Now that Referendum C has passed and Colorado will enjoy a functioning state government … No, wait a minute. Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute has mused that there could be litigation on the grounds that the TABOR baseline is embedded in the state constitution and thus cannot be changed by a mere statute like Referendum C, even though proposed by our legislature, endorsed by our governor and approved by a majority of voters.
Sound complicated? It is. For one thing, it has me confused. Conservatives are always accusing liberals of trying to win in court what they could not win at the ballot box. So is Caldara now a liberal? No more than the Bush administration, which attacks in court what it could not win at the ballot box on issues like assisted suicide in Oregon and medical marijuana in Colorado and California.
One reason Referendum C came before us was Amendment 23, which requires the state to dedicate increasing sums to K-12 education. TABOR reduced the amount of money the state could collect after the 2001 recession. So with less money coming in, and more required to be spent in certain areas, the legislature had to cut in other areas.
Some of these cuts were healthy fat removals. But after a while, you run out of obvious fat, and the C opponents never presented a clear list of what should be cut next. John Andrews said we could eliminate state colleges, Ari Armstrong criticized all manner of state subsidies to private business, while others pointed to the cost of imprisoning captives of the moronic War on Drugs. But nobody put together a coherent picture of a Colorado we might enjoy if C were defeated.
One thing becomes clearer with every state election, though. It’s time to assemble a convention and start over with our state constitution. It was adopted in 1876, nearly 130 years ago.
I have no idea how many times it has been amended since then, but I found 40 amendments that passed just since the 1984 election, and some of those were repeals of obsolete provisions.
Here’s one example of constitutional obsolescence. Our county boundaries are part of the constitution, and those lines were defined, by and large, when people got around by horse and buggy, or perhaps by rail.
They don’t reflect modern connections. Thus we have a big battle underway concerning Wolf Creek Village near the summit of Wolf Creek Pass. It’s in a corner of Mineral County, which will collect the taxes if the development goes through. But Mineral County won’t have to provide many services, because the worker bees will live in Archuleta and Rio Grande counties. There’s no direct route from Wolf Creek to the Mineral County seat at Creede.
So Mineral County gets the benefits and the other counties get the costs. Little wonder that Mineral County’s government approved the development, and people in the other counties are fighting it. If our county boundaries reflected modern reality, then the local government making the decision would also bear the local consequences, and we’d get better decisions.
Nor should I neglect to note that the county boundaries in the state constitution were so vague that they took years of litigation to resolve: between Grand and Larimer counties over North Park, for instance, between Summit and Lake counties over Climax, between Chaffee and Fremont over the Whitehorn mining district, to name a few.
There are many other reasons why our patchwork state constitution needs a total overhaul. It’s needed one for a long time, according to one of the 39 men who wrote the 1876 constitution.
He was Casimiro Barela of Trinidad, and in 1911, toward the end of a long career in the state Senate, he observed that “The Constitution of the State of Colorado has become cumbersome and difficult to manage. … [It] has become a codex so large in volume, so imprecise in its scope, that it is as a body of statutory decrees. … A constitutional convention will no doubt be costly, but think of the enormous cost that results for the habit of amending a constitution every two years.”
That was 94 years ago, and the situation hasn’t improved since then, despite dozens of amendments. It’s time we started over.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
