Now that the General Assembly has gone home, it would be a good time for the public to become better acquainted with the Independence Institute and its president, Jon Caldara.
Caldara, who doubles as a talk show host, is probably no stranger to a lot of Coloradans, but his organization deserves more attention, especially this year.
For this year, Caldara and the institute are taking on the task of defending the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights at a time when the Democratic-controlled General Assembly and Republican Gov. Bill Owens have teamed up to undermine the value of one of its key provisions.
Referendum C, which will be on the fall ballot, is the product of this alliance and, under its provisions, the state would be able to keep $3.1 billion that would otherwise be refunded to the state taxpayers.
In preparation for what will be one of the biggest and most expensive political brawls in the state’s history, Caldara is circulating a “No refund for you” bumper sticker and seeking to enlarge the membership of the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank based in Golden.
Caldara is, thankfully, no newcomer to this type of fight. He served as chairman of the Regional Transportation District board of directors and helped defeat the Guide the Ride mass transit plan in 1997. He and his organization have been very important in battles over charter schools, higher-education reform and a variety of other public policy fights.
Caldara recently mailed a thoughtful, eight-page letter to long list of people, a letter that is a call to arms for the state’s conservative voters. In it, he pointed out that there have been three events recently that point up the challenge for conservatives:
In last November’s elections, our state was the only one in the country that gave liberals reason to smile, as they won our U.S. Senate race and gained control of the state legislature.
Since that time, our state’s leaders have been threatening to abandon fiscal discipline, and are looking high and low for ways to raise taxes and get around TABOR.
Our state has become notorious as the home of Professor Ward Churchill, with his anti-American hate-mongering and questionable academic record.
Caldara does not intend the campaign against Referendum C to be a “just-say-no” type of campaign. He has outlined a number of steps to address the state’s fiscal problems, steps that would not require revising or bypassing TABOR.
If his letter has a deficiency, it is that it doesn’t mention Amendment 23, the ballot initiative that mandates increases in school funding without regard to available revenues or business cycles. There are a lot of people who sincerely believe that there can be no real fiscal reform in Colorado until key provisions of that misbegotten amendment are repealed. Because state law prevents that issue from appearing on the ballot before 2006, true reform must wait until then.
Still, Caldara outlines a good case for defeating Referendum C this year. He also makes a good case that the handling of the Churchill matter is a disgrace that must be resolved before the University of Colorado or any other state college or university can ask for increased public support.
Whatever else may be said about the Churchill matter, it is now quite clear that CU is relying on the hope that Coloradans will not only forget about Churchill but also forget about the university’s past promises to deal with the matter.
The forces that will be arrayed on behalf of Referendum C this fall will be formidable. The campaign will doubtless be filled with images of packed nursing homes, dilapidated schools and crowded roads, pictures intended to suggest that the state is about to achieve Third World status.
The fervor of Referendum C’s supporters isn’t in doubt. What is in doubt are the underlying “facts” on which the claims are based.
Caldara and the Independence Institute are not only the state’s best hope of getting another point of view. They are, at this point, the only hope.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.
