Colorado’s state budget faces another huge shortfall. Businesses small and large face an uncertain economic environment. Unemployment hovers just above 8 percent. Our roads continue to fall into disrepair. And far too many of the state’s children are still stuck in troubled schools.
Colorado’s next governor, obviously, faces monumental challenges.
To move Colorado forward, we need someone who can build coalitions, someone with a proven track record of making government more efficient, of balancing budgets and of coming up with creative solutions.
John Hickenlooper is the clear choice to be our next governor.
His background in both government and private business, along with his strong leadership skills, makes him uniquely qualified to lead our state in these troubled economic times.
In the late 1980s, he remade himself into a brewpub owner after losing his job as a geologist and, in turn, helped remake a downtrodden corner of Denver into LoDo. As Denver’s mayor, he made government work better and helped Denverites imagine an even greater city.
He came to office in 2003, in the midst of another recession, and quickly balanced the budget despite a slump in sales tax revenues. He then hustled to get voter approval to reform the city’s career service system and launched an effort to reform the police department.
Hickenlooper acknowledged that regional problems such as homelessness and transit needed regional solutions, so he built bridges into Denver’s suburbs and formed coalitions with its neighbors.
He worked to pass a measure to send more children to preschool, and found private support to send more inner-city kids to college.
He also helped lure the Democratic National Convention here in 2008, and ensured that it came off without a hitch.
And, yes, Hickenlooper has even helped to raise taxes in Denver. While that may be a scarlet letter in this election cycle, Hickenlooper did it the right way: He asked voters first.
And while he has steadfastly maintained that a recession is no time to raise taxes (and we agree with that), we’re confident that if he sees a need in the future, Hickenlooper will test the waters, build the necessary coalitions and make the case to Coloradans.
That belief, of course, is based on how Hickenlooper has acted as mayor, not how he has acted on this year’s campaign trail. The Denver mayor, in a political move to be sure, hasn’t been very forthcoming on how he’ll tackle the pending $1 billion shortfall that Colorado’s government faces next year. But we think his business acumen and political chops make him the best of the three leading candidates to handle the Herculean tasks that face Colorado’s next governor.
While we have always appreciated Tom Tancredo’s candor, his initial support for Amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101, which would devastate state and local governments, was disappointing. He has since backtracked on Amendment 61 and is less supportive of the others, which leads us to believe his original support was either politically motivated or he was wildly uniformed. Neither is good.
Tancredo also has campaigned as if state government is spending money like Congress does, and that’s just not the case. He did, however, offer the most concrete plans of any candidate we’ve met with when it comes to cutting the budget.
As for Tancredo’s firebrand stance on illegal immigration, while it may help draw attention to the debate (and to himself), it has done little to help solve the issue. His bomb-throwing proclivity isn’t befitting a governor who would need to work with the federal government and with businesses, state lawmakers and citizens.
The other candidate, Republican Dan Maes, simply isn’t credible. First, he misrepresented himself as a successful businessman who could help turn the state around when in fact his resume is that of a struggling small businessman. There’s nothing wrong with that, but he hasn’t proven he can turn around a small business, much less a state with an $18 billion overall budget.
His credibility also has come under question several times: Was he a gritty, “Serpico”-style cop working undercover in Liberal, Kan., or was he fired for essentially tipping off the suspects and blowing the investigation? It’s the latter.
And what about the Freda Poundstone flap? The once powerful lobbyist says Maes met her at an ATM to collect at least $300 in cash that Poundstone claims was to help pay his mortgage. He claims it was a campaign donation, yet he never filed it as one, and it’s illegal to accept that much in cash.
Oh, and he was slapped with a record fine for other, unrelated campaign-finance violations.
Unlike Maes and Tancredo, Hickenlooper has proven himself as a businessman and as a politician. We’ve been disappointed that he has never disclosed the recipients of nearly $3 million he gave to charity — we later learned that nearly half of that was involved in a conservation easement deal — and we think he has let down voters with his reluctance to be more detailed about the budget and other pertinent issues in this campaign. But he remains Colorado’s best choice.
If he’s elected, we hope Hickenlooper continues to be an independent thinker. He has served Denver with distinction, and we’re confident he can lead Colorado by offering innovative, bipartisan solutions to the state’s problems.
