Much of that won’t be directed by the campaigns, either.

More than $4 million has been raised by outside committees already in the Democratic primary for governor between U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser, offering a preview of what’s to come.

Independent expenditure committees, colloquially known as state super PACs, can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money so long as they don’t coordinate with the campaigns they’re supporting. While the committees often report the names of contributors, the donors are sometimes cloaked in anonymity, either through obscure business entities or separate nonprofits that don’t need to disclose their donors.

That’s true of some of the money flooding into the independent committees in the Bennet-Weiser race. While some large checks have been cut by big names like New York City billionaire Michael Bloomberg and figures well known in the local or national business worlds, others have come from deep pockets that are harder to identify.

The vast majority of the super PAC money in the primary, $3.6 million, has gone to Rocky Mountain Way, the committee supporting Bennet����ap bid. About $563,000 has gone to Fighting for Colorado, the committee supporting Weiser’s candidacy. 

Bennet and Weiser have largely cleared the field on the Democratic side of the race, which also has several declared lesser-known candidates. On the crowded Republican side, where there are 20-odd contenders, there’s been little fundraising by independent expenditure committees so far. The GOP field also lags significantly behind the Democratic side in direct campaign fundraising. Coloradans have elected only one Republican as governor — Bill Owens, who won in 1998 and 2002 — since the 1970s.

The outside cash backing them likely represents the tip of the iceberg this year, observers said — especially in the first competitive Democratic governor’s race in over a decade where one candidate doesn’t promise to steamroll the competition’s spending with self-funding.

In 2018, Democrat Jared Polis spent more than $22 million of his own money on his way to winning the governor’s office. Polis is now term-limited from running again. 

Differing rules for direct, outside donations

Statewide races can cost tens of millions of dollars to organize and get a campaign message across. But Colorado candidates can raise only $725 from an individual donor for each leg of the race, or $1,450 combined for the primary and general elections.

That, in effect, caps wealthier donors at a fraction of what they might want to give directly to candidates. 

In the Democratic primary alone, 34 individuals and organizations have cut checks of $10,000 or more to the independent committees. The single largest donor, Bloomberg, has contributed $1.25 million to the committee backing Bennet����ap bid — a sum more than 860 times greater than what he’d be able to give to Bennet����ap campaign directly.

The lack of limits on donations or spending by outside groups that operate independently of campaigns , which found such spending was protected as free speech.

 “Because direct campaign contributions in Colorado are capped at $725 per individual, these independent expenditure groups are really key for building cash at scale,” said Aly Belknap, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, a government watchdog group.

Add in the ability for other nonprofits to donate to the committees, she said, and “this effectively washes the money and obscures the original donors, and creates a lack of transparency for the public and the voters about what kinds of special interests are contributing to the campaigns.”

(Common Cause is also a nonprofit that is not required to disclose its donors. Belknap said the organization has a policy of disclosing who give more than $2,500 automatically, and of making the smaller donor list available for inspection at its Denver office.)

Ian Silverii, a Democratic political strategist, said the independent expenditure committee arm’s race is an “ironic” side effect of state campaign finance reforms. Silverii worked on the Weiser campaign when it was first starting up last year but has since stepped back from the race. 

The caps on campaign contributions didn’t stop big money from pouring into races. They merely shift where the big checks go and how they get spent, Silverii said.

The separate pot of money also comes with its own drawback.

Candidate campaigns get favorable ad rates from TV stations and other outlets compared to independent expenditure committees, meaning direct donations go further.

When it comes to candidate fundraising, Bennet’s campaign has directly raised about $3.5 million and started the year with about $1.6 million in the bank, according to the most recent campaign finance reports that cover activity through the end of December. The Weiser campaign has directly raised about $4.6 million and started the year with about $3.5 million in the bank. 

Lack of control over message

Since candidates legally can’t coordinate with the independent committees, they thus lose the ability to control the story they want to tell when the money goes to outside groups. That can result in candidates sustaining collateral damage if they end up tied to messages or messengers that repel voters. 

Silverii used ultrabillionaire Elon Musk’s on last year’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election as an example. Voters associated the Republican candidate with Musk as overall views of the billionaire  amid his involvement in Trump administration initiatives, and his preferred candidate lost by .

“It is probably always better to have more resources to tell your story than it is to have fewer resources, but there is also a risk of your support being a liability,” Silverii said.

Case in point: Each of the gubernatorial campaigns, asked to comment generally on the outside money sure to flood the race, attacked the other’s third-party support while highlighting its candidate’s own direct donor base.

“The momentum behind Phil’s campaign is surging, so it����ap no surprise that out-of-state billionaires and special interests are dumping millions into this race to try to stop him,” Anna Huck, Weiser’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “Phil isn’t beholden to special interests, corporations or out-of-state-billionaires — he’s powered by the people of Colorado, with more in-state donors, more local endorsements and more than double the cash on hand than Michael Bennet.”

Jordan Fuja, a campaign spokesperson for Bennet����ap campaign, highlighted contributions to third-party committees that supported Weiser’s prior campaigns. She claimed Weiser had “a clear conflict of interest” because of donations from attorneys and people with ties to the oil and gas industry that may have business before the attorney general’s office.

She also singled out support for the Weiser-backing independent expenditure committee from Blair Richardson, a private equity CEO who donated to President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, though he has also contributed to Democratic causes.

 “Michael is honored to have the grassroots support in this race with more supporters, more contributions, and a lower average donation than any other candidate in this primary,” Fuja said in a statement. “Phil Weiser, on the other hand, publicly condemns billionaire money while quietly taking it himself — including millions in donations from billionaires in past races.”

In a statement, the director of Rocky Mountain Way, Sarah Andrews, said the committee exists to bolster Bennet’s story and “is focused on ensuring voters understand Michael Bennet’s long history of steady leadership and real results for Colorado.”

“This effort is about making sure Coloradans hear clearly about the proven leadership that delivers for hardworking people and provides more opportunity for Colorado families,” Andrews said.

Attempts to reach representatives from the committee supporting Weiser and some of the largest donors to both committees — including Bloomberg and Paramount President Jeff Shell on the pro-Bennet side and Richardson and investor Tom Ray on the pro-Weiser side — were unsuccessful.

Mike Johnston, a former state senator and who spent the last three years leading one of Colorado’s most influential philanthropy organizations, announced Wednesday that he is running to succeed Denver’s term-limited mayor, Michael Hancock.

Once Johnston’s candidate paperwork is finalized with the Denver Elections Division, he will become the 17th person to jump in the race for the April 4 municipal election. It is the first open mayor’s race in Denver since Hancock first ran in 2011.

“I just see the promise of what Denver can be and see the places where we are falling short and I’m inspired to try to help deliver a Denver that we will all be proud of,” Johnston said in an interview Wednesday. “I want to help build a Denver that is vibrant, affordable and safe.”

Johnston worked as a teacher and principal before being elected to the first of his two terms representing northeast Denver in the Colorado Senate in 2009. He ran for governor in 2018, behind Gov. Jared Polis and Cary Kennedy in the Democratic primary that year.

Since 2020, Johnston has worked as the president and CEO of . During his tenure, the philanthropic organization undertook efforts including launching , the state’s largest COVID testing and vaccination initiative, and backing the campaign for on this year’s ballot. That measure will redirect a sliver of Colorado’s income tax revenue to a permanent affordable housing fund to address the state’s housing crisis.

If elected in 2023, Johnston indicated those funds will play a big part in his plans for the city, including when it comes to addressing homelessness. Sweeping encampments just moves people from one part of the city to another, Johnston said.

“The problem we’re facing right now is we actually don’t have enough supply of permanent supportive housing to put people in who are homeless,” Johnston said. “What we need to be able to do is build those permanently affordable, supportive housing units. Prop 123 makes that housing possible.” 

Johnston’s announcement comes two days after sitting State Sen. Chris Hansen .

Some other presumptive candidates are now off the board. Outgoing Speaker of the Colorado House Alec Garnett will take over as Polis’s chief of staff next year. Penfield Tate, a former state senator with two previous mayoral runs under his belt, announced this week that he is next year.

Aside from Hansen, the other candidates who so far have filed paperwork to run for the city’s top office next year are: , Anna Burrell, , Alex Cowans, Marcus Giavanni, , Aurelio Martinez, , Jesse Lashawn Parris, , , Ken Simpson, Ean Thomas Tafoya, James Walsh and . ]]> /2022/11/16/mike-johnston-denver-mayor-candidate/feed/ 0 5455565 2022-11-16T17:34:36+00:00 2022-11-16T19:19:53+00:00 /2021/03/12/the-spot-suburban-shift-left-women-office-regional-rail/ /2021/03/12/the-spot-suburban-shift-left-women-office-regional-rail/#respond Fri, 12 Mar 2021 18:47:33 +0000 /?p=4485578

For people, policy and Colorado politics

What’s The Spot? You’re reading an installment of our weekly politics newsletter. .

This week, The Post����ap political reporters are having a Q&A session, answering a few of the questions readers sent in and highlighting some of our work from the past week.

But first … Colorado state leaders put forth a $700 million one-time stimulus plan this week, suggesting up to 40% of the money could go toward infrastructure and up to 15% toward “housing and community revitalization.” Check out the full breakdown from Wednesday. By the way, lawmakers will have to pass numerous bills in order for the full package to get to the governor’s desk. 

To support the important journalism we do, you can become a Denver Post subscriber .

Questions?

Have a question about Colorado politics? Submit it here and it’ll go straight to The Denver Post politics team.

There are many correct answers, but what do you think has been the *single* the biggest factor swinging the Denver suburbs from Republican to Democratic? — Larry Parker, Aurora

Short answer: Demographic changes — specifically the increase in college-educated white people, which now make up a larger percentage of our state’s electorate than nearly anywhere else in the country. The Post’s Jon Murray touched on this after the suburbs helped carry Joe Biden to a landslide win here.

But you’re right that there are other factors. Trump was almost uniquely unpopular with many suburban voters, and his presence catalyzed a blue shift that was already underway. Previously safe red districts are now competitive in many areas of the state, and previous swing districts are now safely blue. That����ap recently been true for state races, too. 

The GOP is not purely at the mercy of demographic shifts or national politics. The party and its candidates have agency over who they run, how they message and how they build coalitions. And by and large, the GOP has embraced a brand of far-right politics that simply doesn’t resonate with a majority of Colorado voters.

— Alex Burness, Statehouse reporter

With the mountains’ peak tourism months coming to a close and wider public vaccinations around the corner, what is Colorado’s plan for attracting tourists, who might be looking to get away from lockdowns and a sense of “cabin fever” but scared and scarred of the coronavirus disease, to stimulate our local economy and businesses? — Calloway Carlotto, Glendale

The pandemic isn’t over yet (still trying to achieve that herd immunity), but Colorado is loosening restrictions and trying to revitalize its economy.

State political leaders announced that $700 million stimulus package proposal and the state will see about $6 billion overall from the latest round of federal stimulus money, though it����ap not yet clear where exactly that money will go.

But, like you point out, public confidence is important for tourism, too. That����ap why the state’s tourism office has launched a campaign called “Do Colorado Right.” It����ap seeking to bring in visitors while still adhering to safe practices, including wearing masks. Tourism spokesperson Jill McGranahan said it����ap a shift from what the department was doing early in the pandemic — encouraging residents to explore their own backyards — to marketing to out-of-state visitors.

The office partnered with Olympic gold-medalist snowboarder Red Gerard, The Bachelor’s Ben Higgins and Top Chef contestant Brother Luck to promote tourism through some social media videos. The campaign’s has a list telling visitors what they need to do before they visit as well as providing a link to what����ap open in Colorado.

As the Colorado Restaurant Association indicated Wednesday though, restaurants and small businesses still have a long way to go before they’re back to pre-pandemic conditions — and hope to see more financial assistance.

— Saja Hindi, Statehouse reporter

More Colorado statewide political news

• After months of COVID-related fears, it turns out Colorado’s budget situation is actually pretty stable … leading to the stimulus package we’ve mentioned twice.
• Colorado is taking a hard look at marijuana industry regulations, with some big changes being floated that could ripple out nationally.
• Business interests want Colorado lawmakers to take it easy on new regulations this year.

What efforts are being made to advance women candidates to higher offices, e.g. U.S. senator? — Diane Dash, Denver

Colorado is one of five states that has never elected a woman as governor or U.S. senator, despite having more women in its state legislature than 49 other states. That is a source of disappointment for groups like Emerge Colorado, which trains Democratic women to run for office at all levels.

“Now that we have two Democrats in the U.S. Senate, getting a woman into one of those two seats is going to be challenging, because there are no term limits,” Emerge Colorado Executive Director Michal Rosenoer said in an interview Wednesday. 

“So, Emerge’s strategy has been to build a bench of really strong women candidates at the state level, where we can be developing and training women who have the acumen and knowledge to run for things like U.S. Senate,” she added, referring to it as a “bottleneck.”

There is not a dearth of women willing to run. Republican Cynthia Coffman and Democrats Cary Kennedy and Donna Lynne were candidates for governor in 2018, but fell short in their respective primaries. In 2020, nine Democratic women and one Republican woman ran for U.S. Senate but didn’t make the ballot.

“The higher up the food chain an election gets, the more it����ap decided by power brokers who don’t necessarily live in Colorado — donors and political players at the national level who are more steeped in traditional beliefs about who is and who is not electable,” Rosenoer said.

— Justin Wingerter, federal politics reporter

More federal politics news

• Census delays leave Colorado candidates waiting and worrying about 2022.
• Colorado has 33 federal labs and two of its congressmen want to find out if the buildings need repairs.
• Coloradans in the U.S. House split along party lines Wednesday during the final vote for the $1.9 trillion federal stimulus package.

What are the current plans the state has for developing an enlarged commuter rail network? Can we expect to see a multi-decade plan with forecast dates of completion detailing such a network connecting Boulder, Fort Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs, etc., sometime soon? — Joseph Schlatter, Centennial

The answer to your first question is yes: There are plans to build a commuter rail network along the Front Range, a nearly 200-mile line connecting Fort Collins to Pueblo. But as to when we’ll see specific dates for completion, or even phases, that����ap a ways down the track (as The Post , “likely a decade or so away from welcoming its first passenger.”)

In December, a draft report presented to the Front Range Passenger Rail Commission provided some new details about the cost, with the initial phase connecting Fort Collins to Colorado Springs estimated between $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion. 

Throw another $200 million to $300 million at a second phase, and the line could be extended south to Pueblo. The report even envisioned service between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs running two to six daily round trips.

You’ll need an ever bigger crystal ball beyond that: There is talk at the commission of a faster, more frequent and costlier line between Trinidad, Cheyenne and perhaps points south. Speeds would reach 90 to 110 mph on new tracks, with trains running every 30 minutes at peak times. The cost of that more ambitious undertaking: $7.8 billion and $14.2 billion.

— John Aguilar, suburban reporter

When the pandemic is over, what is our plan to revitalize downtown Denver? — David Rutter, Denver

Several projects are already underway — and a few are in more conceptual phases — to change the way downtown looks and flows. But it won’t all be finished by the time Denver begins to really open up. 

City officials plan to use about $98 million in bonds (currently under consideration by the City Council) to renovate the Colorado Convention Center with an 80,000-square-foot ballroom addition and a 50,000-square-foot outdoor terrace with mountain and downtown views. 

And Monday, the council cemented the city’s pick to renovate the 16th Street Mall to the tune of nearly $150 million. The group also accepted a $20 million from a state grant to help pay for the work. 

And there’s more in the pipeline, said Tammy Door, president and CEO of the Denver Downtown Partnership: the redesign of Skyline Park, the idea for which was originally unveiled in 2004;  and the 5280 Trail, a longstanding vision connecting five miles of downtown and several neighborhoods — though it����ap a long way off.

— Conrad Swanson, Denver City Hall reporter

More Denver (and suburban Denver) political news:

• In the COVID-19 pandemic, the very definition of a public health crisis, Denver spent less than 5% of federal stimulus money on public health itself. 
• Douglas County effectively said it won’t enforce the state’s COVID restrictions anymore, and asked the governor to open up the state.
• There’s a good chance the Denver metro gets up to two feet of snow this weekend. Here’s a small bit of what you need to know. And what huge snowfalls looked like in the city’s past.

Forward this newsletter to your colleagues and encourage them to .

A thick gold band with an antique-cut white diamond about 2 carats in size. A 6.2-carat canary-yellow diamond ring.

“It was nonstop,” Bianca Gardelli recalled about the first time she saw the collection. “The lady was quite fancy — her husband, too.”

As the Colorado treasurer’s it’s Gardelli’s job to make sure abandoned valuables like those large diamonds get logged, tagged and securely stored inside an old, walk-in vault on the first floor of the state capitol. The division, also known as the Great Colorado Payback, is Colorado’s way of reuniting about $1 billion worth of lost bank accounts, stocks, unpaid wages, life insurance payouts and even the contents of safety deposit boxes with their rightful owners or heirs.

Most claims are for a few hundred dollars; the largest amount Colorado paid out to an individual person was $1.23 million.

The office has received solid silver bars, a Cold War-era pen that hid a tear-gas canister, a Sandy Koufax rookie card, Civil War tintypes, military flight records, a thumb-size pistol and a platinum Tiffany necklace adorned with diamonds, pearls and a giant emerald that’s worth more than $150,000.

Mostly, though, the safety deposit boxes hold personal documents, comic books, baseball cards and coins.

“We get a lot of coins,” Gardelli said. “There seems to be a generation of individuals who purchased silver coins as a rainy day fund.”

The law requires banks to turn over abandoned property — including safety deposit boxes and bank accounts — after five years of nonpayment, and the collection with the huge yellow diamond has been in the state’s possession since a Denver metro area bank turned it over 17 years ago. The treasurer’s office has been criticized at times for moving slowly to reunite property with its owners, but this is a special case.

The unidentified bank gave the state all the information it had about the box’s owners in 2002, but the husband and wife were both dead by the time state employees started looking for them. Since then, four different elected treasurers and their staffs have tried and failed to put the collection in the hands of their heirs.

“The (yellow) diamond is overwhelming, but there are other rings that were in the box that are probably just as important to the owner’s family,” Gardelli said.

Republican Mike Coffman was the state treasurer when the box arrived. He told The Denver Post he remembers it because of the controversy around the case.

The office received an early claim on the safety deposit box, but it was a case of mistaken identity, Gardelli said: “The person’s grandmother or mother had the same name as our claimant, but when attempting to claim, it became clear it was not the correct family.”

Heir claims are tricky because often the children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews don’t know anything about the contents of their relatives’ safety deposit boxes or the address of where they lived — both of which Colorado uses to prove ownership.

The heirs are tasked with tracking down birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses and anything else that could corroborate their claims. In the case of multiple heirs, they have to decide among themselves who is going to claim the property. Colorado allows only one heir to collect “tangible assets” like the diamond jewelry in this particular box. If multiple heirs can’t agree, the contents are sold and the proceeds split evenly among them.

In 2010, former Democratic Treasurer Cary Kennedy invited  to see some of the more unique items in its vaults, including the fancy intense yellow diamond. The show didn’t delve into the ring’s history, but it did offer some clues about its value.

“It����ap a very shallow stone, so it takes up more space than you would expect. It actually looks more like a 9-carat stone. It����ap a little bluffy,” said Peter Shemonsky, the show’s jewelry expert.

Shemonsky estimated the ring was worth up to $85,000 if the stone wasn’t treated to make it more yellow and up to $20,000 if it was irradiated.

Walker Stapleton, the next Colorado treasurer, remembers trying to unite the collection of about 20 pieces, which he estimated could be worth up to $1 million, with its rightful owner.

“I know (the heir) is from a very prominent and well-known Denver family,” said Stapleton, who left office in early 2019 after serving two terms. “It’s very weird. … I talked to her three times and every time the same conversation. I told her how to claim it, and she acknowledged it was hers and said she would follow through to claim it and she never did.”

Gardelli declined to confirm Stapleton’s recollection. She inherited the case when she became the unclaimed property director about a year ago.

She and current Treasurer Dave Young are tight-lipped about many of the details they have on the box’s owners and possible heirs because they don’t want to attract time-wasting, fraudulent claims. What Gardelli would say is that the box’s owners left Europe from a place and time that “paints a picture of their ethnicity and whatnot.”

She used immigration records and census data to track the couple through the United States and eventually discovered that they went back overseas — yet another twist and another complication. All the treasurer’s forms are in English and overseas heirs don’t always speak our language.

While Gardelli continues to work the case, the yellow diamond and other items continue to sit in the unclaimed property vault, which looks like a long, narrow room piled high with cardboard boxes.

“The vault is very, very full,” Gardelli said, adding that she plans to auction off dozens of items in the near future.

The state can sell items it has held for at least five years, and then the money from those sales sits in a bank account indefinitely waiting to be claimed.

The box with the yellow diamond isn’t in danger of going on the block since Gardelli has a lead on its owner. She couldn’t say how soon she expects to close the case, but her lead is strong enough that she feels comfortable holding onto the box a little longer.

Even if the state finds the rightful heir, of course, some questions may never be answered.

“It’s human nature to try to fill in the blanks, Young said. Why did the couple leave Colorado? Who forgot the heirlooms in the safe? Did they own so much jewelry that 20 missing items worth hundreds of thousands of dollars could go unnoticed? Was there, Stapleton speculated, perhaps some bad memory attached to the items in the box?

When asked for her best theory, Gardelli said, “The only thing I could guess is that the family possibly thinks that another family member has the property.”

Superintendent Tom Wilke’s repair list goes on. Just a short walk away, in the town’s junior-senior high school, he points out the art room where sewage backs up during heavy rain. Almost half of the 95-year-old building’s classrooms regularly have no heat, he notes. And then there’s the auditorium.

“This ceiling could cave in tomorrow,” said Wilke, an energetic presence who has led the 151-student district for four years, while also serving as the elementary school principal, high school principal, maintenance director and assessment coordinator. “It’s one thing after another, and it’s never ending.”

But the challenges facing this rural district on Colorado’s arid southeastern plains aren’t so unique. Across the increasingly affluent state, which boasts powerful job growth and one of the highest percentages of college graduates in the country, public K-12 systems are in deep trouble.

Collectively, officials say, Colorado’s 178 school districts have more than $14 billion in infrastructure needs. Spending per student is well below the national average of approximately $12,500 – even below of Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico, which in 2017 posted the nation’s highest poverty rates. Budget shortfalls have stalled teacher pay and forced more than half of all districts to put one or more schools on a four-day week, the largest proportion in the country.

Several dozen superintendents work multiple jobs, and the burnout rate is high: Wilke is leaving Manzanola, and his dream job, on June 30.

“Colorado remains among the least well-funded systems in the nation,” said Bruce Baker, a school finance expert and professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. “They’ve got the ability to spend more. They just don’t.”

The issues here parallel those in numerous states – from West Virginia to California – that have been in the national spotlight recently because of teacher strikes for higher salaries, smaller class sizes and increased education spending. Colorado ranks last for wage competitiveness, and Denver just saw its first teachers’ strike in 25 years, with hundreds walking out for three days following a protracted impasse with Denver Public Schools administrators over the district’s pay system.

“I am a single mom. I have three kids,” teacher Rebecca Ryan said at a school board meeting on Jan. 24. “They are getting fed from a food bank because my salary doesn’t cover my student loans, my living expenses, and I now can’t afford groceries.”

Some of the pressures can be traced to the Great Recession, when Colorado, like many states, slashed K-12 funding. The effects lingered. In nearly half of states, combined K-12 state and local per-student funding from 2008-2016 remained below 2008 levels when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (In Florida and Arizona, funding remained about 23 percent lower.)

Over the past several years, however, Colorado’s economy has rebounded and boomed. It ranks third for job growth in the United States, federal labor statistics show, with its unemployment rate among the lowest of any state. Oil and gas production set record highs.

Tax-adverse voters have not responded. They have repeatedly rejected attempts to raise levies to prop up underfunded school districts, including $1.6 billion statewide initiative in 2018 that would have helped districts cover escalating operating expenses.

“At the end of the day, people wonder, ‘How can you have such a hot economy and not be able to fund your schools?’ ” said Dave Young, the state treasurer who taught middle school math, science and technology for 24 years.

The state provided about $4.7 billion of the $12.3 billion spent on public K-12 schools in 2017-2018 – with local revenue comprising about $5.8 billion and money from the federal government and other sources for the remainder. Most lawmakers and educators agree that Colorado’s school finance formula is woefully inadequate. A constitutional amendment prevents the General Assembly from raising taxes to help districts offset the significant costs of new statewide academic standards, evaluation systems and accountability requirements. Instead, it must seek approval from the electorate.

At the local level, a provision known as the Gallagher amendment limits property tax revenue. This forces districts to repeatedly ask voters to increase property-tax rates to cover additional operational costs or to pay down debt on bonds to build new schools.

Students and parents, many from lower-income communities, tried several years ago to seek more resources through litigation. But the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the public-school financing system, taking away a strategy that has been used elsewhere, such as in Kansas, where the state’s highest court has twice ordered lawmakers to allocate more money to districts.

“There’s no real solution in sight at the local level for the Manzanolas of the world,” Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. “That’s why districts like Manzanola and others really need state leadership in a state funding solution.”

Polis, who took office in January, tapped former state treasurer Cary Kennedy as a senior adviser for fiscal policy and his point person to lay the groundwork for a successful ballot measure by 2020. Polis also has asked the legislature to allocate $227 million for full-day kindergarten – the state funds a half day – which he says will free up $100 million for districts to spend on other needs.

The governor, who served six years on the Colorado State Board of Education and founded several public charter schools for at-risk youth, said he is committed to addressing the “fiscal thicket” of constitutional restrictions that have hamstrung education funding for decades. He plans to work with the state treasurer to “free up additional funds,” such as marijuana tax revenue, for building new schools in high-poverty districts.

Polis is appealing to a tough crowd. In 2018, for the third time in 13 years, an effort to rewrite the state’s finance formula to reduce inequities among urban, suburban and rural school systems failed.

“We really have a system of haves and have-nots, and the spectrum is widening at each end,” warned Walt Cooper, superintendent of the Cheyenne Mountain School District in the southwest corner of Colorado Springs.

Lawmakers are aware of this gap: A key committee is considering a Robin Hood-type bill that would attempt to address the funding chasm between wealthier and poorer districts. But the proposal, introduced in late February, may not have enough support to advance.

“It’s important to at least have the discussion to see if there’s a path forward politically,” said state Sen. Dominick Moreno, a Democrat.

While troubling disparities between rich and poor districts exist in virtually every state, the gap here is especially stark. In the affluent ski community of Telluride, student performances take place in a state-of-the-art, 30,000-square-foot theater constructed through a public-private partnership. In the tiny town of Blanca, in south-central Colorado, the school district spends nearly a third of its $940,663 budget on utilities because its lone 63-year-old school has so little insulation and its outdated heating and cooling systems run on propane.

Superintendents say outdated curriculums, technology and infrastructure in districts unable to pass measures to increase property taxes can impede student performance on statewide assessments.

“When you’re using materials that are a decade or more old, that’s a challenge,” said Superintendent Chris Fiedler, whose district, 27J Schools, sits on Denver’s northern edge in the suburb of Brighton. Voters there have rejected 10 of 15 requests since 2000 to raise property taxes for operational costs or to fund debt on bond measures to build new schools. Until this year, some textbooks still in use were so outdated that they did not stretch beyond the Clinton presidency.

The district, whose student population has doubled to nearly 18,000 over the past decade, ranks near the bottom for total per-student funding in the metropolitan area. Given its less-than-competitive base salary, it switched to a four-day week this school year to attract teachers. Its state funding shortfall since 2009 exceeds $144 million.

“I call that Colorado’s broken promise to their kids,” Fiedler said, as he thumbed through a stack of spreadsheets showing how poorly the district has fared compared to its peers in a dizzying kaleidoscope of funding measures. “It’s really depressing.”

When local measures fail, districts have few alternatives. Aging facilities are patched rather than repaired or replaced. And administrators like Manzanola’s Wilke pray that the auditorium ceiling holds.

Voters in the fading agricultural outpost turned down bond proposals in 2017 and again last year. The losses left Wilke emotionally exhausted and frustrated. His students – most of whom qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch – deserve more, he says.

The measure defeated in 2018 asked voters to approve raising property taxes by $2 million. The money would have been added to a major grant from the state to renovate the town’s junior-senior high school and acquire adjacent land for a new gym and an elementary school addition.

Resident Jeanne Smith volunteered to visit every home to discuss the details. She said her neighbors want what’s best for their kids. But some don’t have heat or water. Some have holes in their roofs and floors. In the end, they could not stomach a tax increase – even one that might have cost only $10 more a month.

“Many people here are disabled or retired and on a fixed income,” said Smith, who also lives on a tight budget. “They are making the decision: Do we eat the cat food, or let the cat eat the cat food?”

That����ap the estimate from the Polis administration to keep federal programs such as food assistance and housing vouchers going in Colorado through the end of June if the shutdown isn’t resolved.

Polis shared the numbers with the congressional delegation and the General Assembly’s budget committee Wednesday.

Polis has yet to decide whether to ask the legislature to float those programs, which are run by state agencies. But the budget committee chairman told my colleague Anna Staver he isn’t sure the state is in a position to extend a lifeline if the federal government can’t guarantee reimbursement.

“It becomes an extremely difficult decision. Quite frankly, it����ap a budget buster if we have no guarantee the federal government will pay us back,” state Sen. Dominick Moreno, a Democrat, said. “We’re put in this awful position.”

Polis is expected to share more information with the budget committee Monday.

Here’s a breakdown on how much money the state receives for some food and housing assistance programs, per the Polis administration:

• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, run by the Department of Human Services, $60 million per month
• Women Infants and Children, run by the Department of Public Health and Environment, $6.5 million
• Housing Choice Vouchers, run by Department of Local Affairs, $4.5 million
• Subsidized lunches for public school students, run by the Department of Education, $21.9 million
• Child and Adult Care Food Program run by the Department of Public Health and Environment, $2.1 million

All told, more than 583,000 Coloradans, 229,000 households and 178 school districts rely on this assistance each month. According to the Polis administration, funding for SNAP, WIC and housing vouchers will run out on March 1. Money for school lunches will run dry on April 1, and the last food program will be broke by May 31.

“These are programs that impact the lowest-income Coloradans. That honestly makes it all the more complicated,” Moreno said. “We’re in an untenable situation here.”

The state agencies that administer these programs aren’t sure whether the federal government would pay them back if they used state money to fill the gap until federal funding returns. They’re trying to get an answer, but their task is complicated by the fact that many of their federal counterparts are furloughed.

Shutdown or not, we’ll see you here next week. — Nic Garcia

Welcome to The Spot, The Denver Post����ap weekly political newsletter. Keep the conversation going by joining our ! Forward this newsletter to your colleagues and encourage them to . And please support the journalism that matters to you and become a Denver Post subscriber . Send tips, comments and questions to ngarcia@denverpost.com.

Countdown

60 days until the budget is introduced in the Senate; 99 days until the General Assembly adjourns

Your political digest

• Colorado bill allowing medical marijuana use for autism advances. Denver Post
• Colorado is pushing back on Colorado President Donald Trump’s policies. Denver Post
• Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner to propose paying federal workers during the government shutdown. Denver Post
• Anti-fracking activists sue Colorado over “forced pooling,” and they’re promising more challenges. Denver Post
• Colorado lawmaker wants to ban cell phone use while driving. Denver Post
• This scientist from Superior is Gardner’s latest challenger. Denver Post
• Editorial: Gardner is breaking with Republicans on Trump’s wall — and it����ap the right thing to do. Denver Post
• Democratic darling Beto O’Rourke visited Pueblo last week. Denver Post
• Walker Stapleton’s beard is incredible. And he knows it.
• Five reasons why state Rep. Lori Saine is Colorado’s nastiest and most clueless politician.
• Colorado’s U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse is picking the wrong fight with Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
• We can’t save everything from climate change – here’s how to make choices.
• In (Colorado) Trump country, Republicans cheer on shutdown.
• Mitch McConnell got everything he wanted. But at what cost?

Capitol diary

Jared Polis, Colorado’s first social media governor

Nearly every night, just as I’m about to shut my eyes, it seems my phone vibrates with an alert. Gov. Jared Polis has tweeted.

If President Donald Trump is known for his early-morning policy and personnel declarations, Polis is quickly gaining a reputation for his evening and late-night musings:

• At midnight Jan. 16, a link to a story about his budget request.
• At 6:35 p.m. Jan. 19, Dolly Parton a happy birthday.
• At 12:17 a.m. Jan. 20, a link to a study on universal basic income.
• At 10:11 p.m. Jan. 20, a picture of the Super Wolf Blood Moon.
• At 11:49 p.m. Jan. 21, of emojis and an article about green energy.

And people are paying attention. That last tweet got 374 likes and 63 retweets.

Polis alone is tweeting from his personal handle, . His communications team runs the official account. However, we’ve been told he approves every tweet, Facebook post and Instagram picture to ensure continuity of voice.

Polis social media savvy shouldn’t come as a surprise. He dominated his opponents on social media during the campaign.

Here’s how Polis’ Facebook interaction grew during the general election, according to the social media tracking website CrowdTangle.

It wasn’t just in the general election. Polis’ social media dominance can be traced back to at least the primary. Here’s how his Facebook interaction thumped his biggest Democratic competitors, Cary Kennedy and Mike Johnston.

Why does all of this matter? Since 2008 politicians have been experimenting with social media to get their message out to voters. In 2016, Trump taught a master class to Republicans, and now Democrats are scrambling to catch up. Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a social media rock star, to teach Democratic elder statesmen how to use social media to better connect with voters.

We’re going to Iowa. What do you want to know?

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is heading to Iowa this weekend for a few meet-and-greets with some of the nation’s first primary voters. Your faithful correspondent is also backing his bags for a trip to the Hawkeye State. While I’m out there, I want to get answers to your questions regarding Hickenlooper and the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Shoot me an email or a , and I’ll do my best to get you an answer.

Senate Republicans flex their minority muscles

State lawmakers, lobbyists and political observers are accustomed to late-night debates. But the ritual of debating policy and eating pizza on a paper plate on the floor is usually reserved for springtime.

This year, a prime-time drama came on the 20th day.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans launched an all-out effort to stop a Democratic bill from advancing during a floor debate. They tried to attach 13 different amendments to the bill, forcing hours of debate and grandstanding. The debate went so long the Senate adjourned so committees could meet, picking up where they left off shortly after 7 p.m.

The legislation in question, sponsored by state Sens. Tammy Story and Rachel Zenzinger, both of Jefferson County, stripped language from a bill Gov. John Hickenlooper signed into law last that a trial court found unconstitutional.

Let����ap back up. Last year, Senate Republicans attached an amendment that would allow school districts to run their buses across the state without first getting consent from other districts to a bill. Conservative advocates believed this would help solve a long-standing inequity issue when it comes to school choice. (.)

School districts sued, claiming the amendment didn’t fit under the bill title. They won. The ruling was appealed.

“This is going to Supreme Court,” said state Sen. Owen Hill, a Colorado Springs Republican and the amendment’s sponsor.

As he sees it, Democrats are trying to get the language off the books so a court can’t overturn the lower court ruling.

Democrats say they’re simply trying to clean up the mess created last year.

Zenzinger told me if Republicans believe the language in question is good policy, they should run a bill.

The day of drama ended rather anticlimactically as Democrats passed the bill and the Senate adjourned at about 8:45 p.m.

What does all this political theater mean for the remaining 99 days? Education lobbyists I spoke to last night were spooked but Zenzinger said “it����ap too soon to tell.”

Conservative group says Washington should find a permanent solution for Dreamers

Amid the government shutdown, which is centered on President Trump’s demand for a border wall, the Colorado branch of Americans For Prosperity, a political nonprofit established by the Koch network, is urging Colorado’s senators to prioritize a permanent legal solution for Dreamers.

They are individuals who were unlawfully brought to the United States as children and are the subject of the long-proposed DREAM Act to allow them to stay legally. Hundreds of thousands of them have been living in legal limbo since Trump ended an Obama administration executive order that granted temporary protection from deportation.

AFP-CO State Director Jesse Mallory said in a statement:

“The offer to couple a temporary protection for Dreamers with border security funding is a commendable first step, but it����ap not enough. Lawmakers must work toward a package that provides permanent legal status for Dreamers along with funding that increases border security.”

Earlier this year, the Koch network, led by businessman Charles Koch, announced it would push for a permanent solution for Dreamers.

Union membership is up

New data from the federal government shows union membership in Colorado increased to 11 percent of the total workforce in 2018, up from 9.6 percent in 2017, the state’s largest labor association announced in a media release Wednesday.

“Our members understand that the power of number with unions means more than any court decision,” Josette Jaramillo, president of the Colorado AFL-CIO, said in the statement. “When we stand together as workers, we are stronger!”

According to the union, Colorado’s union membership rate is slightly higher than the national average.

Polis’ transition team announced these senior staff hires Thursday afternoon:

• Eve Lieberman, chief policy adviser and legislative counsel. She’s currently chief of staff to Polis’ 2nd Congressional District office.
• Jacki Cooper Melmed, chief legal counsel. She has held that job in the Hickenlooper administration since 2015.
• Lauren Larson, director of the Office of State Planning and Budgeting. Hickenlooper hired her for the same position in July.
• Cary Kennedy, senior adviser for fiscal policy. She is the former state treasurer and CFO of the city of Denver. Kennedy also ran for governor in the Democratic primary but subsequently campaigned for Polis.
• David Oppenheim, legislative director. He was most recently state director of State Innovation Exchange.
• Wade Buchanan, policy director. He held the same title under Gov. Roy Romer and also was Gov. Hickenlooper’s senior adviser on aging.
• Maria De Cambra, director of communications and community engagement. She is managing director at the Campaign for a Strong Colorado. 
• Danielle Oliveto, deputy chief of staff. She’s a former congressional and campaign staffer for Polis.
• Kate Siegel Shimko, director of boards and commissions. She was Congressman Polis’ national finance director.

The incoming governor’s transition team is continuing to fill Cabinet positions, reviewing more than 700 applications.

The state treasurer also traveled Colorado prominently in 2013 to warn voters off a proposed income tax hike for education. Three years later, he trained his cross hairs on a ballot proposal that would usher in “ColoradoCare,” a $36 billion single-payer health care system. Both times, voters overwhelmingly heeded the calls.

Now, in his run for governor, the two-term Republican has pitched his campaign as a series of warnings about the next big threats to the state’s budget and economy.

For Stapleton, the intense concentration on fiscal perils — this time as a way of attacking Democrat Jared Polis’ plans for universal health care, state-backed preschool, expansion of renewable energy and other promises — is rooted in a world view heavily influenced by his time in business. Though he comes from a political family with two storied branches, the Stapletons and the Bushes, the 44-year-old cut his teeth in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, earned a Harvard MBA and then got into real estate, eventually taking the reins of a family-controlled business.

“We believe we can solve all of these challenges in Colorado, but the government will not solve these challenges for us,” he told nodding volunteers who gathered in a supporter’s kitchen nook on a recent Saturday morning in Superior. They were preparing to knock on doors, and he thanked them for carrying “what I think is a really important message of economic opportunity — and how we keep that opportunity going in the state of Colorado.”

The fiscal-first campaign approach hearkens back to Colorado’s last Republican governor, Bill Owens, who served from 1999 to 2007.

But Stapleton faces a very of-the-moment question in 2018: Will the focus on budgets inspire Colorado’s swing voters in a state that’s been trending blue, especially in an increasingly fractured political age dominated by Donald Trump?

Though he enthusiastically embraced some Trump policies ahead of the June primary, Stapleton’s general-election focus has been on the fiscal message that worked well for him in the past. He began railing against short-sighted decisions surrounding the PERA pension fund during his 2010 campaign, unseating Democrat Cary Kennedy. He kept it up through this spring’s passage of a bipartisan bill to shore up the system.

Along the way, he received credit for raising the issue’s profile, while facing grumblings that his public stands didn’t always advance the debate about solutions.

Family matters on the trail

On the campaign trail, one thing becomes apparent about Stapleton right off the bat: He’s a family man.

In stump speeches, the Greenwood Village resident often names three other people before digging into Polis: His children, 4-year-old Olivia, 7-year-old CoCo and 10-year-old Craigie. He has plenty of dad jokes, and he’s getting better at landing the punchlines.

One story he’s told repeatedly in recent weeks has Craigie, who’s named after Stapleton’s father, Craig, complaining that he isn’t getting paid for helping the campaign.

At a recent meeting of Republican women candidates and activists in Westminster, Stapleton then pivoted to his proud-father quip: “I realized that my wife, with an assist from me, has raised this kid as a capitalist.”

The line drew plenty of laughs and hinted at a lighter-hearted Stapleton than people usually see on the campaign trail. His intensity often ramps up when he speaks into a microphone, with his attacks on Polis sometimes delivered so forcefully that the tone overshadows his message. During recent debates, his nerves have been visible on occasion.

In conversation, though, a self-deprecating affability comes to the fore.

“If he could meet one-on-one with every person in the state, he definitely would win by a landslide,” said his wife, Jenna, in an interview.

She said she knew Walker had a taste for politics when she married him 12 years ago. She moved to Colorado from New York City, where they’d met and begun dating long distance.

Campaign speaking may not always come naturally for Stapleton, but it’s indisputable that politics runs in his blood.

He grew up in affluent Greenwich, Conn., and Stapleton’s mother, born Dorothy Bush Walker, is a cousin of former President George H.W. Bush. Stapleton says one of his greatest memories is fishing one-on-one with him in 1980, when he was 6, just after Ronald Reagan had tapped Bush as his vice presidential running mate.

When George W. Bush became president in 2001, he appointed Craig Stapleton as ambassador to the Czech Republic and then, during his second term, to France.

On his father’s side, Walker Stapleton is the grandson and great-grandson of a pair of Benjamin F. Stapletons who were prominent Colorado Democrats. The younger one was a party chairman who advised former Sen. Gary Hart, among others. Earlier, Benjamin Stapleton Sr. served five terms as Denver mayor — and initially was a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan, though the KKK expelled him after city vice crackdowns targeted Klansmen. He died 24 years before Walker Stapleton was born.

“The history of my family in Colorado is really a history of the Democratic Party in the state of Colorado,” Stapleton said in an interview — but his personal political alignment followed the Bush side.

Making the move from business to politics

The capitalist punchline to Stapleton’s joke about Craigie underlines his business career prior to his foray into politics.

He got his start at a Wall Street investment firm in New York City in his early 20s. Soon he took off for the Bay Area in northern California, receiving stock options at a couple startups while the late 1990s internet tech boom was underway. After earning his business degree from Harvard, he switched to real estate and moved in 2003 to Denver, fulfilling a desire to live in Colorado from boyhood visits to his grandparents. He got a job acquiring strip malls for Lamar Companies.

He also became involved with Sonoma West, a commercial property holding company in northern California’s wine country in which his family held a major stake, while investing in real estate elsewhere (including as far away as the Czech Republic). He was named Sonoma West’s chairman, CEO and president in 2005.

“The business was having some problems of mismanagement,” he recalled. “It was too small of a company to be public. … So we reordered the board, changed it around, and I became more and more involved. And then we started a process, which was long, to go private.”

The company changes continued past the 2010 election.

His victory as a newcomer in the treasurer’s race, after winning a competitive primary against J.J. Ament and then the main race against Kennedy, the incumbent, came after he faced a flurry of TV ads highlighting an embarrassment: his admitted drunken-driving arrest in 1999 in downtown San Francisco, when he was 24.

His Jeep Cherokee and a taxi cab collided in an intersection. The major question left unresolved by police documents was whether Stapleton — whom police described as “loud and belligerent” — committed a hit and run, as originally charged. He failed to stop for two blocks, but he has insisted he was trying to get clear of traffic. Regardless, that charge was dismissed in his plea deal.

“I served my time in community service,” Stapleton says now. “It����ap now 20 years old and I have moved on and learned from it.”

For the first year after the election, Stapleton spent a significant amount of time moonlighting for Sonoma West as a well-paid consultant, finishing up the company’s going-private transaction. That drew criticism from Democrats. Stapleton says he hasn’t done work for Sonoma West since late 2011.

His tenure as treasurer has given him plenty to be proud of — and plenty of grist for opponents. In some cases, those two currents focus on the same things.

The office is charged with investing state tax dollars. Stapleton faced questions about potential conflicts of interest, given his holdings and investments. He said he set up a blind trust. But Democrats have renewed those concerns in 2018, in large part because Stapleton’s financial disclosure forms for years erroneously cited the wrong entity as the blind trust.

The Denver Post confirmed that he set up the Walker R. Stapleton Blind Trust in early 2011 with an-out-of-state trustee who is a certified public accountant. Stapleton’s campaign says nearly all of his holdings and investments, with a few minor exceptions, are contained within the trust.

Another point of pride and controversy is rooted in the office’s oversight of a raft of unclaimed property in search of its rightful owners. An aggressive marketing strategy under Stapleton has led to record claims for the Great Colorado Payback program. But complaints also spiked as the treasurer’s staff struggled to keep up.

Position provided perch for PERA advocacy

While Stapleton claims credit for strides made on reforming PERA, the troubled pension system, he  that he brought perhaps too much bombast to his early advocacy.

His election handed him a prominent perch — and made him one of 15 voting members on the PERA board.

The state legislature had approved a reform package in 2010 that raised the retirement age for teachers and state workers, cut benefits and increased taxpayer contributions. But Stapleton argued beginning in the campaign that the changes didn’t go far enough in addressing PERA’s underfunded obligations.

He wasn’t the only one on PERA’s board with concerns, but he quickly set himself apart — most strikingly with a lawsuit he filed against PERA and 14 board members during his first year in office. He was seeking benefits data for the top 20 percent of beneficiaries, stripped of identifying information, and called for transparency.

“If responsible board members had asked these questions at an Enron or a Countrywide or a Lehman Brothers, we would have gone a lot further in addressing the problems that occurred,” Stapleton said at the time.

Though Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, backed him at one point, Stapleton lost the two-year court battle, and it bred distrust with teachers’ unions and other PERA interest groups.

He now calls the lawsuit “probably the most uncomfortable decision I’ve made.” But he maintains it was the right call.

Stapleton’s repeated pressure to lower PERA’s assumed rate of return and make other changes played out largely outside board meetings, where Stapleton often stopped by briefly or was represented by a deputy.

Ultimately, Colorado legislators this year passed a new reform measure that shores up PERA in significant ways. It didn’t go as far as Stapleton wanted, though, and it hewed closer to a framework approved by the PERA board last fall, with Stapleton dissenting.

Some current and former board members argue that Stapleton’s penchant for blistering public statements and news conferences prolonged the reform discussion.

“In terms of, did Walker have a major impact on what happened and changes that were made? No,” said Lynn E. Turner, who left the board this summer after serving for 11 years. “To say he deserves credit for that is woefully misleading.”

But state Sen. Kevin Priola, a Republican involved in crafting this year’s bill, gave Stapleton more credit.

“I definitely didn’t have the bully pulpit that Walker Stapleton did,” Priola said. “He was one of the folks who tried to keep it out front and keep the focus alive — and not the folks who said, ‘There’s nothing to fix here.’ ”

Easy friendships across the aisle

On a personal level, Stapleton’s sincerity and one-on-one amiability has made it easy for him to form friendships with people across the political spectrum, says a close friend, John Hereford, founder of Oak Leaf Energy Partners in Denver.

Among them are Hickenlooper and now-Sen. Michael Bennet, also a Democrat. Hereford, a Republican, recalls the foursome’s “epic, epic matches” playing squash more than a decade ago, when Hickenlooper was the Denver mayor. Stapleton also has spent time taking in jazz performances with current Mayor Michael Hancock since both participated in a bipartisan fellowship program.

Hickenlooper’s courtship of his wife, Robin Pringle Hickenlooper, a corporate executive and longtime friend of Jenna Stapleton, was aided by an early encounter at the Stapletons’ home; later, the Stapleton daughters were flower girls in the wedding.

“We need more of that,” Hereford said of the bipartisan bridge-building, “so that the politics don’t descend into some fractious argument over every issue.”

Stapleton is socially conservative on most issues, as he emphasized during last spring’s hard-fought primary. He received an assist when immigration hardliner Tom Tancredo introduced him at the GOP assembly.

And he took pains to underline points of agreement with President Donald Trump, especially on immigration and his tax-cut package. Yet he also said that he’d push back on policies he considered misguided or bad for Colorado — a distinction he’s played up more recently as he tries to appeal to a broader spectrum of voters.

That middle position may put him in an awkward spot with Republican die-hards who love the president. But no matter — Trump tweeted a “complete and total” endorsement of Stapleton on Wednesday, one his campaign embraced.

In the end, it’s his focus on fiscal responsibility that Stapleton hopes will have wide appeal.

“I think that if you’re running for governor, you need to explain to people how you’re going to pay for things,” he said at the Republican women’s event. “Because if you don’t,” he added, “that leads to empty government promises.”

A new TV ad in the Colorado governor’s race uses misleading editing to accuse Republican Walker Stapleton of supporting a transfer of state money from schools to prisons.

The attack ad, run by Democrat Jared Polis’ campaign, is simple and effective, riffing off Stapleton’s public comments during his 2010 campaign for treasurer about competing funding priorities in the state budget.

Only the ad doesn’t provide that context, making some claims misleading or false.

Here is a fact-check of the ad.

The ad’s basics

The ad begins with fast-cutting images of students and schools, and a narrator says: “Pencil … penned in. Textbook … getting booked. Locker … lock-up. Public schools … or prisons. Coloradans value education and opportunity, except for Walker Stapleton. Stapleton says Colorado spends too much on schools, and that Colorado ought to spend that education money on prisons. It’s true.”

A clip of Stapleton then plays to back up that claim (more on that shortly). The narrator concludes, “That is Walker Stapleton, and that is not Colorado.”

Evaluating the ad’s claims

Claim 1: Stapleton doesn’t value public education
Verdict: False

Stapleton has put a good deal of focus on education in the campaign, beginning back in the primary, though Democrats have criticized many of his ideas. His focus, though, largely has been on how the state and school districts have funded the public education system and whether they have spent the money wisely.

He’s that include an expansion of charter schools, a back-to-school shopping sales tax holiday, tax-free savings accounts that parents could use for some education-related expenses and a greater focus on reducing what he sees as administrative bloat.

“The structure for K-12 education funding is broken,” he said in a June Republican primary debate. “We need more transparency to understand where our money is actually going and why it is not ending up in the classroom.”

Claim 2: Stapleton says Colorado spends too much on schools
Verdict: True

Stapleton has been clear that, in his view, too little public spending on education goes to pay teachers or to benefit students directly. He showing that spending levels on administration are growing faster than funding for classrooms in most school districts in the state. The upshot is that he wants to tilt that balance toward classrooms to improve the quality of education.

Claim 3: Stapleton thinks Colorado should spend education money on prisons
Verdict: Misleading

The video bases this claim on an altered quote from the 2010 race.

At the time, Stapleton vocally supported the repeal of voter-passed Amendment 23, which requires an automatic annual increase in the state’s basic per-student funding for schools. He argued that it was exacerbating disparities elsewhere in the budget, which at the time was feeling the effects of the Great Recession. He was running to unseat Democratic Treasurer Cary Kennedy, the chief author of Amendment 23, and he succeeded.

The Cañon City Daily Record that Stapleton said the measure’s repeal could help open a new prison in the area by creating a situation where “education competes for funds.”

At an event in Loveland — where the clip in the Polis ad comes from — : “In my opinion, because of automatic ratchets in our budget, we’re already spending too much unchecked money as it is on education, and we don’t have enough money to go around. And this is money that could be used for correction services and money that can be used for infrastructure.”

In the ad, Stapleton’s comments are condensed to: “We’re already spending too much unchecked money as it is on education, and this is money that could be used for correction services.”

Devoid of context, that edited quote creates the incorrect impression that Stapleton wanted to transfer state money directly from education to prisons. He meant that removing Amendment 23’s education-funding restrictions would give more freedom to lawmakers to weigh spending priorities across the board — though that could have resulted in a net decrease in state education spending.

Stapleton sees the program — which returned more money during his tenure than all previous years combined — as one of his better known successes. Democrats, however, hope to turn that popularity against him by convincing voters the program has been mismanaged and the two-term treasurer is to blame.

The Great Colorado Payback started in 1989 as a way to tell people about all the unclaimed property the state keeps, such as the contents of forgotten safe deposit boxes and bank accounts. The division didn’t do much advertising until Democrat Cary Kennedy became treasurer and started running television ads.

When Stapleton took office in 2010, he established a tradition of timing his TV ads with March Madness, the spring college basketball tournament. And that’s when things took off.

The program grew from about 60,000 claims per year to nearly 140,000 in 2017, spokeswoman Rachel George said. The size of the staff and its methods for processing claims, however, remained the same. The result was a mess.

“This will be my fourth request to you since my initial email on July 19 to Erin to resolve the pending claim …,” Courtney Smith wrote in a September 2017 email to a Great Colorado Payback employee. “The last time I received a response from you was on September 5 in which you said you would touch base with me the following day. It is now the 24th of September.”

Another email came from a grandmother named Dianne Ehalt who wrote the office in October 2016 to complain that she had been waiting more than a year and a half for the program to send her $10,000. She wanted to use part of the money for her granddaughter’s education.

“Well, she is struggling without this assistance,” Ehalt wrote. “What is going on???”

The Denver Post reviewed emails sent to the program in 2016, 2017 and 2018. These emails detailed the frustrations of dozens of people who said they had sent two, three and even four unreturned requests for updates about their claims. Seven of those complainants wrote that they had been waiting more than a year.

In July, three Democrats from Colorado’s Senate pointed to previously published emails as proof of the program’s alleged mismanagement. They wrote to the Legislative Audit Committee and asked its members to investigate the unclaimed property office.

“This is not good government, and clearly signifies a department that needs to be held accountable for improving their policies and internal procedures,” according to the letter from Sens. Andy Kerr of Lakewood, Rhonda Fields of Aurora and Kerry Donovan of Vail.

The letter came less than 100 days before Colorado voters pick their next governor, and its accusations fit into a larger political narrative of incompetency Democrats hope to create around the Republican candidate.

Stapleton and his team believe changes they have made over the last two years tell a different story.

“From our perspective, we have made a lot of progress,” he told The Denver Post. “It’s been a long odyssey to try to improve the performance of that department over many months and years.”

Stapleton and others in his office said efforts to fix problems with the unclaimed property division started in 2016.

Those changes started at the top.

“I think that over decades of service the mentality of the leadership over there became unresponsive …,” said Deputy Treasurer Ryan Parsell. “When they got so many calls that their voicemail broke, the solution wasn’t ‘Well, maybe we need to be doing something to get a better return call policy.’ It was ‘We need a bigger voicemail box so it doesn’t break.’ ”

Stapleton picked a new leader for the program in 2017 and changed how the job was classified.

“If the person running the program is not doing a good job, they can be fired and replaced whereas previously that was not easy to do,” said George, the agency’s spokeswoman.

Employees spent five months converting from a paper system to a digital one, which now allows people to file supporting documents electronically. The treasurer’s office partnered with a background check company to automatically verify the identity of people whose claims are $100 or less. They even got a new phone system.

“I don’t think it’s a story of perfection,” George said. “But it is a good story of success.”

Stapleton still has things he wants to change. State law requires a notary to verify someone’s identity if his or her claim is worth more than $100. He thinks that limit should be higher, and he’s interested in exploring possibly more modern methods for verifying who people are.

“I’m very happy to see they’re taking this seriously,” Sen. Donovan said. “I wish it would have been taken seriously day one when the office was put under control of Walker Stapleton.”

Change in government happens slowly, Stapleton said. It took more than a year to change job classifications for employees in that department. He also doesn’t think there’s “an appetite” to hire more people to process claims.

Colorado’s unclaimed property division has 14 employees. Utah’s division employs half as many people to process about 15 percent of the claims that Colorado does. Iowa processes about 35 percent as many claims with a staff of 11.5 full-time employees.

“My job is to try and be as effective and efficient with the resources I’m given,” Stapleton said.

He isn’t worried about being audited, either.

“We welcome an audit,” Stapleton said. “We want to make sure that the department is continuing to improve, so we measure that improvement.”

The State Auditor’s Office started laying the groundwork for a performance audit at the beginning of 2018, but it had to postpone those plans because other audits had priority.

“We are probably the only people in the state who were sad when the auditors weren’t going to look at our stuff anymore,” Parsell said.

The deputy treasurer contacted the auditor’s office in June — more than a month before Democrats penned their letter — to ask to get back on the schedule.

That was news to Donovan.

She told The Denver Post she wouldn’t have signed the letter asking for an audit if she had known one was already in process.

The Treasurer’s Office said all she had to do was ask.