Gov. Bill Owens has sent a letter to conservative think tanks around the country explaining his support of Tuesday’s ballot measures to suspend provisions of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Critics say the letter is an effort by the governor – for years a national star in Republican politics – to protect his conservative legacy, which has taken a beating since he helped craft Referendums C and D.
Owens spokesman Dan Hopkins says the governor is simply trying to help conservative think tanks “understand what is really happening in Colorado.”
On Oct. 12, Owens mailed more than 100 letters to think tanks at the expense of the Vote Yes on C & D campaign to reiterate his position that suspending TABOR refunds is the only sensible fix for declining state revenues. Conservatives across the country accuse him of abandoning fiscal conservatism.
“Would I prefer to not be asking our taxpayers for help to shore up our state budget? Of course,” Owens wrote. “Have we considered every alternative – including possible cuts – to avoid these referenda? Yes.”
To Stephen Slivinsky, director of budget studies for the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., Owens’ letter looked like “an act of legacy protection, or at least attempted legacy protection.”
It landed on Slivinsky’s desk as he was finishing a Cato Institute white paper criticizing the referendums, he said. “When I read the letter I thought, ‘Wow, it’s the kinds of arguments we were rebutting in the first place,”‘ Slivinsky said. “The letter didn’t seem to yield much in the way of new argumentation. It seemed more like an attempt at damage control.”
In his letter, Owens mentioned that his record on fiscal policy “has consistently earned me the top grade among the nation’s governors” from Cato.
“What he’s trying to do is protect TABOR,” Hopkins said. “There are TABOR debates that are going on in numerous states. In many of them, the Colorado experience is being cited. … The governor feels that what’s happening is not being understood nationally, nor is it being represented accurately.”
It cost about $200 to print and mail the letters, Vote Yes on C & D campaign spokeswoman Katy Atkinson said. Owens asked the campaign to foot the bill because he did not want the mailing to be raised as an issue by the referendums’ opponents, Hopkins said.
“This is not about Bill Owens,” he said. “This is about TABOR.”
Owens argues in his letter, as he has elsewhere, that C simply asks voters for a timeout from the constitutional amendment’s spending limits. It is not the assault on TABOR many conservative analysts have portrayed it to be, he says.
But the proposal provides “a way to circumvent the TABOR cap” on spending, said Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington, D.C., think tank originally funded by the late Colorado beer magnate Joseph Coors.
Darling was not sure if his organization had received Owens’ letter. He refused to comment on Owens’ current standing in the conservative policy world.
Less demure was Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, who emerged in the spring as the governor’s most aggressive critic in Washington.
Though he and Owens were exchanging debate challenges in open letters during the same time frame, Owens did not include Norquist in his mailing, Norquist said.
Someone else forwarded the letter to Norquist, he said. He was collecting signatures from other think tanks Thursday for a response letter to be mailed to Owens today, he said.
Norquist, who hosts a weekly conservative roundtable in Washington, is considered one of the nation’s leading conservative activists. If Owens was trying to get around him to make his case to the wider conservative world, “that didn’t work,” Norquist said.
“Young Republican children years from now will be scared in campground campfires by stories about Bill Owens – the tax-cutting Republican who magically turned into a tax-increase bad guy,” Norquist said. “And they will not be able to sleep all night.”
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
