Eighteen years ago, a parade of political and civic leaders told Colorado voters one lie after another in an attempt to defeat the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
In one advertisement, the Arapahoe County sheriff pointed to a section of the amendment that he insisted “cuts cops and puts criminals back on the street.”
The Denver Metro Convention & Visitor Bureau, not to be outdone in hysteria, warned its members that fire and police protection “could be eliminated or vastly curtailed” (my emphasis) and that “hotels will have to devise a way of returning the excess taxes to their out-of-town guests.”
Denver’s mayor publicly worried that the amendment would tie the city in knots during the upcoming papal visit in 1993.
The chairman of the Downtown Denver Partnership claimed TABOR “would severely hamper the health and welfare of downtown” — at a moment, ironically, when downtown Denver was entering a period of renewal and growth that continues to this day.
Other opponents predicted a dark future for the state’s cultural institutions, singling out the Denver Museum of Natural History (since renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science) for special mention. Some even suggested voters would be required to approve cost-of-living adjustments in pensions.
None of these charges were true, and a few of us in the media — very few, as it happens — tried to point this out.
I’m not sure what was more remarkable, the fact that so many Colorado leaders were willing to play fast and loose with the truth, or that a majority of voters simply dismissed the warnings and passed TABOR anyway. They were too fed up with galloping government growth (in the 1980s, state and local taxes here grew as a percentage of personal income by 1.6 percent) to trust what their leaders said.
Sound familiar?
Voters are in a similar unruly mood this year, although mainly for reasons having to do with federal spending, debt, and a sluggish economy. And just as in 1992, they are being asked to rule on ballot measures — Amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101 — that the entire civic establishment has rallied to oppose, depicting them as they once depicted TABOR, the handiwork of modern-day barbarians.
There’s one huge difference this time, though: As hard as it may be for some Coloradans to believe, for once the civic establishment is mostly telling the truth.
TABOR was radical policy in the service of conservative ends: keeping government from swelling out of control. By contrast, 60, 61 and 101 are radical policies in the service of radical ends. Instead of merely rolling back the Ritter administration and legislature’s property tax “freeze” that amounted to an illegal tax hike, for example, they would slash school district mill levies in half while ordering the state to backfill the loss with non-existent revenue.
Combine that with a big income-tax cut, virtual elimination of vehicle ownership taxes and huge cut in registration fees, and you’ve got a recipe for massive public-sector layoffs.
Oh, and did I mention that one of the measures also prohibits bonding by government except at the local level, and only after voter approval and with a borrowing limit of 10 years? That of course ensures that tens of thousands of private-sector jobs are cut, too.
Opponents of the measures have raised $5.7 million, which should be plenty to defeat them. Yet they’re taking nothing for granted. After all, with the explosion of take-no-prisoners political advertising in recent years, voters if anything are more cynical than ever about warnings of the impending Apocalypse. Somehow, civic leaders must break through the doubt and signal that this time, by gosh, they really, truly aren’t kidding.
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“If you can keep your head while all others about you are losing theirs, maybe you don’t understand the seriousness of the situation.” — William Safire
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
