intense scrutiny by Republicans of bill sponsors’ claims that undocumented alien students would not be subsidized by Colorado tax dollars.

Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, told Democratic Senate sponsors, Angela Giron, Pueblo, and Mike Johnston, Denver, that as far as he was concerned pay-per-service fees provided to colleges by the state amounted to subsidies that undocumented students would be taking advantage of.

Johnston and Giron largely disagreed with King, and said that fee for service dollars, which are transferred in lump chunks to schools for a variety of reasons including subsidizing rural colleges, are not attached to individual students and therefore those students do not benefit directly from the money.

Members of both the legislative council and joint budget committee staff explained the reasoning behind an increase in the projected revenue of the bill and their decision that fee-for-service dollars would not be affected by an the relatively small number of undocumented immigrant students taking advantage of the services.

“For an incremental change of the population in this magnitude we don’t feel the institutions would require addition funding” Eric Kurtz, Joint Budget Committee analyst, said when questioned whether colleges would need more funds for the students.

The new fiscal note raised estimated annual tuition revenue coming from the students to between $770,000 and $1.3 million a year.

King said the fact of the matter is that because some schools receive money that subsidizes undergraduate education, illegal aliens would receive services subsidized by taxpayer dollars. King called for the term un-subsidized to be removed from the language of the bill. “This is not a gotcha amendment,” King said. “This is just a truth in advertising amendment.”

Johnston asked for a no vote on King’s amendment, explaining that fee for service funds, as described by experts, is a lump sum of money that would not see an increase as a result of the new students added. The nominal indirect funds received by students could not be seen as a subsidy for that student in particular, he said.

Both he and Giron said that because undocumented students would not be able to take advantage of direct subsidies provided by the Colorado taxpayer in the form of the Colorado Opportunity Fund, they remained true to their word that those students would receive no Colorado taxpayer dollars.

Students who choose to go to college would face a considerably steeper rate than in-state students due to their inability to gain access to the College Opportunity Fund. This extra cost would amount to considerable revenue to the colleges they attend.

Republicans were united in their opposition to the bill passing out of committee.

In the Democratically controlled Senate that opposition doesn’t mean much, but the solid Republican opposition the bill faced in two committees may portend a difficult time for it once it makes its way over to the House.

The bill now moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Senate Bill 54, sponsored by Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, that has been fighting its way through the Senate passed a second reading this week. The proposed law would require the state to provide four hours of education per week to juveniles awaiting trial and also require sheriffs to register information about the juveniles being held in their facilities in a central database. As the Colorado Independent has reported, information on the numbers, demographics, charges and conditions of incarceration regarding imprisoned un-convicted youth is at best spotty, compromising efforts to assess and reform a system almost everyone involved, including sheriffs, readily admits is inadequate.

“These kids are in solitary confinement for [an average of] seven months and as a result have a poorer future,” Hudak told lawmakers from the floor of the Senate Tuesday. She said that 25 percent of these cases are either dismissed or come back as not guilty. The effect is that we have young people living for months in adult prisons and missing schooling for no good reason. Youth held in such conditions, she said, become depressed and fall into a downward spiral. Hudak’s bill would reduce jail suicides and fight recidivism.

Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, said that he was sympathetic to the plight of the young people the bill seeks to address, he thought the law would negatively effect a larger number of students in Colorado for the sake of a few students who had “made poor decisions.” He doubted that the allotted funding would truly cover the program and criticized the four-hour-per-week education requirement as ineffectual. King seemed not to fully consider that the young people the bill aims to help have not been convicted of any crimes.

“Kids incarcerated in a jail do not have the opportunity to attend school because they have violated the law. This is going to create a hardship for students in school by taking the teacher away from those students… We are not getting anywhere close to the minimum number of hours here,” King said, “At the most, you could get a partial credit toward graduation.”

Hudak said she cut the minimum-hour requirements precisely to ensure the allotted money would be adequate.

Like King, Sen. Scott Renfroe, R-Greeley, argued the bill was designed to help people who had made poor choices.

“This bill is putting a burden on school districts. This is people who have been charged with crimes that a DA thinks is strong enough to charge them as an adult.”

Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, reminded the Senate that “these young people are entitled to a presumption of innocence.” He said the lawmakers were bound by the Colorado Constitution to provide young people an education. “This is still a positive bill that will make sure these students receive some of the education they are entitled to… The time lost should not have that detriment on their education.”

Hudak added that the program would have a number of ancillary benefits that were beginning to take shape just since she introduced the bill. She said sheriffs supportive the provision that would compel county jails to report juvenile detentions to the state and include details on the kinds of education they are receiving and that many sheriffs, upon her introduction of the bill, have taken it upon themselves to begin reporting the juveniles to their education districts on their own.

“We’ll now be able to find out how many children are in county jails and we’ll discover whether or not they’re being educated.”

Ted Tow of the Colorado District Attorney’s Council told the Colorado Independent he supported the bill.

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Rachel Maddow’s spot-on realtime response is rocketing around the Web — probably because it resonates with Republicans as much as it does with Democrats.

“Honestly… to invoke government failure during Katrina as a model for how to move forward as a country,” she said, aghast.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks delivered the same verdict but used more words:

“[T]o come up at this moment in history with a stale ‘government is the problem, we can’t trust the federal government,’ it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party… The country is in a panic now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill. But the idea that… government will have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that in a moment when only the federal government is big enough to actually do stuff — to just ignore all that and just say ‘government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,’ it’s just a form of nihilism.”

Here in the Colorado, we got a double dose of Jindal-style political theater this week. In lieu of ideas, we got fire-and-brimstone quotes from scripture in the Legislature and “big government bad” recitations in a Senate Committee hearing. In both cases our elected officials were supposed to be working to solve quality-of-life problems that have persisted for decades. And in both cases the Republican proposal was to do nothing.

At the Senate Finance Committee hearing, citizen after citizen testified about how the provision to restrict the budget at the center of the debate had been devastating to many residents of the state. Statistic after statistic, study after study, bore them out. Colorado ranks at the bottom among the 50 states in providing child care, in spending on education and on infrastructure and health care. For a relatively wealthy state, the list is long and depressing. The Republicans were unmoved.

Which begs a question: Is this how conservative Republicans want our state (and nation) to look? After more than 15 years of TABOR-made small government, this is the result. Does it matter to the people still championing the philosophy that got us here?

State Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs. (Photo/Bob Spencer, The Colorado Independent)

Sponsored by Democratic Sen. John Morse, the bill would eliminate the so-called Arveschoug-Bird provision, which restricts the state’s General Fund to 6 percent growth per year and allocates any surplus specifically to transportation and construction projects. Morse’s bill and the problem it seeks to address are tongue-twisting and arcane, yet the small corner room of the Capitol where the hearing took place was filled with laptop jockeys, community leaders, a webcast crew and a buzz that hung in the air when it became clear that SB228 was going to clear its first public hurdle.

In Colorado, a bill like this, which addresses the famously restricted state budget, was sure to draw fire. But Senate Bill 228 has already become something of a larger political test case.

In the back-and-forth that followed last week’s press conference introducing it, and in the charged exchanges that characterized today’s committee hearing, there was a feeling that the rigid political framework that has pitted small-government conservatives against tax-and-spend liberals for decades may at last be shifting, despite the best efforts of the Republican members of the committee yesterday.

“The repeal [of Arveshoug-Bird] will not cost or save taxpayers a dime. It simply puts the responsibility on us to decide where the money goes,” said Morse in response to one of a long line of questions that argued 228 would effectively raise taxes.

Morse, though, with his poster-board chart and carefully constructed sample scenarios, would not be knocked off course. He persuasively presented 228 as a “common sense” solution to a thorny bureaucratic problem. That has been his tack from the beginning. He says 228 is about “taking responsibility for governing” and not about taxing or spending or any other similarly toxic political cliche. And his consistent deadpan “just the facts” delivery yesterday made the bill’s detractors seem vague and therefore ideologically driven by comparison.

In particular, ranking minority member Keith King, R-Colorado Springs and fellow conservative Greg Brophy, R-Wray, seemed grasping and increasingly frustrated with Morse’s “new-style” political debate. In the middle of one of several admitted rambling non-questions, King all but pointed his finger in the air as he railed that proponents of the bill would have us first “throw out the constitution” and “throw out the bill of rights [too].”

“This has always been interpreted as a limit on spending,” he said, “and I just find it funny that we can come in here today and wordsmith it into something else.”

Brophy was less expansive. Most of what he seemed to know of the bill was that he was supposed to oppose it. In fact he seemed to be catching up as the hearing progressed, spurring chuckles on occasion from the gallery.

“You said it wasn’t a limit on spending,” he said to Morse, reading from his laptop. “You called it an … allocation … wha?”

“An allocation strategy,” Morse said.

“An allocation … ?”

Chuckles among the audience.

Later Brophy seemed to turn into a strawman for Morse, setting up lines for him.

“So what will happen to transportation funding in 2011 if we eliminate Arveschoug-Bird?” He seemed genuinely confused.

“Whatever the the General Assembly decides,” said Morse, “as it should be in a democratic republic.”

When Brophy oddly asked how much Morse would have allocated to transportation over the last decade if it had been up to him, Morse took the opportunity to make perhaps his only straight reference to a traditional political touchstone, the free market.

“There’s no answer to how much I would have spent. By 2000-2001 we were already close to 50th among the states in spending, and that includes on roads. The free market in those years didn’t decide to spend on roads. Taxpayers … didn’t think they should use it to fund roads. They thought that was a public responsibility.”

Clearly frustrated, Brophy then claimed 228 would put an end to fiscal responsibility in Colorado, that it would “put us in the same place as California … $42 billion upside down from where they wanna be …”

The committee Republicans were joined by Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, who has clearly decided 228 will be a signature issue for him and who had come prepared to argue against it. He said that TABOR, the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, directly stated no limits on spending could be lifted except by a vote of the people. The “other limits” mentioned in TABOR surely refer to this Arveshoug-Bird provision, he said.

Morse, however, with the backing of a powerhouse legal team that includes former state Supreme Court justice Jean Dubofsky, reiterated that Arveschoug-Bird is not a spending limit and that a recent Supreme Court ruling provides precedent to that effect.

“Arveschoug-Bird is a formula that dictates how we are to spend the state revenue,” Morse said, “but times change, and so do priorities.”

Mitchell, returning time and again to TABOR’s “other limits,” began to sound more like a man lost in 1960s science-fiction televisionland than a lawmaker with a point to make. Should he lose in the Legislature as he lost today in committee, it seems clear Mitchell will return to the matter through the ballot initiative process, where an amendment to repeal Morse’s bill that repeals the Arveschoug-Bird provision would no doubt be pitched to voters as a check on wasteful government.

But one of the community leaders who offered testimony in support of the bill, Marijo Rymer, a spokesman for Arc of Colorado, an advocacy organization for people with developmental disabilities, refused to let Mitchell corner the market on the will of “the people.”

“When I go into the booth to cast my vote, when I decide who I will support as a representative, I’m consciously throwing the monkey on [their] back to take the responsibility to decide what programs to fund,” Rymer said.

“Voters can spend two hours with an initiative before deciding how to vote. But we are here to drill down into these laws … It is our job to make the hard but necessary choices,” said Morse. What else are we elected to do? he kept asking the committee in different ways.

Apuan, a business and nonprofit administrator, beat Roupe by 380 votes, according to the final canvass. Come January, he will join fellow Democrats Rep. Michael Merrifield and state Sen. John Morse.

On Wednesday, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink also reported a record 274,681 people voted in the Nov. 4 presidential election in the state’s most populous county in south-central Colorado, up from 242,888 voters in 2004.

Two years ago, Morse handily beat incumbent state Sen. Ed Jones in a race in which the former police chief from Fountain was flogged by the now-defunct 527 Trailhead Group. Merrifield, a retired teacher, is entering his fourth and final term before voter-mandated term limits force him to step down. During his tenure, Merrifield has also received his share of attacks, including concerns about an e-mail he sent to a state senator in which he indicated a “special place in hell” awaited two pro-voucher Colorado Springs school board members who were at the time being recalled.

Come January, Colorado Capitol watchers will see another familiar face return. Former state House Majority Leader Keith King handily beat Democrat Pete Lee in his campaign this year to replace Sen. Andy McElhany, the affable minority leader who was also term-limited this year.

The other Republican members of El Paso County’s 11-member delegation include Reps. Amy Stephens, Bob Gardner, Larry Liston, Kent Lambert, newcomer Mark Waller (who ousted Douglas Bruce) and state Sens. Bill Cadman and Dave Schultheis. Incoming Republican state Sen. Mark Scheffel also represents a small portion of El Paso County.

There is a classic story about King when he was the House Majority Leader in Colorado’s House of Representatives. One day, shortly before the legislature kicked off its 2004 session, King ran into Rep. Michael Merrifield, at the time the only elected Democrat from El Paso County.

“How does it feel, knowing all your bills will be killed this year?” Merrifield later recounted King saying. For his part, King said he had been joking, but sure enough, that year none of Merrifield’s proposed bills survived in a Republican majority that was trying its darndest – unsucessfully – to pick off Merrifield.

The tables have turned – in the House, the Senate and the governor’s office – and the Democratic Party is now calling the shots. But King, who has been out of office for just a year – is ready for a comeback. At the urging of Senate Minority Leader McElhany, himself term-limited next year, King says he plans to formally announce at Thanksgiving his plans to run to represent Senate District 12, which encompasses much of central Colorado Springs.

King, who served four terms in the House, is an ardent advocate of charter schools and school vouchers. Last year he launched a charter school called Colorado Springs Early Colleges – which enables high school students to work concurrently toward their college degrees. He says he wants to run because he’s got “unfinished business in education.”

“I’m an entrepreneur and government needs more ways to think outside the box,” King says.

Despite King’s past reputation as a hard-core partisan, he says that he has the ability to work well across the aisle – particularly with the more recent breed of Democrats who have been more supportive of education reform and charter schools.

“The longer term limits [are in place], the newer Democrats coming in are pro-charter school,” King says.

Specifically, he identifies Rep. Terrance Carroll and Sens. Peter Groff and Chris Romer as likely to support his ideas of reform. Public education traditionalists, like Merrifield and Sen. Sue Windels – both retired teachers – are less apt to go along with his ideas, King says.

“People support charter schools for different reasons – Republicans for freedom of choice, free markets, competition, raising the bar and Democrats for social justice. They are tired of failing schools failing kids, year after year.”

“I’m a realist,” King says. “I don’t know if would come back if I was so far out of the mainstream as far as what I’m trying to do with reform. I wouldn’t bother.”

King has at least two hurdles ahead – Republican Charles Fowler has also said he plans to run.

And, last week Democrat Pete Lee also announced he is running – the first time a Democrat has run for the central Colorado Springs district in at least 12 years. Four years ago, the popular McElhany beat his only opponent, Libertarian Robert Herzfled, walking away with nearly 78 percent of the vote.

Lee, an attorney who currently serves on the board of directors for Pikes Peak Mental Health, the Youth Transformation Center and the Manitou Springs Restorative Justice Council, announced his candidacy last week. He and his wife Lynn have lived in Colorado Springs for 31 years.

Cara DeGette is a senior fellow at Colorado Confidential and a columnist and contributing editor at the Colorado Springs Independent. E-mail her at cdegette@coloradoconfidential.com