PUEBLO — In one of the more feisty congressional town-hall meetings last month, U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton faced more than 100 people — some of whom were wearing “10.4” buttons indicating the area’s unemployment rate — and asked them not to blame him for the mess in Washington.
“I voted for the budget; I made no claim it was perfect,” he said, avoiding a question from a man who asked what Washington was going to do to sacrifice in tough times. “I wasn’t there to help create the problem. I am there to help fix the problem.”
Almost a year into his first term, the Republican from Cortez is still grasping the nuances of perception, reality and politics in his freshman majority status.
He beat out a moderate Democrat last year and is trying to assuage the nation’s problems — from energy development to job creation — from a splayed and politically checkered district.
The 54-year-old says his job in Washington is not harder than he expected, and he finds the travels back and forth less tedious than when he was a Colorado General Assemblyman, driving back and forth from Cortez to Denver.
“I am as advertised,” Tipton said in an interview last week from his Washington office. “I am a citizen legislator.”
Tipton may be vulnerable
But observers say the freshman has made enough missteps — from poor fundraising to mishandling important policy to stepping into an ethics flap involving a conflict of interest with his nephew’s company — that he could be vulnerable next year against Democratic House candidate Sal Pace.
Bob Stovall, an Action 22 board member and a government-relations expert in Colorado Springs, said he believes Tipton hasn’t garnered any great grades in his first year, “but he’s doing reasonably well in a very contentious setting. I would give him a C- plus or B-minus, a first-semester grade, not a final grade.”
Last spring, Tipton peeved the Roaring Fork Valley Transit Authority when he didn’t back a $24 million project in bus-system upgrades because he said it was too expensive. He pointed to a $15,000 line item for WiFi on the buses between Aspen and Glenwood Springs as government waste.
Also in May, ranchers in southeastern Colorado learned that a military construction subcommittee had not kept in place a ban on the Army’s efforts to expand the 235,000-acre training site at Piñon Canyon.
Tipton had to scramble to keep the ban after facing a barrage of constituent complaints.
That same week, Tipton apologized to the House ethics committee after hearing that his 22-year-old daughter was dropping his name while working with clients on the Hill for Broadnet, a company run by Tipton’s nephew.
The ethics committee hasn’t responded to his letter of apology — something Tipton says is proof it was not a big deal.
“There was no there, there to begin with,” Tipton said. “Simply because the separation that was there. Again, maybe it’s a better job of explaining . . . of talking to people.”
The House ethics committee doesn’t comment on its correspondence.
The congressman, who also owns a small business near Mesa Verde National Park, says the bulk of what his opponents call “missteps” may have been solved with better communications. He says he doesn’t spend time “chasing cameras or chasing reporters.”
But perhaps what he hasn’t done in media outreach, he makes up for in constituent services. He says he has spent only 13 nights at his Cortez home this year and his office manages roughly 5,000 correspondences a week. Most weekends and congressional recesses are spent on the road in the enormous 3rd Congressional District, which stretches from northwestern Colorado down to almost the state’s southeast corner.
Bulk of work on energy
“He is so accessible,” said Christi Zeller, Club 20 energy chair and executive director for the La Plata County Energy Council. “Even when Club 20 was in Washington, D.C., he came and went on a night tour of the monuments with us. That puts him in an incredible leadership role.”
The bulk of Tipton’s legislative work and focus has been on energy. He holds a perch on the Natural Resources Committee and chairs the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Energy and Trade.
Tipton sees energy expansion as a vital piece of growing the state’s economy. And he sees too much government regulation as interference for the private sector. He authored, last week, legislation to cut the regulatory burden for hydropower development.
“We all understand we need some regulations,” Tipton told the room in Pueblo a couple of weeks ago. “But we’ve seen examples of the overreach.”
But his votes have irked environmentalists who happen to be in abundance near the mountains of Pitkin County — also in his district.
“We have the most anti-environment House in the history of the House, and he’s leading that charge,” said Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co. “We’re a business. We employ 3,400 people in the winter, and we think wilderness and public-land preservation is good for business. We think hunters and fishers think that. To relax restrictions on natural-gas and oil drilling is not an environmental issue, but these are business issues.”
In the face of that criticism, however, Tipton says he wouldn’t pick a different time to be in Washington.
Though flagging in fundraising in the last quarter — he was among the worst House Republican fundraisers in the quarter ending June 30 — he has stepped it up and even hosted a reception with House Speaker John Boehner last month in Aspen.
“If you were to pick a time to be here, this is probably the time I would pick,” Tipton said. “The disconnect between Washington and home is that at home gets it. They understand they’re going to have to do business a different way and a better way. To the best of our ability, we’ve actively participated in that debate.”
Allison Sherry: 202-662-8907 or asherry@denverpost.com
