For more than a decade, it was easy to assess the performance of the Colorado legislature at the end of every session. The only issue that mattered was money. As long as legislators couldn’t agree on a plan for easing the tax-limitation stranglehold, all they could do was disappoint.
Voters of both parties took turns ridiculing lawmakers as venal, do-nothing losers, and everybody looked forward to the end of the session when at least the parking rates at the south end of downtown would return to normal.
Approval of Referendum C last year changed all that. In 2006, the question was: Now how will they louse things up?
The answer: Not as badly as House Minority Leader Joe Stengel predicted before he resigned his leadership position because he got caught taking state pay for sitting on the beach in Hawaii.
In fact, with the possible exception of smokers, sexual predators, identity thieves and smugglers of illegal immigrants, Coloradans did all right this year.
The elderly were big winners.
When Stengel talked on opening day about special interests queuing up to collect on the revenues generated by Ref C, he failed to mention that first in line were homeowners 65 and older.
They definitely got a big payoff.
The Homestead Tax Exemption that gives about $500 to older taxpayers who have owned their homes for 10 years or more was reinstated by lawmakers, as promised during the campaign for C.
Another special-interest group that did OK was low-income families who have had trouble paying utility bills. Funding was increased to Energy Outreach Colorado to help cover heating bills and home weatherization for the poor.
More money was appropriated for early-childhood education, college-tuition assistance, and programs for developmentally disabled children and teenage substance abusers.
Road- and bridge-repair funds and the tourism-promotion budget got infusions of cash, too. And a compromise should help secure pensions for the Colorado Public Employees Retirement Association.
It wasn’t all sweetness and bipartisanship at the statehouse though. Things got testy when lawmakers tried to take on issues that the federal government has botched, things like emergency contraception, immigration reform, health care and environmental protection.
The governor (who looks a lot more like a candidate for the U.S. Senate now than he did 119 days ago) vetoed a measure to allow pharmacists to sell emergency contraception without a prescription as the Food and Drug Administration’s medical experts have recommended, and he nixed a bill that would have set tougher clean-air standards than the toothless ones created by the Bush administration with the help of corporate polluters.
Partisan posturing over immigration finally resulted in bills passed to get tough on human trafficking, production of fraudulent documents and hiring illegal immigrants. But the larger problems of enforcing federal sanctions against hiring undocumented workers and tightening border controls remain exasperatingly out of the reach of state solutions.
And the crisis of the uninsured has fallen to cash-strapped states simply because the federal government is unwilling to confront the issue. At best, frustrated Colorado lawmakers could only nibble at the edges of this nightmare scenario.
As for the charges and countercharges of ethics violations all session, that was (mostly) a good thing.
As long as the legislators are willing to rat each other out on relatively minor indiscretions, chances of producing the local equivalent of Tom DeLay remain minuscule.
The only real drawback to all the ethics challenges was that few Coloradans noticed anything else but the sniping, said House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, as he prepared for the end of the session and the official opening of the campaign season.
He said he finds himself quoting an old Arabian proverb more and more lately.
“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.