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Please wait while we transition from the Colorado Senate campaign to Barrett's personal website that will cover politics, community affairs, and local interest in Fort Collins.

The Three Candidates

John, Syndi, and me at a candidate forum sponsored by students from Poudre High School

(Photo by Dawn Madura/The Coloradoan)

Amendment 65 (Colorado Congressional Delegation to Support Campaign Finance Limits)

Generally this initiative will look and feel like a way to reform campaign finance laws, an effort we need to work on at the state and federal level. I would preface my position by pointing out that I am the only 14th Senate District candidate to accept voluntary spending limits for my campaign so I hope I have demonstrated that I think money plays a far too important role in politics. That being said Amendment 65 is a well-intentioned but ultimately problem-ridden initiative and I would encourage you to vote no on Amendment 65.

Here is on excerpt from the Colorado Blue Book in opposition to the Amendment:

•   A state ballot measure cannot require elected representatives in




Congress or the state legislature to support or vote for certain laws and




policies. Therefore, the measure will have no practical effect. Rather




than using Colorado law to make a political statement, those who




advocate for more restrictive campaign finance laws should instead




support congressional candidates who will pursue such changes.







We absolutely need to enact campaign finance reform but we should not give the movement a bad name by passing a law that cannot be enforced, has little or no effect, and may end up making it harder for challengers to defeat incumbents. 

Real campaign finance reform needs hard work and a lot of it. We cannot undo both a century of decaying political ethics and a generation of money corrupting politics in one fell swoop. We must be patient and work together for better electoral laws. Believe me, I'm an independent candidate for the state legislature, I know the system is far from perfect and does not serve the people very well - I still don't think Amendment 65 is the way to go about fixing the problem. 

Amendment S (State Personnel System)

Amendment S will be on the ballot in November and I would like to voice my support for this initiative and ask all Colorado voters to consider supporting it too.

In many ways it is not really controversial, multiple groups have endorsed it and labor unions have generally regarded it with neutrality.

Amendment S will update the state personnel system and, in particular, will do away with some overly cumbersome and unnecessary provisions in the state hiring process.

Click here for more information.

Parties, Independents, and Castles in the Sky

In the course of running for the state legislature most people have told me that they are excited to see a third option on the ballot, others have said that we need not an independent candidate but a new third party. Unfortunately the realities of generating a third party are more than daunting.

Colorado currently has a handful of efforts designed to bring a centrist, moderate party into the fold. The Unity Party exists under such a mission and the byproduct of the recent effort by Americans Elect to nominate a bipartisan/independent ticket for the presidency has left (if only on paper) an Americans Elect party in Colorado. There are also better known alternative parties that usually represent the radical fringes of policy platforms; Libertarians, Greens, and American Constitution among them.

Not surprisingly there is a problem for the loose coalition of independent candidates in Colorado up for election in 2012. Unlike the major parties, though more akin to the people of the state, independents do not always align on complicated issues. While we are working together for a common goal, better representation of the American people, we choose a nuanced and more difficult-to-package style of governance that allows for debate and expects compromise.

For those hoping to see a third, centrist party in the United States or just Colorado I would say that a more likely option is to simply split the Republican Party into a center/center-right GOP and a far-right Conservative major party. If you took the socially-conservative, anti-immigration, xenophobic, Tea Party, moral superiority-based elements out of the Republican Party and left the fiscally conservative, pro-business, state and local control advocates you would have not only three viable parties but also what would be a de facto moderate party in none other than the Republicans. If the Republicans also then adopted a more moderate energy and environment agenda that sought to expand sustainable energy futures while keeping energy affordable, while simultaneously protecting both the environment and the business community you would actually have a force to be reckoned with.

Third parties may only come if they split out of the existing party elements. Believe it or not more Democrats have defected from their brand to become independents and independent candidates than have Republicans, I find that interesting because moderates are more likely to be squeezed out of the GOP as it becomes increasingly hijacked by the far right. The trouble with generating a third party from the ground up is two fold: impatience and money. You cannot start such an effort at the national level and work your way down. For one thing the money required to do so is extraordinary and you cannot compete with the two parties we have, their addiction to the coffers of special interests has left them with a spending power akin to Scrooge McDuck. Second, it just does not make sense to build a castle in the sky; a national movement without state-level and local-level, organized support is doomed to fail. We are impatient in wanting to solve national problems while ignoring the hard work and political realities required to get there.

Instead independents will need to focus on recruiting moderates in local and state legislative races to build the foundations required to stage offensives for state-wide races. If those efforts are replicated across the Union then a national campaign could be possible, instead efforts in this year’s election cycle looked to put a presidential ticket together without grassroots support.

Americans are not built to be complacent creatures. Though we have let our guard down too long and let our politics deteriorate into an entertainment sport, the time is fast approaching when the circus performers we call leaders are swept aside in favor of actual governance and problem solving. 

Health Care and the Role of Personal Responsibility

Today the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and while that is a pivotal milestone in U.S. health policy we must not think that we have somehow solved health care issues. The politics of health care will remain heated and there are more long-term solutions that are less controversial that we need to consider.

There is a great deal of friction when we point to personal responsibility for health as a factor in health care policy. Wellness and disease prevention need to be at the forefront of Colorado's health policy and we cannot hand down government mandates to individuals to address personal choices. Although there are circumstances that make it harder for many people to make good individual choices with regard to health habits we should look at wellness in our health care policy as leadership by example instead of government intrusion.

What I mean is that Colorado's government must work creatively (not something any government is particularly good at) to address wellness. Reducing the costs of compliance with medical directives, educating the public on existing programs and services, encouraging better disease prevention policies, better urban planning, and incentivizing healthy lifestyles will pay dividends for the state.

Colorado must also do more to encourage regular preventive care and wellness exams; we must also work to establish good preventive care habits from infancy to adulthood. To lead by example we should work to incentivize and reward personal wellness within the framework of our state's massive public employee health care benefits programs.

Our motivation for proactive health care policies should come from two sources: (1) it is the right thing to do and shows that we are an efficient, innovative government and (2) we will save money. By preventing diseases and promoting wellness there will be less drain on our health care system for treatment of things like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, strokes and numerous other conditions that are avoidable through long-term wellness.

Health care policy deserves continued attention. Whether you felt like the Supreme Court's decision today was a victory or a defeat, we cannot afford to lose focus on these issues.

Crossing that bridge now...not when it crumbles beneath us...

According to the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) over 52% of Colorado’s state highways are rated in “poor” condition, up from just 40% in 2006. While that may not seem like a striking figure consider this: 33% of our highways have deteriorated so badly they need $8.6 billion for full reconstruction. In an already tight state budget we need to address our infrastructure needs sooner rather than later so that we invest in Colorado instead of shelling out billions just to repair it.

In Larimer County alone we have 43% of our state highways, about 316 miles worth, rated in poor condition. We also have about 10% of our state highways rated as being too congested for their vehicle loads.

None of this is particularly riveting until you start looking at the damage we are doing to Colorado by delaying answers to our current and future infrastructure needs. CDOT estimates that, under current funding, in the next 25 years we will only increase our lane miles by negligible amounts, far less than even 1%. Meanwhile we will increase our population by 50% and increase our demands on the state highway system by 61%. That means we will not have the funds necessary to pay for the demands on state roads, but we will nonetheless overwork them. When we place burdens on state infrastructure that it is not designed to withstand we also deteriorate roads and bridges more quickly; this becomes the worst kind of double-edged sword for the state: we do not adequately fund our infrastructure development only to find that the costs of maintaining it become extraordinary.

If you are looking for an even more alarming number, CDOT has identified about 750 rockfall sites that threaten motorists around the state, a problem unique to states with mountainous regions. CDOT only has funding to provide mitigation (nets and planned blasts) for about five of those locations each year.

Over the next 10 years, just to reach a moderate level of infrastructure quality for bridges, pavement, and maintenance, we need to come up with $390 million/year, or $3.9 billion over 10 years, just to keep Colorado from looking like a zombie movie.

None of this includes what we need for snowplow removal, preparing the Front Range corridor for the needs of I-25 and I-70, or CDOT operating in a state that routinely sees blizzard conditions and has the highest average elevation of any state in the Union.

There are ways to fix this problem but the worst thing we can do is wait. If we wait we will not have to spend money now - even though we are delaying projects that do need funding this instant – but that just means we will have to spend even more later than if we behaved responsibly today.

How to do better:

Because we have not updated our fuel taxes in twenty years we are effectively bringing in about 42-cents on the dollar for infrastructure spending compared to the early 90s. In addition, tax revenues slated for infrastructure are dependent upon the number of gallons sold and not the fluctuating price of fuel, so when we spend money to encourage alternative-fuel vehicles and carpooling we are inadvertently making the infrastructure problems more difficult to solve.

For that reason, and many others, we must support changing Colorado’s gasoline taxes to be based on the price of fuel and not the amount sold. Making gas taxes proportionate to gas demand will have the rare quality of pleasing both liberals and conservatives, to say nothing of moderates.

For conservatives: proportional fuel taxes do not engage us in social engineering or burden families or businesses that consume more fuel.

For liberals: proportional fuel taxes do not punish the state for encouraging sustainable transportation.

For moderates: Colorado will be able to pay for its needs and not waste money in the future, our infrastructure will be competitive, and our state’s roads will not become a disaster zone.

We avoid debating issues like this because there are more controversial topics we want to discuss…we must make procrastination from our state legislators a controversial topic because right now we are giving them license to delay until our only option will be to do too little, too late.