As he begins the second half of his first term as governor, Bill Ritter faces his toughest challenges yet.
The governor has made it clear what his agenda is for the year ahead:
• Balancing the state budget. That’s required by the state constitution, but with a shortfall projected up to $600 million or more, it’s an enormous problem.
• Preserving jobs and helping to create new ones, by focusing on renewable energy and short-term and long-term transportation needs.
• “Keep making investments for the long term in things like education, health care and natural-resource protection,” Ritter has said.
“It’s still called the Colorado Promise, but it will have to be more incremental,” observes political consultant Eric Sondermann. “You take small steps and get what you can in a bad economic environment.”
Ritter has become one of the leading Democratic governors in the West — along with Cabinet nominees Janet Napolitano and Bill Richardson — and he’s a national leader in the push for renewable energy. The Democratic National Convention in Denver helped his image in the party, as did the fact that the state voted for Barack Obama by a slightly larger margin than the national average.
“A rising tide lifts all boats, even leaky ones,” said pollster Floyd Ciruli.
Tom Cronin, a political scientist at Colorado College who studies executive leadership styles, thinks Ritter “so far . . . deserves relatively high marks, but the real tests are still to come.”
Ritter will probably be re-elected in 2010 — Colorado voters have a history of showing confidence in their incumbents — but he won’t have the easy time of it that his forerunners have had over the past 40 years or so.
As it is with President-elect Obama, one of Ritter’s challenges is having both legislative chambers controlled by his own political party. Democrats in the state legislature already have found it tempting to pass controversial laws straight out of the party platform. That makes it difficult to govern from the center, which is politically necessary in a state like Colorado.
Ritter’s first two years have been a mixed bag. The economy already is creating revenue problems in addition to those created in the past — and presumably in the not-too-distant future — by the fiscal restrictions of the TABOR amendment.
TABOR, temporarily held at bay by a bipartisan moratorium approved three years ago, is not his fault. But some of the governor’s critics in the business world blame him for being too accommodating to labor interests.
His executive order on state employee bargaining, in particular, still rankles some business interests.
“He has irritated some very powerful interest groups,” says Ciruli. And the perception that he could be in trouble will encourage stronger candidates to come forward — candidates with money.
The oil and gas industry put up a lot of cash to successfully fight Ritter’s proposed severance tax in last November’s election. Similar interests are also liable to back whoever runs against him in 2010.
But Ritter still has two years to strengthen his footing. And he appears to be getting better at the job as he goes along. “He’s grown as a self-confident political speaker,” notes Cronin.His economic plan seems to enjoy considerable bipartisan support, but what’s to quibble with? There’s nothing in there about raising taxes. Then again, this is the only state in the Union where not even the legislature can raise taxes without voter approval. (Given recent voter rejections of tax hikes, it’s probably best not to even whisper the “T” word.)
One of the taxes rejected in 2008 was Ritter’s proposal to end severance tax rebates and use the money for scholarships. That’s another negative in the mixed bag, but to lose a ballot issue is “certainly not fatal, and probably not all that damaging” for a governor, Sondermann believes. Former Colorado governors Owens, Romer and Lamm all lost issues in which they had invested a lot of political capital, yet they all still kept high approval ratings.
So far, Ritter hasn’t displayed the charisma of those three — or even, going back further, of stolid John Love, governor 40 years ago.
“He’s raised a lot of expectations, and not much has happened,” Ciruli says. “The real question,” says Sondermann, is whether Ritter can “build the coalitions necessary to enact his agenda, especially in these difficult economic times.”
