U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, this one talking about the Democrat’s “long record of supporting Colorado’s leading best-of-the-above approach to energy.”
Democratic Sen. Mark Udall and his challenger, GOP Congressman Cory Gardner, shake hands before taking the stage for a debate Oct. 7 in the auditorium of The Denver Post for their third debate of the campaign.
(Photo By Brent Lewis/The Denver Post)
He is being challenged by Republican Congressman Cory Gardner, , focusing on jobs created by the hot sector, including Realtors and engineers.
“Mark Udall led Colorado to set cutting-edge standards for renewable energy, growing our clean energy economy nearly 33 percent,” a narrator says in the Udall spot.
Colorado was the first state in the country to enact, thanks to the efforts of then Congressman Udall and Republican House Speaker Lola Spradley. Colorado voters decided public utilities serving at least 40,000 customers should be required to generate at least 10 percent of their electrical power from clean, renewable sources. That standard has since tripled.
Amendment 37 passed in 2004, three years before Gardner sponsored a bill in the state legislature . The bill turned out to be a dud — but that wasn’t Gardner’s fault.
Democrats have made hay of touting his 2007 green-energy legislation intended to assist in the financing of clean-energy projects because the “the law was repealed five years later, deemed useless for not enabling a single project,” according to The Associated Press.
New Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, was so keen on Gardner’s bill he singled it out his first State of the State speech. But after it was signed into law those involved discovering the funding mechanism of the bill was problematic, . Trying to get a compromise on a fix in subsequent years failed, so the measure was scrapped during Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration as part of a larger makeover of the energy office.
Udall has been criticized throughout the campaign for looking so grim in his ads. have sported the smiling Udall Coloradans have known since he first ran for the state legislature in 1996.
