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Do not be alarmed
Dear WW,
It is Christmas morning and I want to wish you all Happy Holidays. For those of us in the Colorado Legislature this season is a short respite while we gather our resources for the four-month legislative session that starts January 12th.
I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate and send best wishes to Joan Fitz-Gerald, our new Senate President, and Andrew Romanoff the new Speaker of the House. From them we will see strong leadership.
I am also pleased with the choices that the Republicans made for minority leaders--Joe Stengel in the House and Mark Hillman in the Senate. I believe they will capably and honorably lead the opposition.
Last week I was flying from Detroit to Denver when, somewhere in the middle, the flight attendants started looking concerned and the plane took a sharp turn to the left. The pilot got on the public address system and said, “Ladies and gentlemen there is smoke on the plane and we don’t know where it is coming from. So we will be making an emergency landing in Des Moines in about ten minutes…. Do not be alarmed.”
On this full plane I was squeezed into a window seat. Next to me, in the middle and aisle, was an elderly couple. It was not an exit row. I thought, “if getting off this plane in a hurry becomes necessary, a vacancy committee will be picking Colorado’s next Senate Majority Leader.” I tried to follow the pilot’s advice about not being alarmed.
That night I was speaking to a group in Denver about the fact that Democrats were now in the majority in both houses in the Colorado General Assembly for the first time since John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960.
When Kennedy and his people got in office, Kennedy joked, “We were surprised to find out that things were just as bad as we had been saying they were.”
The Democrats in Colorado are in a somewhat similar position. The TABOR amendment which passed in 1992 and most people understood as being a proposal that would allow them to vote on tax increases, actually did much more. Its ratchet effect prevents state services from recovering from the reduced levels that are necessary during a recession.
The mechanism is somewhat complex, but let it suffice to say, that if we do not amend TABOR, by the end of the decade Colorado will have no state money going into higher education, people who are currently on Medicaid will be cut off, programs to protect water quality will be cut and every other community service provided by government will be reduced. This is true regardless of our needs or our prosperity.
“Do not be alarmed.”
We have decided to keep ThisMatters.org going. It’s main purpose until the November 2005 election will be to help educate people on the connection between the services they rely on and their tax dollars. Tax dollars which will continue to ratchet down while we wonder why education, health care, transportation and other services gradually disappear. At the beginning of the new year I will write to you more about what ThisMatters.org will be doing.
I think sometimes members of the legislature feel that they are in some way important or that they have power. I am under no such illusion. The issue of first importance to the welfare of Colorado is this crisis in providing services. Nothing is second.
The legislature cannot fix this problem. If we do our job we can refer a solution to the people for a vote. Then it is up to you. The campaign will not be straightforward. We will have the job of explaining how tax dollars make a stronger community and provide the framework for health and prosperity. The other side will say “Vote no. It’s your dough.“
The voters will have to sort it out.
Anyway I feel like I am starting to sound like Scrooge being all serious on Christmas Day. The good news is that in our democracy all of these things are in our hands.
I hope you are all well and that you have a healthy and prosperous new year. I look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Ken Gordon
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