There weren’t any grand plans or sweeping blueprints for change. At this point, there is no money for that sort of thing.
Gov. John Hickenlooper used his first State of the State speech Thursday to focus on the ways in which government can help fan what is a tiny flame of economic recovery.
The speech was appropriately calibrated to reflect the seriousness of a $1 billion state budget shortfall, yet the brewpub-owner-turned-politician urged Coloradans to keep sight of priorities, such as education funding.
“As somebody who chose to start a new business in the midst of a previous recession, let me tell you, this doesn’t have to be the time to limit our investments or our dreams,” Hickenlooper told a joint session of the state legislature.
Hickenlooper, a Democrat and former Denver mayor, hit all the right notes in his first State of the State address. He repeated hopes for bipartisanship. He reached out to business, talking their lingo when he suggested that every bill before the legislature contain an assessment of the regulatory impact it would have.
The speech, however, was not purely a Kumbaya effort. Hickenlooper hinted that he thinks favorably of a hospital provider fee, passed in 2009, that raised money to get federal matching funds to cover the uninsured.
That fee has been the target of Republican legislators who want to cut health care spending. It sounded to us like the governor was telegraphing that there wouldn’t be much profit in an effort to repeal the fee.
And Hick voiced support for the teacher-tenure bill, passed last session despite the fervent opposition of the teachers union. Rumored efforts to weaken that law likely won’t get much traction with the new governor.
We’re glad to see him take an early and public lead in front-end managing the legislation that might otherwise end up on his desk.
It’s an approach that differs from Hickenlooper’s predecessor, Bill Ritter.
Some of those differences are due to governing style — Ritter seemed to prefer more space between the legislative and executive branches — and some are a product of a vastly changed economic landscape.
Ritter’s first State of the State, in 2007, was an ambitious, 42-minute vision for Colorado that included goals such as providing basic health insurance to every resident by 2010 and cutting the state dropout rate in half by 2017.
It was going to be tough to accomplish those goals, but then the economy tanked and made them all but impossible. By his last State of the State, Ritter was speaking of the tough and unpopular decisions necessary to balance the state budget.
That is the Colorado that Hickenlooper has taken charge of, a daunting state of affairs, to be sure.
Yet the governor seemed energized, even jaunty, in his visit with the Post editorial board after the speech. In his typical Hickenlooper way, he was reeling off ideas about making compressed natural gas more readily available as an auto fuel and working with neighboring Nebraska to market an annual crane migration to tourists.
He’s also thinking about ways to gain a statewide consensus on reforming conflicting constitutional measures that strangle the state budget process.
We’re hopeful that Hickenlooper’s quirky blend of ideas and enthusiasm will lead Colorado into better times. He’s certainly off to a good start.
