The candidates’ responses were published today in a special report (pdf) sent to members of participating groups, which include Audubon Colorado, Colorado Wildlife Federation, Colorado Trout Unlimited, Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts and Environment Colorado Research and Policy Center . Together these organizations have a combined mailing list of about 40,000.

“I do not subscribe to the belief that clean energy costs more; in fact, I believe that clean energy costs less in the long run,” said Tancredo. “Developing a sustainable energy policy means addressing the needs of today while developing a plan for tomorrow that is sustainable and that will meet the needs of a growing state without putting additional stress on our environment. We cannot sacrifice our natural health and welfare for short-term energy development.”

Hickenlooper’s own comments on renewable energy were actually somewhat similar: “Support for renewable energy, balanced with responsible development of natural gas can make for a more predictable and sustainable energy market. Focusing on the economic and health benefits of clean energy makes enormous sense, because the negative impacts of dirty emissions are not only harmful to public health, they are costly.”

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Rep. Doug Lamborn

The long list of Republican and Democratic lawmakers who asked for earmarks (pdf) included, for example, Ohio Republican Steven C. LaTourette, who asked for millions of dollars in earmarks. His requests included a $100,000 for a bike path feasibility study and $500,000 for ferry service from Ashtabula to Canada.

Other Republicans seemed to want it both ways. They voted against the bill but, confident that the bill would pass, were sure to insert earmarks that would bring funds to their constituents.

New York’s Pete King also asked for ferry boats. According to congressional records, King asked for $1,000,000 to be used for “the construction of a fast ferry boat terminal to connect commuters and tourists from downtown Glen Cove to New York City, La Guardia Airport, and other key travel corridors.”

Among other requests, King also asked for $215 million to extend the Long Island rail line to Grand Central Terminal.

King voted against the bill.

Texas Republican Kay Granger also added millions of dollars in requests to the legislation. Granger asked for $750,000 to finish an airport runway and surrounding infrastructure programs, $1.35 million for a bridge, and another $750,000 for buses and bus facilities.

Granger voted against the bill

Democratic lawmakers requested similar earmarks. The bill passed 256-168 in the House and 73-25 in the Senate. Both Democratic Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Udall voted for the bills passage. Colorado Reps. Mike Coffman, R-CO6, and Lamborn voted against it.

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Edit note: The original version of this story reported that CO4 Rep. Betsy Markey had voted against the bill. She voted for it.

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With that kind of competition helping the government run things — the kind of competition businesses make sure to obliterate in phone-book-size contracts– why wouldn’t we want to look to the private sector to fix the healthcare system?

A report released last week by Penn State law professor Ellen Dannin presents the real costs of road privatization. She looks closely at the the 2007 Northwest Parkway contract Colorado signed with Brisa/CCR as a typically problematic case. Brisa wrote into the deal every right to object to new or improved roads and mass transit systems that might compete with the Parkway. Yet no lawmaker or citizen could object to the lopsided contract because the terms were not released until after the deal was signed. Crazy! But again, as Dannin points out, typical.

Some excerpts of Dannin’s readable and damning study:

The issues missing from public discussion and scrutiny are terms that make government the insurer of the private contractor’s financial success and that cede power over public decisions to private entities. In other words, infrastructure contract terms control far more than just tolls or turnpikes, and their effects will be felt long after the contracts end.

Destroying competition would seem to undermine the basic argument for private operation. The theory is that consumer choice among competitors in the free market spurs better performance and drives down costs. Noncompete provisions forbid competition and consumer choice and eliminate these spurs to better performance and lower cost. Yet, standard infrastructure privatization agreements forbid building or improving competing infrastructure in order to leave no alternative but using the privatized infrastructure and guaranteeing the contractor’s revenues.

[…]

[R]equiring government to insure the contractor’s income complicates – and even eliminates – options for addressing important public issues for the life of the contract, such as reducing air pollution, environmental degradation, and urban and suburban congestion; promoting public health; and tackling other problems related to car-focused transportation. Recall that the Northwest Parkway contract penalized building or improving mass transit.

Market magic from the mouths of politicians is often more like illusion– a poker game voters are asked to join only after the cards have been dealt.

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Rio Blanco County, Colo. (Illustration/Google Maps)

“Three extremely conservative Rio Blanco County commissioners unanimously passed very substantial impact fees, and as a result they have the money to fix the roads, they have the money to hire deputy county sheriffs, they have the money to do these things that we don’t,” said Rifle attorney and former Garfield County judge Steve Carver, who lost to Republican high school administrator Mike Samson last year.

The three-member board of county commissioners in Rio Blanco, to the north of gas-rich Garfield County, is comprised of Republicans who saw the need for additional fees to pay for the increasing pressure put on roads, bridges, law enforcement and other county services and facilities by the booming natural-gas industry.

“The handwriting was on the wall: How do we deal with the impacts of something like this?” Ken Parsons, chairman of the Rio Blanco Board of County Commissioners, told the Associated Press in May 2008.

Democrat Stephen Bershenyi, a Rifle blacksmith and artist who unsuccessfully ran against Republican John Martin last year, said the oil and gas industry spared no expense — or dirty tactic — in turning back the Democrats because they feared the same type of impact fee in Garfield County.

“One of the things that scared them the most was what happened in Rio Blanco County,” Bershenyi said. “The county commission, which is a Republican board, decided to charge the energy industry impact fees for each well permit issued. By August of last year [Rio Blanco] County had already brought in more than $6 million in impact fees from the energy industry from wells that they were drilling.”

Rio Blanco charges just under $18,000 per well, with the vast majority of that money going toward road construction and maintenance. An impact fee support study conducted in 2007 estimated the county would have collected $22.7 million had the fee been in place during the heart of the boom (from 2000 to 2006).

Over the next 15 years, when Rio Blanco expects to see another 16,500 wells drilled — with some studies suggesting the next natural gas boom will shift there from Garfield — the county expects to generate $292 million. Still, that won’t cover its estimated $343 million infrastructure tab if its population triples, as predicted.

“[Implementing impact fees] was one of the things that I was advocating that Garfield County do immediately, because we should have done it from the very beginning,” Bershenyi said.

Parsons and Rio Blanco County Administrator Pat Hooker didn’t return calls requesting comment on the impact fees Tuesday, but the groundbreaking step — the first such fee imposed in Colorado — definitely raised eyebrows not only in the rest of the state but throughout the gas-producing Rocky Mountain West. According to the AP’s May 2008 report:

Bob Gallagher, head of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, said there are no similar fees in his state. “But if our Birkenstock-wearing friends in Colorado have a chance to pass it in Colorado, there’s a chance it will come across the border,” Gallagher said. “It’s a little bizarre that people want to continue to bite the hand that feeds them.”

Bershenyi, without divulging his choice of footwear, said the 4,000 active wells in Garfield County could have provided about $60 million for sorely needed infrastructure if a more conservative $15,000-per-well impact fee — Garfield’s wells aren’t quite as deep as Rio Blanco’s — had been charged.

“When you throw the economic downturn in, [Garfield] County is strapped, and they thought they had a rainy day fund that was really going to put them in good shape, and what they found out was it was woefully short of the goals they needed to carry forward with the services that are being requested of them,” said Bershenyi, who in April was elected to the Glenwood Springs City Council.

Martin, the longtime Republican commissioner, told the Colorado Independent in April that Garfield County had set aside $80 million to weather the recession and slowdown in drilling stemming from plunging commodity prices.

“Hopefully we’ve done enough to survive the downturn because that downturn is going to last for many years,” Martin said at the time.

“What it is is there’s $80 million coming into the county, but $80 million has been spent,” Carter said when asked about the county’s reserves. “He doesn’t have a rainy day fund. That’s totally bogus.”

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The Post’s regretful story has the tone right but the reasoning wrong, evincing the same kind of shortsightedness that dogs the stimulus program in general.

Given the resources available and compared to plans being funded in other states, Colorado is going about stimulus road spending in a smart way, taking an approach any good doctor would appreciate: addressing critical problems but careful above all not to do any harm.

Colorado Department of Transportation Director Russ George lays it out for the Post reporter:

George says there just isn’t enough money to pay for the really big projects… So Colorado is focusing its limited dollars on relatively small scale projects. Transportation funding has been tight in recent years, and only the smaller jobs are ready to go.

George insisted that by clearing stimulus projects costing several million dollars apiece, officials can free up money later for bigger projects.

What Colorado is doing is putting people to work immediately, making sure dilapidated bridges don’t collapse under rush-hour traffic and saving money for later large-scale projects.

What Colorado is not doing is building bridges to nowhere and catering to the now-outdated sprawl economy by laying highways to yet-to-be-built tract-house exurban communities.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there’s not more money and greater will to embark on truly transformative infrastructure projects, like setting down full-metro-region high-efficiency mass-transit grids, for example, or alternative-energy fueling stations all around the country.

People have called on President Barack Obama to seize the moment of economic crisis and general readiness to accept change to remake U.S. society through infrastructure the way the post-war highway system did. The regret is that it doesn’t seem possible to make that kind of change.

We’ll certainly find the money and the political will to widen I-70 some other time.

The proposed skier vanity plate and supporters, from left to right: Ari Stiller-Shulman, Sen. Dan Gibbs, Ski Country CEO Melanie Mills, and Brent Lessing (Hertz Corporation's Soutwest Region General Fleet Manager).

A pair of ski-town lawmakers are out to change that with a ski-themed license plate that comes with the added bonus of earning about $50,000 a year in transportation funding to fix decrepit roads and bridges.

Granted, that’s only enough money to repave a mile or two of I-70, but state Rep. Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, and Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, were likely thinking more about ski-industry marketing benefits when they agreed to sponsor Senate Bill 161.

The state’s ski-industry lobbying group, Colorado Ski Country USA, launched a petition drive last year, gathering just under 4,500 signatures of people interested in purchasing the new specialty plates for $50 a pop, on top of the usual registration fees.

The Colorado Department of Revenue decides the ultimate design of the plate, but first the Legislature must approve the bill, which already has the unanimous stamp of approval of the Senate Transportation Committee.

A prototype design displayed during the petition drive featured a skier and a snowboarder on a white mountain background with a blue sky — reminiscent of Utah’s now defunct white plate with a solo skier and the tagline “Ski Utah! Greatest snow on Earth.” This state’s proposed plate reads “Colorado” above the skier and snowboarder and “Ski Country USA” below.

The old Utah plate, in use since the 1980s, was recently replaced by a more graphic skier plate that kept the same tagline, and Utah has been pushing hard to cut into Colorado’s skier-day dominance. Colorado sees about 12 million skier days per season, compared to about 4 million for Utah.

“As a state where skiing is our signature sport, we wanted to have a Colorado skiing plate just like they have in Utah, Idaho and California,” said Ari Stiller-Shulman, public policy and communications manager for Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA).

“Utah’s plate is very prominent because we get a lot of Utahans traveling through Colorado and you see them a lot. Ours is way cooler.”

But not everyone agrees with that assessment. One post on a ski-oriented Web site compared the Colorado plate to “clip art,” and another post from someone claiming to be a Utah resident hoped for a design change.

“Living in Utah, it’s always fun to read about the rivalry between our two states and the ski industry. (But) I do hope the DOR comes up with a different design. The one I saw in your post was dreadful.”

Skiing Magazine suggested a different design altogether: a crowded mountain backdrop with the letters “FMR TXN” (translation: Former Texan) and the tagline “Everyone skis here.”

But Stiller-Shulman said the Department of Revenue mandates certain design specifications for visual clarity, and CSCUSA itself insisted on certain elements.

“We wanted to make sure the skier and the rider are wearing helmets, of course, but it has a skier and a snowboarder on it, and if the current form of the plate were to be the one that is used in the end, it will be the only plate in the nation with a snowboarder on it, which is kind of cool,” said Stiller-Shulman, a snowboarder.

But even that aspect could be controversial. About 5.5 million Americans skied in the United States in 2007, according to the National Ski Areas Association, compared to 5.1 million snowboarders, but there’s often tension between the two groups. Two Utah ski areas — Deer Valley and Alta — still ban snowboarding, but no Colorado ski areas keep boarders out.

“We expect (the Colorado plate) to be really popular and a great way for Coloradans to show pride when they ride,” Stiller-Shulman said.

Still, Democratic U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette Thursday was quick to hail the government’s release of Colorado’s share of the transit-funding pie, which some critics have charged is far too small in comparison to stimulus funds directed to highway expansion, maintenance and repairs.

Federal Transit Administration funding for Colorado, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, totals $103.4 million, with $12.4 directed to public transit in small towns and the rest headed to urban areas.

“These transit funds will immediately help stabilize our economy in Denver and throughout Colorado,” DeGette said in a release.. “Colorado has many transit projects ready-to-go that will create and save thousands of jobs while reducing congestion and providing residents with green transportation options. With this funding, we can purchase and repair buses, continue expanding Denver’s light rail system, and get our economy moving.”

But according to RTD, FasTracks, funded by a sales tax increase approved in a 2004 metro-area election, is $2.1 billion short of the $7.9 billion needed to build out the system promised to voters.

RTD is weighing a sales-tax increase to fund the system, and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recently broached the idea of a toll on Pena Boulevard, the main route to Denver International Airport, to fund FasTracks. That is feasible now under a local tolling provision in the recently passed FASTER bill that raises vehicle registration fees to pay for road and bridge repairs.

Remember Referendum D, anyone?

The Republican caucus argued long and loud that the bipartisan budget reform bill SB 228 would amount to “highway robbery.” The repeal of the Arveschoug-Bird provision would eliminate the 6 percent limit on growth in the state General Fund that funds health care programs, job training, mental health services, prisons and hundreds of safety net programs for residents (not to mention thousands of public and private sector jobs).

Any money left over in the General Fund gets automatically transferred to transportation and capital projects, but that hasn’t happened for years in the recession-wracked state budget further pinched by TABOR.

Considering the economic times and the fast-growing rolls for unemployment, food assistance and poverty prevention programs, does it really make sense to choose pavement over people?

Senate Majority Leader Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, made his yearning for asphalt known with his caucus offering dozens of amendments to stymie the bill. Many of those proposed revisions would halt the implementation of the budget reform process until funding-starved transportation and capital improvement projects were completed in GOP districts.

Why is there no cash to pave roads and expand rural community colleges?

One reason is the failure of Referendum D, the $1.5 billion bond initiative for transportation, K-12 and higher education capital construction projects and police/firefighter pensions, which lost by a scant 14,000 votes in 2005. Then-Rep. Penry opposed the initiative and actively campaigned against it.

More recently, the entire Republican caucus voted against SB 108, the transportation funding bill known as FASTER, expected to raise $250 million per year. Cooler heads prevailed and the governor signed the bill Monday but not for the continuing obstruction of Minority Leader Penry and crew who should be dubbed “Hoover Man” and “No Boy.”

Colorado Senate Minority Office (Photo/Bob Spencer, The Colorado Independent)

Threatening a long debate in the Capitol tonight and a “barrage of amendments” to cripple the bill, the senators have now turned to Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter to join them in defeating legislation they say will “gut” both highways and the constitution.

“Republican lawmakers called on the governor to commit publicly… [today] to veto another pending proposal that would amount to the largest cut ever in transportation funding,” read the Senate GOP release e-mailed to the press this afternoon.

Throughout the day, the Republicans have been making impassioned arguments in the Senate chambers and in the press against proposed fees and tolls and for the continued right to send tax revenues to road construction at the exclusion of all other government programs.

Senate Bill 228 is the kind of legislation Colorado lawmakers have traditionally felt pressed to line up strongly for and against. Indeed, the bill has sparked ideological flag-planting from the time it was proposed, pitting caricatured “small-government fiscal conservatives” against “tax-and-spend liberals.” But the bill has gained bipartisan traction partly because it has been viewed as a a practical and limited solution to the clear budget constraints that have devastated services in the state, the kind of restrained law that might poke holes in traditional right-left posturing.

Today’s debate turns mostly on whether the long-standing provision SB 228 would overturn — the so-called Arveschoug-Bird provision — amounts in the law to a limit on spending or merely determines how funds should be allocated. Bipartisan supporters claim Arveschoug-Bird has amounted to “formulaic tyranny” that ties lawmakers’ hands during a time of shifting economic realities and program priorities. Since it passed into law in 1992, Arveschoug-Bird has sent any General Fund surpluses over the six percent limit allowed for state budget line items to transportation and construction projects.

In promoting Senate Bill 228, sponsor John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) has asked that responsibility be placed on lawmakers to decide how to allocate the state’s famously capped tax revenues.

“What are we here for if not to make and defend these very difficult necessary decisions?” he asked members of the Senate Finance Committee who conducted a hearing on the bill last month.

In a clever turn of phrase, Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Mike Kopp of Littleton called the bill “highway robbery.”

“If the governor really does share the concerns of the business community, he’ll reach across the aisle…,” he is quoted to say in the press release challenging Ritter to promise to veto the bill.

Debate resumes in the Senate chamber at 4:30 p.m. tonight and continues indefinitely. Listen in here.

Senate Majority Leader Brandon Schaffer, D-Longmont. (Photo/Bob Spencer, The Colorado Independent)

Heated exchange preceded today’s debate on Colorado Senate Bill 228, which seeks to repeal the the so-called “6 percent solution,” the long-established and controversial cap on General Fund growth. The new bill would give lawmakers increased flexibility to decide how to allocate Colorado’s shrinking state budget.

Animated members of the Republican minority trolled the speaker’s podium this morning, taking turns calling out House Majority Leader Brandon Shaffer (D-Longmont) on his decision to move debate on the bill to later in the day and for threatening to invoke procedural gag rule 9-C, which would limit discussion to five hours.

Sen. Nancy Spence (R-Centennial) said that she hadn’t seen the use of the gag rule in her 11 years as a member of the state legislature.

Sen. Shawn Mitchell (R-Broomfield) reiterated what many members of his caucus had been saying at the podium — that this is the most important legislation lawmakers will consider in this General Assembly and beyond.

“Why cram it into the dark of night?” he said. “We should be allowed to debate the constitutional questions involving this blow off of crucial spending limits… this [proposed delay in the debate] is a midnight charade.”

After nearly an hour of back and forth, Shaffer, clearly frustrated, blurted out from the floor that his motives were being maligned. After it was suggested again that he wanted to silence debate and put it off till the cover of darkness, Shaffer shouted, “Where’d that come from? … “I never proposed that!”

If nothing else, Shaffer’s proposed delay seemed like political tit for tat. Senate Republicans had pushed the debate from Friday to today to have the weekend to better prepare.

“We were ready to debate Friday, in the light of day, during business hours,” countered Shaffer.

Republicans are now proposing the bill be submitted to the Transportation Committee for review because the de facto effect of the bill would be to repeal laws that ensure transportation funding.

“But Republicans gutted that funding when they cut sales and income tax in 1999 and 2000,” said Sen. John Morse (D-Colorado Springs), sponsor of SB 228, his hoarse voice rising with emotion. “There was a public hearing before the Senate Finance Committee and no representatives of the Transportation Committee came,” he said.

Spence is one of three Republican members of the Transportation Committee.

“This money doesn’t come from transportation. It comes from the people. From taxpayers. It’s not your money. It’s the people of Colorado’s money, which we decide how to spend in every other area, except for transportation…,” Morse said. “No, gutting transportation happened a long time ago … You decided to turn off the spigot and now you say ‘You’re gutting transportation.’ Vote no to send this to Transportation Committee… This affects everyone. We’re all here. Let’s debate it.”

Listen to the ongoing debate here.

Supporters of SB 228 believe it is crucial to regain the ability to send funds where they are most desperately needed, namely to health and human services and education programs.

“This bill merely places transportation funding on the same playing field with other programs,” said Morse.

Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Ritter is scheduled to sign the FASTER bill today that raises $250 million from increased vehicle registration fees, which he contends will create thousands of jobs and pay to fix the state’s roads and bridges.