School tax plan raises GOP ire

April 22, 2007

By Joe Hanel | Herald Denver Bureau

DENVER - Lawmakers are headed for a showdown Monday over Gov. Bill Ritter's idea to collect more property taxes for schools.

Republicans have dug in their heels, with all but one of the 41 GOP lawmakers opposing Ritter's plan.

But the sponsor, Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder, said the Legislature has to act to prevent a looming crisis.

"This is not raising money for public schools. This is preventing a loss," Pommer said.

Ritter floated the idea a month ago, calling it a "stabilization" of local school district mill levies. A 1993 law forces down the tax rate on homeowners when the value of their homes increase.

Yes, the governor is supporting this fix to the School Finance Act, but newspaper articles consistently portray it has his idea. It's not. Republican Sen. Norma Anderson first proposed it in 2004. Current Republican Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhaney made the motion and voted to move it out of the Senate Education Committee and the Republican-dominated state senate approved it with just 6 "no" votes -- four of them Democrats. In the legislature we've been working on this ever since 2004.

County assessors release new property values every other year. Most homeowners can expect their property values to rise this year, meaning they would pay more in taxes under the Ritter proposal. Ritter expects the change to raise $53 million this year.

Just to be clear, if the value of your home is going up, you'll pay higher property taxes whether we repeal the obsolete 1993 law or not. If we repeal the law, they might go up a bit more.

The problem was created by the state's complicated - and sometimes conflicting - budget laws. The state has had to pick up more and more of the local districts' share because the 1993 law forces down mill levies.

In 2000, voters protected education funding in the state Constitution. So if no other way is found to pay for schools by 2011, experts predict education will start to eat the rest of the budget. Colleges would be first in line for cuts.

Fort Lewis College trustees voted Thursday to support Ritter's plan, and several other colleges have signed on as well.

Colleges get it. During the last budget crisis, they got hit hard. They took the brunt of the budget cuts and most of them still haven't recovered. With this leak in the state budget, they foresee the next crisis coming and, like us, want to prevent it.

The fix has turned into a partisan fight, as Republicans say the proposal is a tax increase, which Ritter denies.

"The money doesn't come from the tooth fairy. Somebody's paying that money. It's a tax increase," said House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker.

The crisis doesn't hit for a few years, so there's no urgency to find a fix before May 9, when the Legislature goes home for the year, he said.

"We have a little time to resolve this problem," May said.

That's exactly the thinking that pushed the state to the brink of bankruptcy two years ago.& The Republicans couldn't help but see that the crisis was coming. Even if they couldn't figure it out on their own, they had to hear the warnings -- from businesses, economists, colleges and everyone else who can add and subtract.  Their solution? "Why worry now, there's always tomorrow?" They kept spending more money than they had coming in and didn't stop until Democrats took over the legislature and worked with Republican Governor Bill Owens to pass Referendum C, balance the budget and avert the crisis.

But one of his former colleagues wants action now.

"You know what my daddy used to tell me? 'Wait' broke the wagon. You don't wait to fix something," said former Sen. Norma Anderson, a Lakewood Republican.

Anderson called the 1993 law "stupid," noting that she wrote it herself. Legislators at the time passed it without understanding the future effects, she said.

Anderson herself tried to repeal the law in 2004. She won in the Senate, with GOP support, but House Republicans blocked the plan. Her fear is that legislators will soon take away local control from schools, because the state is picking up most of the cost.

Whenever the partisan bickering starts I think of the great legislators of the past who cared so much about this state that they did the right thing regardless of party, politics or ideology. I'm glad I had the opportunity to serve four years while Sen. Anderson was still in the legislature.

Republicans say Ritter should look for ways to pay for schools that don't involve taxes. They have suggested selling off the state lottery or managing state lands to get a better cash flow for schools.

Democrats say they already have considered and rejected those ideas as unworkable.

A little clarification here: We've been working on the state lands issue for a few years now. By "we," I mean Republicans and Democrats, including former Gov. Owens. We've made some significant progress and we're going to make more every year. Unfortunately for the Republicans who have suddenly discovered the issue, we've headed down a different path: reinvesting in state lands and the fund they pay into so that the trust gets big enough to eventually make a big contribution to school funding. That "save now for benefits in the future concept" is the kind of deferred gratification they loathe.

"I've looked at every possible option we could think of for public schools," Pommer said.

With Republicans almost uniformly opposed, the governor and his allies are trying to shore up Democratic support, especially in the Senate.

The plan is scheduled to get its first public hearing Monday afternoon in the House Education Committee. Pommer will offer it as part of the School Finance Act, Senate Bill 199.

Lawmakers apt to raise roof over lousy-homes bill

By Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News

March 28, 2007

A controversial construction-defects bill that created political drama at the Capitol in recent weeks is scheduled for debate today on the House floor.

"This is going to be one heck of a fight," predicted Rep. Alice Borodkin, D-Denver.

The intrigue involves automated phone calls to senior citizens that infuriated Democratic lawmakers, including Borodkin, and a Republican lawmaker at odds with her own caucus and the home-building industry.

Rep. Debbie Stafford, R-Aurora, said she was told by a fellow House Republican that she would be targeted by a home-builders association in future elections if she supported the bill.

On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker, said Stafford has an ax to grind because home builders worked to kill an unrelated bill of hers this session.

He said her version of events "never happened."

I think it happened. I wasn't there when Debbie was threatened, but it wouldn't be he first time. When the Republicans ran the legislature they routinely threatened their own caucus with reprisals if they didn't vote the party line.

In fact, they would bring our floor work to a halt and we'd sit and watch while the Majority Leader walked up and down the aisles bullying his fellow Republicans into voting the way he wanted.

One common threat was a primary. If the recalcitrant Republican was in a safe seat (meaning there wasn't much chance of him or her losing in a general election), the leadership would threaten to find an opponent for the primary, an opponent who would have the support of the Republican Party and Governor Owens.

They carried through the treat once in a while to make sure people understood it was serious.

Rep. Mike May, the current Republican leader in the House, isn't like that. I don't think he threatens his caucus. But there are others who would and, Debbie Stafford insists, did.

"I stick by my story," Stafford shot back. "I think it's time we stick by the people of Colorado, and they are being stuck with shoddily built homes and no recourse."

At issue is a measure designed to protect homeowners from having to waive their legal rights, at the time of buying their homes, to compel their home builder to fix construction defects.

Opponents argue that House Bill 1338 does much more than that, opening the door to lawyers collecting huge judgments for their clients.

"I don't get that," said Sen. Jennifer Veiga, D-Denver, the Senate sponsor of the measure. "That's not in there."

The controversy over House Bill 1338, also sponsored by Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder, began before the bill was even introduced March 7.

Several Democrats said senior citizens in their districts received "Robo calls," claiming their lawmaker supported a home-builders bill that would raise taxes and enrich trial lawyers.

The senior citizens, in turn, called the lawmakers to complain.

"We had no idea what they were talking about," Rep. Nancy Todd, D-Aurora, recalled. "There was no home-builders bill at the time. And the one that was later introduced doesn't raise taxes. It was a scare tactic."

Borodkin was so furious she contacted the Colorado Association of Homebuilders and Colorado Concerns, a consortium of influential business leaders statewide.

"I said, 'If these calls don't stop by noon tomorrow I'm going to ask the attorney general to sue because they are filled with falsehoods.' The calls stopped," Borodkin said.

The calls were paid for by Rick Sapkin, with Edgemark Development. He is chairman of Colorado Concerns.

Sapkin could not be reached for comment, but William Mutch, director of Colorado Concerns, said Sapkin was acting as an individual and not as the group chairman.

Sure he was. As an ordinary, individual Coloradan he decided to spend thousands of dollars on robo-calls all across Colorado claiming that a bill to protect a few legal rights for new home buyers is actually a sneaky attempt to increase taxes. Heck, we've all done that.

Actually, his explanation was even better. He claims that he was testing some new robo-call technology and it went awry, accidentally calling people from Arvada to Grand Junction lying about why were running the bill. Give the robot a laser weapon instead of a telephone and you'd have the makings of a great science fiction flick.

Joking aside, this is the homebuilders' modus operandi. They have dozens of lawyers and lobbyists working for them, but no one is ever actually speaking or acting for the homebuilders themselves. You can negotiate for hours with their lawyers, then the lawyers will say they're not actually getting paid for the meeting and you can't hold the homebuilders they usually work for to anything they said.

You can negotiate an issue with a lobbyist, then find out it's not something the "homebuilders" actually care about.

One other thing. It's odd to talk about Colorado Concern and the other groups as if they're somehow separate from the homebuilders. They''re supported with the homebuilders' money and they follow the homebuilders' orders.

I've tried to talk with some of these other groups and their response is always the same: we take our direction from the Homebuilders Association.

The home builders, Colorado Concerns and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce are leading the charge against HB 1338.

Mutch said opponents agree that some home builders are inserting waivers-of-legal-rights clauses in contracts that are over and above what lawmakers intended in 2003 when they passed the original construction-defects bill. Those clauses give homeowners little recourse if their homes are defective.

Some? We haven't found a contract from a major production homebuilder without those clauses.

The 2003 bill put an end to home-owners collecting punitive damages, triple damages and attorneys fee. But homeowners were allowed "a right of remedy," if the builder didn't make repairs, Veiga said.

The clauses, she said, are stripping away that right.

Area lawmakers applaud new governor

By John Fryar

The Daily Times-Call

DENVER — Longmont Democratic Sen. Brandon Shaffer applauded Bill Ritter on Tuesday for “coming from a problem-solving perspective” rather than a politically ideological one.

Shaffer said inaugural speeches by the new governor and Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, as well as remarks by Democratic legislative leaders, were “right on” in taking that approach to the issues facing Colorado’s state government.

Ritter and others were “focusing on the future, not lamenting the past,” Shaffer said.

Boulder Democratic Rep. Jack Pommer said Ritter “laid out a good agenda” for state government’s attention.

Pommer, a member of the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, complimented the new governor for also recognizing that the state doesn’t “have a lot of money to spend” on new programs.

One of Pommer’s fellow budget committee members, Larimer County Republican Rep. Steve Johnson, promised Tuesday that “I’ll do everything I can” to support elements of Ritter’s “Colorado Promise” platform, as long as it’s “within the resources we have.”

There will be many areas of agreement among Democrats and Republicans about the issues in the months ahead, Johnson said.

“The question is, how do we pay for all this stuff?” he asked.

Broomfield Democratic Rep.-elect Dianne Primavera, meanwhile, said she was “very impressed” by the new governor’s speech, especially Ritter’s call for taking care of what Primavera called “our most vulnerable citizens.”

Another of those attending the inaugural ceremony was Erie’s Pat Waak, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party.

“I have been going 90 miles an hour for the last two years” in working to elect a Democratic governor and to retain and expand Democratic control of the Legislature, Waak said.

Sitting in the audience and looking at the officeholders gathered there, Waak said, it finally hit home: “My God, we did it.”

She said she was happy not only at the successful elections of Democrats, but about “the quality of the people” who won office in November.

“We really have a chance to serve the people and serve the common good,” Waak said.

Republican Johnson, meanwhile, said of Ritter’s speech: “I liked it. I thought it was hopeful. I thought it was optimistic. I thought it was inclusive.”

Berthoud Republican Rep. Kevin Lundberg, however, said he did not attend Tuesday’s ceremonies because he had to spend time finishing an article he was writing for a newspaper in his district.

Nevertheless, Lundberg said of the new Democratic governor: “I wish him well.”

LongmontFYI - Area lawmakers applaud new governor - www.longmontfyi.com/...

Democrats take the reins

Renewable energy, health care, education on agenda

By Ryan Morgan (Contact)

When lawmakers begin the 2007 legislative session Wednesday, it'll mark the first time in more than four decades that Democrats have controlled both chambers of the Legislature as well as the governor's office, which Gov.-elect Bill Ritter will take over today.

"For Boulder County, it's going to make a world of difference to our constituents," said state Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder. "On the issues that our voters care so much about — education, the environment, health care — you'll see legislation that not only will pass, but that will be signed."

Boulder County's lawmakers, all of them Democrats, say they want to tackle issues ranging from health care and education to prison policies. Renewable energy is another hot topic — nearly every lawmaker from the county plans to propose legislation touching on the issue.

Tupa will introduce a bill to require paper trails on electronic voting machines by 2008. Current law requires the machines to record their results on paper by 2010, but Tupa said he wants to see that change made before the next presidential election.

The bill would also increase to 5 percent, up from 1 percent, the number of machines county officials are required to audit for accuracy following an election.

Tupa said he'll also sponsor a bill to give a tax rebate to homeowners who install solar panels.

CONTACTS

House District 10

Rep. Alice Madden, D-Boulder, House Majority Leader

Phone: (303) 866-2348

E-mail: alice.madden.house@state.co.us

House District 11

Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder

Phone: (303) 866-2780

E-mail: jack.pommer.house@state.co.us

House District 12

Rep. Paul Weissman, D-Louisville

Phone: (303) 866-2920

E-mail: reppaul@aol.com

House District 13

Rep.-elect Claire Levy, D-Boulder

Phone: (303) 866-2583

E-mail: claire.levy.house@state.co.us

Senate District 16

Sen. Joan Fitz-Gerald, D-Golden

Phone: (303) 866-3342

E-mail: joan.fitzgerald.senate@state.co.us

Senate District 17

Sen. Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont

Phone: (303) 866-5291

E-mail: brandon.shaffer.senate@state.co.us

Senate District 18

Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder

Phone: (303) 866-4872

E-mail: ron.tupa.senate@state.co.us

Rep. Alice Madden, D-Boulder, has health care on the brain. She'll sponsor legislation to take money the state receives from tobacco companies as part of a legal settlement and funnel it into rural medicine, mental health care and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

After hearing from one of her constituents who was denied health insurance because he was a military reservist, Madden said she'll propose a bill saying, "You can't deny insurance solely based on military status," she said.

Madden will co-sponsor legislation that would have the state buy generic drugs at wholesale prices and sell them to uninsured people in Colorado who make too much money to receive Medicaid.

She said she also wants to look after animals: She'll carry legislation to ban "canned hunting," a practice in which hunters pay to shoot exotic animals that have been confined.

Sen. Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, is drafting a bill backed by the Autism Society of Boulder County to try to increase the amount of money available to children up to age 3 who are diagnosed with developmental delays.

On the renewable-energy front, Shaffer said he's working on legislation to make it easier for producers to create and distribute alternative fuels like ethanol and for consumers to be able to use them. That legislation might also require the state to buy more vehicles capable of using alternative fuels, he said.

To give school districts a break from high energy prices, Shaffer will propose legislation to regulate utilities with the goal of keeping districts' prices consistent throughout the school year and sheltering districts from spikes in energy prices from year to year.

Rep. Jack Pommer,

D-Boulder, said he'll propose legislation to double the renewable-energy requirements of Amendment 37, which Colorado voters approved in 2004. That measure required Xcel Energy and other utilities to generate 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2015. Pommer's proposal would bump up that requirement to 20 percent.

He'll also carry a measure that would change the way the courts sentence criminals to try to find more alternatives to throwing offenders in jail or prison.

"We're spending an absolute fortune, and we're not necessarily reducing crime," he said.

Pommer said he's trying to find more money to help send more kids to pre-school. He said a bill he's carrying will try to make the Colorado Student Assessment Program more efficient and use the savings for pre-school.

"Testing's great, but the goal is educating kids, and I think that's where the priority has to be," he said.

Rep.-elect Claire Levy, a Boulder Democrat elected to replace outgoing Rep. Tom Plant, said she's going to focus on environmental issues, with a minor in higher-education issues.

Levy will draft a bill that would allow utilities to charge their customers a small fee, the proceeds of which would create incentives for making homes and businesses more energy-efficient.

She'll also carry a measure to require cities to put energy-efficiency requirements into their building codes. Most cities, including Boulder, already do that, but there are "pockets" of the state that don't, she said.

Another bill Levy will carry would allow the University of Colorado to help repay the student loans of graduates who enter "public service" fields.

The university would only be allowed to use privately raised money, and the Board of Regents would define what constitutes public service, Levy said. One example: Law-school graduates could get help repaying their loans if they go to work for legal-aid groups.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Ryan Morgan at (303) 473-1333 or morganr@dailycamera.com.

Democrats take the reins : State-and-West : Boulder Daily Camera - www.dailycamera.com/...