Fear, persecution and self-defense dominated the message this week as hundreds of evangelicals gathered in Colorado Springs for a national conference on Christian political strategy.

The four-day event, called “Breaking the Silence,” was organized to prompt activists to stand up, speak out and defy the godlessness they said reigns in the U.S.

The conference’s program said it all. It featured a photo of a stubble-faced white guy with duct tape over his mouth. As organizers see it, he symbolizes the modern-day follower of Jesus: muted, martyred and oppressed.

The image is a powerful – if not fully accurate – rhetorical flourish from a religious community that has built a century-old, multibillion-dollar media empire replete with television networks, movie studios, multimedia production companies and publishing houses. And that’s just the entertainment side of things.

On Tuesday, Mark Cowart, pastor of the Springs-based Church For All Nations, where the conference took place, stood before about two hundred attendees and tried to harness their sense of persecution into political action.

“We’re not victims. We’re victors,” went his battle cry.

At least, that’s the plan.

Cowart and others aim to galvanize the Christian right against what they see as government tyranny, the power of Satan, and the spirit of the Antichrist in seats of power and influence throughout the U.S. That evil has run deep since 1963, the year John F. Kennedy was assassinated, said traveling preacher Alex McFarland. As he sees it, the country has been plummeting toward hell ever since.

Who, exactly, is responsible for our collective downward spiral? The spotlight this week was on “squeaky wheel” gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender activists who are apparently kissing in the sanctuary, schtupping in church restrooms and hoodwinking activist judges in court. Also, atheists, Muslims, abortionists, big government and the news share the blame for what the silence breakers see as a conspiracy to muzzle them.

At the conference, A-list evangelical speakers outlined lots of ways Christians can set out to heal the country: Hang out with elected officials, run for office, volunteer, vote, befriend homosexuals and lure them away from sin through love and kindness, pray for the country’s leaders (even for President Barack Obama, butt of several jokes about the coming of the Antichrist), support Israel, flaunt the wonders of heterosexual marriage on Facebook, wage legal battles for “religious freedom” in court and build up armed security teams at churches to combat anti-Christian terrorists.

While the specter of last month’s Charleston church shooting fueled the crowd’s anxiety this week, the issues of white supremacy and white anger hardly came up.

Instead, the silence breakers are focusing their ire on the IRS for allegedly targeting pastors who preach about electoral politics at church. Never mind the agency isn’t actually targeting those preachers.

Other items on the agenda include continuing the push to ban abortion – a practice they equate to the Nazi Holocaust – and committing to “disciple” the nation, silence-breaker speak for spreading not only faith in the Bible but political conservatism, too.

“There is an army of God rising up,” Cowart said Monday to a chorus of amens from the crowd.

As this week’s speakers made abundantly clear, that army is staunchly heterosexual, proudly politically incorrect, devout to Fox News and ready to war with big-government, Muslims, atheists, homosexuals, Ivy League intellectuals and anyone else who doubts the fundamentalist vision of the Bible.

For this group of evangelicals, patriotism and religion are inseparable. They want to save the nation by saving Christianity by saving the family by stopping “sodomites” and encouraging family dinners, active fathers and more unplugged time shared between children and married moms and dads – just two of them, of course (and, for goodness sake, they’d better dang well be opposite-sexed).

Rallying behind what the conference’s speakers refer to as “religious freedoms” is at the top of their to-do lists. The crowd here expressed grave concern about the bakers and florists and photographers who, living out “Bible-based” principles, discriminate against same-sex couples by refusing to provide services for their weddings.

As speaker after speaker told it, the church is especially threatened by the June 26, 2015 Supreme Court marriage ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges. 

In a speech Monday, longtime Colorado-based attorney and GOP politico Mike Norton described Obergefell as “the beginning of the end of this nation.” Norton represents and organizes for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal support group founded in the early 1990s to combat what he called the American Civil Liberties Union’s attacks on religious freedom.

Norton and his colleagues (some of whom, he said, consider the five liberals on the Supreme Court to be communists) have been instrumental in organizing Freedom Pulpit Sunday, a day in October when pastors around the country preach about politics. ADF videotapes Freedom Pulpit Sunday sermons and sends them to the IRS in hopes of sparking a legal case that can test out the legality of Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law proposed by then Sen. Lyndon Johnson that blocks nonprofit organizations from political advocacy on specific bills and candidates.

As Norton told it, the law is an affront to the First Amendment and blocks preachers who want to talk about abortion, homosexuality and other “great and controversial issues of our time.” He also said that the law has never been challenged.

So far, fishing for trouble hasn’t worked as a political strategy. Despite all the talk of Uncle Sam persecuting preachers, the IRS has been leaving them alone, Norton said. The ADF, which is hankering a court fight to challenge the Johnson Amendment, can’t seem to drum one up.

Norton, a skilled litigator and calculating strategist in the religious freedom movement, talked about a future filled with more than just legal victories. He said he hopes this week’s conference will help “light a flame of revival throughout this great nation.”

Speakers at “Breaking the Silence” have a long and rich history of evangelical Christian political rhetoric to draw from.

Norton cited 18^th Century preacher Jonathan Edwards as an inspiration, and became teary eyed quoting the personal dictates the revivalist minister lived by: “Resolution One: I will live for God. Resolution Two: If no one else does, I still will.”

During a speech Monday, McFarland evoked the memory of populist Presbyterian politician William Jennings Bryan who fought evolution and Darwinism during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

The silence breakers imagine a not-so-distant future in which ministers will be threatened with jail time if they refuse to officiate weddings for same-sex couples – never mind that nothing in current law suggests that would be the case. They fear believers will be killed in ISIS-like attacks by secular and Muslim terrorists.

Several speakers noted how Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” that the United States was a Christian nation. That letter means a lot to members of this movement, many of whom see themselves as civil rights activists and fear that they, like King, they will be imprisoned for their beliefs.

But unlike MLK, the Silence Breakers are organizing church deacons, pastors and parking attendants to take up arms in churches to be prepared to fight off violent terrorists agitated by congregations’ anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Islam politics.

There are some objections from within the evangelical ranks to the militarization of the church, said Vaughn Baker, a former police officer turned church security strategist, on Tuesday. Some worry armed security compromises the core mission of the church. They don’t want to stand in the way of martyrdom, which helps build new recruits. Besides, some argue, the faithful should be pacifists like Jesus.

Baker doesn’t buy that argument.

“I don’t think Jesus was a pacifist,” said Baker to a flurry of amens. “Let’s wait and see when he comes back if he’s a pacifist. Because he won’t be.”

Photo credit: Breaking the Silence program

In February, commercial painter Juan Deras asked his boss Betty Henry at Craftsman Painting and Decorators Inc. for a respirator mask to protect him from the toxic chemicals he worked with daily. She refused. He complained about the company’s health and safety standards, and she fired him.

Henry told him that it is not her company’s responsibility to provide safety equipment to workers, he told The Colorado Independent.

Deras, who is now preparing for his medical school exams, explained that after a few weeks of working at Craftsman, he began to suffer from shortness of breath, a sore throat and dizziness.

In addition to working with chemicals that made him sick, he rarely received paychecks on time and was forced to use ladders that were dangerously old, broken and too short.

When he complained, Henry did not allow him to enter her office and spoke to him through a cracked door. He said she initially belittled his concerns, saying, “So I’m to give you an armor suit? That’s safety. So I have to tie you to the ladder and tie the ladder to the building? That’s safety.”

After several minutes of calm conversation, Henry said, “If you’re here to cause trouble, we don’t need you.” She fired Deras at the Aurora Craftsman office and slammed the door in his face, he said.

Henry did not return requests for comment on this story.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules require employers to provide safety equipment to employees at no cost. Painters are prone to an array of safety and health risks, ranging from chemical exposure to unsafe equipment and improper training.  These health burdens are aggravated by the fact that many painting companies do not provide health benefits to employees.

In 2013, 294 construction workers fell to their deaths, according to OSHA

The Denver chapter of the International Painters Union and Allied Trades aims to improve working conditions through the Constructing Justice campaign. The campaign works with developers to ensure they don’t contract with companies known to violate workers’ rights.

Over the last year, the Denver painter’s union collected information on wages and workplace security measures.  Conversations with over 600 unionized and non-unionized painters throughout Colorado revealed that workers experience wage theft, poor working conditions and safety hazards.

Leilani Clark, a researcher with the IUPAT District Council 15, explained to The Colorado Independent that the negligence and mistreatment Deras experienced is not an incident isolated to Craftsman. It is an industry-wide problem. 

Many construction companies misclassify workers as independent contractors instead of employees.  This enables subcontractors to evade industry regulations and labor laws and avoid paying federal and state taxes including Medicare, Social Security, workers compensation and unemployment taxes.

For these employers, the financial incentive to misclassify workers is high. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that a business can save 30 percent on labor costs by classifying employees as independent contractors.  Employers playing by the rules end up at a competitive disadvantage and misclassified employees are denied basic protections including medical leave, overtime, minimum wage and unemployment insurance.

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service partnered to counteract the trend through the Misclassification Initiative, which aims to detect and reprimand employers who wrongfully classify workers. In 2011 Colorado became the 11th state to sign the initiative with the hopes of counteracting lost tax revenues.

The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment found that 14.2 percent of the state’s workforce was misclassified in 2010, resulting in $26 million in under-reported chargeable wages. The state’s construction industry is particularly notorious, with over 20.1 percent of workers misclassified as independent contractors. The same report estimates an annual $167 million loss in Colorado Income Tax revenue due to misclassification. 

Florencio Games, a recent immigrant from Honduras, is a prime example of a misclassified worker.  Sitting at the kitchen table of his fluorescent-lit Aurora apartment, Games recounted that he worked 75-hour weeks painting the 360 Degrees apartment complex in Centennial last fall.  During these four months, he worked for Jose Arias, an employee of BTS Painting & Services Inc., but was not classified as an employee.

Florencio Games outside the 360 Denver building where he worked as a painter.

In October, Arias suddenly stopped paying him, and Games was forced to borrow money to keep providing for his sister, wife, two children and sick mother.  After weeks of no pay and financial hardship, he left the job.  To this day, Games says he is owed wages for 22 days of unpaid labor, amounting to $2,400.  He is working with lawyers who specialize in wage-theft cases to sue for back pay.

Games added that the men he worked with are also still owed back wages.  Frequently victims of wage theft are immigrants and workers employed in low-wage industries where they are easily replaced.

The Denver painter’s union regularly files complaints regarding worker misclassification and wage theft.

The union’s Constructing Justice campaign takes the new approach of working directly with developers to raise awareness about the workers’ rights violations in the painting industry. The idea is if big-name developers refuse to contract with companies that violate safety regulations, provide no benefits and steal wages, then painting companies will have a financial incentive to change their practices. 

Two weeks ago, campaign representatives and students met with Michael Barden, the director of facilities projects at the Colorado University of Denver and Anshutz campuses to present a 26 page report that chronicles violations in the painting industry.

CU Denver recently finished construction on a $60.5 million student-commons building. Shamrock Painting was sub-contracted for the project. In 2014 the company received an OSHA violation and was fined for improper safety equipment that exposed an employee to a 40 foot fall on a Denver area construction project. 

Alejandra Colmenero, who graduated from CU Denver this May, was also present at the meeting. She told Barden that her family friend who worked as a painter fell from a ladder and lost his life on the job. She added, “Something like that happening on campus would be incredibly devastating because it’s possible to prevent that situation.”

The group requested that as CU Denver builds its new student wellness center, Barden should ensure the university will hire subcontractors that provide employees with living wages, benefits including sick leave and health insurance and proper safety equipment and training.

They also asked that the university avoid Shamrock Painting Inc. due to its recorded OSHA violation and abstain from hiring companies whose workers have testified to the Denver painter’s union about wage and hour violations, unsafe working conditions and misclassification, including Cornerstone Painting and Coating, Craftsman Painters and Decorators Inc, and Drywall Services Inc.

Barden explained that CU Denver’s developments are regulated by the Colorado State Architect’s contracts. The contracts, he said, are intended to address workers’ rights by requiring contractors to carry insurance liability,  assure workers’ compensation, settle claims for unpaid equipment, and hire a superintendent to oversee construction.

CU Denver goes above and beyond, Barden said, pointing out that the building where the meeting took place is a LEED certified U.S. Green Building. He added that worker safety is a priority, but did not agree to Constructing Justice’s campaign requests, stating that it is a state process and that the university needs to get competitive bids.

Barden did agree to pass the workers’ rights violations information on to his team and to continue the conversation with campaign organizers and the Denver painter’s union. 

Clark, the IUPAT researcher said, “if you ensure that the construction workers on your job sites are getting proficient benefits, pension plans and livable wages, that will ensure that later on their kids have the opportunity to enroll at the University of Colorado.”

According to the Denver painter’s union, UCD has a track record of using irresponsible contractors like Shamrock. Yet campaign organizers see the university’s potential to be a leader pushing the industry toward better labor practices.

 The Denver painter’s union is starting conversations with Corporex and United Properties, too.

Deras, the non-unionized painter fired by Craftsman, said that developers have the responsibility to investigate how companies treat their workers.

The young medical student offers these words of advice to his fellow painters: “Our health is the number one thing to take care of. We need to have good health to keep working and provide for our families. If we don’t take care of ourselves, these companies won’t.”

Photo credit: Karp, Creative Commons, Flickr. 

“I really don’t know what to say to you,” began the letter, written in neat script on prison-issue loose leaf paper.

“But let’s start by bringing what was done in the dark into the light. I have a lot on my heart.”

The heavy-hearted writer, L.C. Jackson, was prosecuted by Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s cold case unit for the 1992 rapes at gunpoint of a mother and her 9-year-old daughter. Jackson has been serving 135 years in Colorado’s prison system since his 2007 conviction.

The letter’s recipient: Clarence Moses-EL, who’s doing his 28^th year behind bars on a different case — a 1987 rape and brutal beating of a woman in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. From the day of his arrest he has said he’s innocent.

L.C. Jackson, photo by Susan Greene

“It’s my truth. It’s the truth. And, sooner or later, it will set me free,” Moses-EL, 59, told The Colorado Independent in a recent prison interview.

Though Moses-EL and Jackson lived in the same housing project in the 1980s, and though Jackson has cycled in and out of the same corrections system where Moses-EL has been housed since his 1989 rape conviction, they’ve said they’ve met only once – more than a quarter century ago at the Denver County Jail, and only in passing.

Each was well aware of the other.

Jackson knew Moses-EL was, at that time, awaiting trial for the rape and beating of Jackson’s neighbor and acquaintaince – a case for which Moses-EL was sentenced to 48 years.

For his part, Moses-EL knew that Jackson was the first man the victim in his case told police attacked her. In fact, she named him several times until, a day and a half later, she changed her story to say Moses-EL’s identity came to her in a dream. What she didn’t mention is that in the weeks leading up to her attack she had been fighting with Moses-EL’s wife and vowed to “get back” at her.

The victim’s dream was the only evidence linking Moses-EL to the attack for which Jackson was never questioned as a suspect. Yet it was enough, amazingly, for a jury to convict him.

Clarence Moses-EL, by Susan Greene

“A dream,” Moses-EL told this reporter in a 2007 Denver Post interview. “I’m in here because of a dream.”

This afternoon, in Denver District Court. L.C. Jackson is scheduled to testify about what he says really happened that night 28 years ago.

Since sending his letter to Moses-EL in 2012, Jackson has admitted to having had rough sex with and beating up the victim in Moses-EL’s case at the exact time and the exact place of her attack. Confessing after all these years, he has told lawyers and investigators, is helping him come clean with his life. It’s a relief, he has said, finally to bring to light what was “done in the dark.”

But Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey has long tried to make sure that what was done in the dark stays shrouded in darkness.

Even though Morrissey has touted his office’s role in solving the cold case mother-daughter rapes for which it won convictions and life sentences against Jackson, he has asserted – falsely, several documents show – that the victim in Moses-EL’s case never named Jackson as her attacker.

Morrissey also has defended his office’s and Denver police’s involvement in destroying all the DNA evidence in Moses-EL’s case – truth-telling evidence that could have freed him more than two decades ago.

After Moses-EL won two court orders and raised $1,000 from fellow inmates to have a rape kit, bedding and the victim’s clothing genetically tested in 1993, police had packaged the items in a box they marked “DO NOT DESTROY.” Then, before the box could be sent to the lab, they threw it in a dumpster.

The lead Denver Police detective on the case said before his death that he had reservations about Moses-EL’s involvement.

What’s more, the details of Jackson’s 1992 rapes of the mother and daughter are remarkably similar to the details in the attack in the Moses-EL case.

“It is long past the time for the truth to come out,” Gail Johnson, one of Moses-EL’s lawyers, wrote in a court filing.

Since being made aware in December 2013 of Jackson’s confession, Morrissey’s office has refused to reopen the case. During that time, Moses-EL’s mother, Eloise Moses, died without having seen her eldest son walk free.

For the past several months, Morrissey’s office has tried to quash new evidence from coming forward in Moses-EL’s post-conviction appeal proceedings. It has said testimony about blood evidence from the scene more likely being Jackson’s than Moses-EL’s isn’t relevant. And Morrissey’s chief deputy, Bonnie Benedetti, has argued that expert testimony debunking the credibility of the victim’s dream identification — as well as other witnesses’ testimonies — would be a waste of the court’s time.

Bent County Correctional Facility, Photo by Susan Greene

Most notably, Benedetti has tried to silence Jackson from testifying today by urging him to lawyer-up and take the Fifth to avoid prosecution, even though he’s already serving more than a life sentence and Benedetti has said in court that the statute of limitations already has tolled. Benedetti has said that in an interview with her, Jackson recanted his confession.

Morrissey, it seems, is unwilling to acknowledge not only that his office may have wrongly prosecuted Moses-EL, but also that Morrissey himself has for nine years willfully refused to reopen Moses-EL’s case since it became clear Jackson’s pattern of violent rape warrants a new investigation.

“Out of an abundance of caution,” his office told The Independent Tuesday, it’s refusing comment.

“This Mitch Morrissey is doing everything he can to cover his behind and hide the truth in this case,” said David Reese, 47, who has flown from Baltimore for today’s hearing in support of the brother who was ripped from his family half a lifetime ago.

“What is it about Denver – convicting a man on nothing but a dream? A dream? Really?

“What’s happened here is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare this man Morrissey and this city need to own up to.”

We’ll keep updating this story at www.coloradoindependent.com. For more background about Moses-EL’s case, see The Colorado Independent’s exclusive coverage.

Top Photo: Moses EL, photo by Susan Greene

A Vietnam veteran who died late last year of severe liver disease complications was a victim of substandard care at the Grand Junction Veterans Affairs Medical Center, according to an investigation by a nationally prominent liver specialist.

In a report released Monday, Dr. Joanne C. Imperial, a fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, cataloged the many missed opportunities at the VA hospital to provide adequate care for veteran Rodger Holmes over an eight-month period in 2014. She called his care “chaotic and reactive rather than proactive.”

Imperial was hired to look into Holmes’ illness and death by advocates who took up the 64-year-old’s case after his social worker at the veterans’ hospital became alarmed at the way the hospital was handling his care. The advocacy group, called Remembering Veteran Rodger Holmes, is hoping that highlighting his case will help more veterans in a health-care system that has come under increasing fire for poor performance nationally.

“This all confirmed my impressions since day one about the extent of the poor medicine practiced in this case,” said Chris Blumenstein, who resigned his social work position at the VA hospital last year in protest over Holmes’ care.

Hospital spokesman Paul Sweeney said he couldn’t comment on the report because the Office of Inspector General is currently doing an investigation of Holmes’ case. Sweeney pointed out that past internal and regional VA reviews of Holmes’ care found it was adequate.

Holmes died Dec. 20, 2014 after going through a high-risk treatment program for advanced hepatitis C. His disease dated back to the 1970s after he served in Vietnam and subsequently began abusing alcohol and became homeless. In the last four years of his life, Holmes had been sober and had been a steady volunteer – driving a van and playing drums – at the Salvation Army in Grand Junction.

Holmes agreed to aggressive treatment for his chronic condition after his primary care provider referred him to a hepatitis C clinic at the Grand Junction hospital in March, 2014. The clinic was staffed by a part-time internist, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and a pharmacist. There was no liver specialist on staff .

The internist recommended Holmes be treated with a trio of antiviral drugs, including interferon, a drug that can have severe side effects. Within weeks, Holmes complained of weakness, dizziness and nausea. But his physician noted in his chart that he was “tolerating the interferon fairly well.”

Holmes continued to get sicker. Several weeks later, he went to the emergency room complaining that he was “sick as a dog.” He was treated for dehydration and sent home.

Less than a week later, at his monthly hepatitis C-clinic appointment, the clinic pharmacist noted that Holmes was beginning to develop liver failure. His interferon treatment was discontinued. But Holmes continued to get sicker and developed an infection.

A liver specialist at a VA hospital in Denver was consulted and recommended that Holmes be referred to specialty liver care in a private Grand Junction hospital or at the University of Colorado hospital. He was not referred.

Instead, Holmes spent 10 weeks in the Grand Junction VA hospital. The hospital was one of the Veterans Administration hospitals cited in a national 2014 study, for providing deficient care to other patients.

When Holmes was discharged, he was provided with home nursing-care visits. On Dec. 2, Holmes called for an ambulance because he was experiencing severe abdominal pain.

He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital where he was diagnosed with a severe infection and multiple-organ failure. He died 18 days later.

Imperial commented in her report that the health care providers at the VA “clearly lacked an in-depth understanding of liver disease.” She noted that providers missed many opportunities to change the course of treatment for Holmes.

“This substandard care is described by a succession of potentially harmful treatment decisions or omissions,” Imperial wrote.

She also noted that many medical-care providers at the hospital “worked diligently and industriously to provide the patient with the best care possible within their abilities.”

But their abilities did not include enough expertise in chronic liver disease.

The Office of Inspector General’s report into Holmes’ care is expected to be released in several months. It was initiated in January after U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet requested a study. U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner wrote a letter stressing the need for a thorough investigation. And the Colorado Legislature also weighed in with a request for action in the case.

Blumenstein said he is giving Imperial’s report to the Inspector General’s investigators, and he has hopes it will have an impact on the findings.

Blumenstein said that Holmes, in his last months, expressed hope that his case would help improve the care given to many other veterans.

“I’ve stuck with this campaign. I promised him on his deathbed that I would,” Blumenstein said. “I told him, ‘I will see this through, my friend’.”

A convicted rapist has confessed in a 1987 sex assault case for which an apparently innocent man is spending his 28th year behind bars.

In light of the confession and other new evidence, Denver District Judge Kandace Gerdes has until October to decide whether to grant a new trial to Clarence Moses-EL, who’s serving a 48-year sentence for an attack he has said – unwaveringly and repeatedly, from day one — he didn’t commit.

Now that Moses-EL’s long-awaited appeals hearing has ended this week, the big question looming over the decades-old rape, beating and burglary case is less “Who Dunnit?” than why District Attorney Mitch Morrissey and his office keep trying to quash facts about what looks increasingly like a wrongful conviction.

“What this case shows is the absolute inability of the criminal justice system – particularly the prosecutorial part of that system – to own up to its mistakes,” said David Wymore, one of the lawyers who in 2008 helped free Tim Masters from Colorado’s most notorious wrongful conviction.

New evidence supporting Moses-EL’s innocence claim includes the following developments:

• Rape convict L.C. Jackson has confessed to having sex with and beating the victim at the same time and place she said she was attacked.

• In court Monday, Pamela Sanders, Jackson’s live-in girlfriend in 1987, corroborated his testimony that he had left their house during the time the victim was attacked a few doors away.

• And blood evidence shows it’s “very likely” the perpetrator’s semen came from a man with Jackson’s blood type and “very unlikely” it came from a man with Moses-EL’s blood type, a University of Denver forensic expert testified.

Defense lawyer Eric Klein argued Monday for another trial.

“Mr. Moses EL has been waiting a long time for this day — almost exactly 28 years,” he said. “We’ve got abundant evidence pointing to L.C. Jackson. At the end of the day, a jury would have reasonable doubt.”

Morrissey defends the conviction. For nine years, he steadfastly has refused to reopen Moses-EL’s case and denied that Jackson may have had a role in that attack.

“There’s nothing to suggest the victim in this case ever named L.C. Jackson,” he told this reporter in an interview for The Denver Post’s 2007 “Trashing the Truth,” an investigation of Moses-EL’s, Tim Masters’ and other cases.

But, in fact, records show that Jackson was the first man the victim named as her possible assailant. Police and prosecutors failed to question Jackson as a suspect. Instead, they pursued Moses-EL based on the victim’s assertion a day and a half later that his identity came to her in a dream. That dream was the only evidence linking Moses-EL to the case.

“A dream,” Moses-EL has said from prison. “I’m in here because of a dream.”

Morrissey’s repeated assertions that nothing linked Jackson to Moses-EL’s case weren’t just factually wrong. They were inconsistent with what the DA well knew about Jackson’s propensity for violent rape.

In 2006, Morrissey’s office touted its DNA hit tying Jackson to the unsolved 1992 rapes of a mother and her 9-year-old daughter at knifepoint. Solving that case marked a coup for his cold case unit, which has earned Morrissey national renown for cracking unsolved cases with genetic fingerprinting. His office won convictions and a 135-year prison sentence against Jackson.

The north Denver home of the mother and daughter victims of that attack is 18 blocks from the scene in Moses-EL’s case. Several details about the incidents are similar. Among them:

• Jackson has said he was drinking malt liquor on the nights of both attacks.

• Jackson has claimed that he had sex with the victim in Moses-EL’s, like he had sex with the mother and her 9-year-old in 1992, consensually

• The 1987 victim was assaulted with a baby in the room, as were the mother and daughter five years earlier

• Jackson raped the mother in 1992 after shoving a scarf in her mouth and a pillowcase over her head; the victim in the Moses-EL case was blindfolded with a do-rag.

• The mother in the 1992 case and the victim in Moses-EL’s case each had valuables stolen out of their purses after they were attacked.

In court this week, Chief Deputy District Attorney Bonnie Benedetti downplayed the similarities as common in rapes. Like Morrissey, Benedetti has strained to de-emphasize Jackson’s links to the Moses-EL case.

Despite having been shown documentation to the contrary, Morrissey kept misstating the facts about Jackson’s potential involvement when testifying at the state legislature. He incorrectly told lawmakers that the victim in Moses-EL’s case never named Jackson as a possible assailant. His 2008 testimony helped kill a bill proposed by then-state Senate President Ken Gordon to reinvestigate criminal cases in which officials destroy biological evidence that courts had ordered to be tested as part of post-conviction innocence claims. In other words – cases like Moses-EL’s.

Gordon, who died in 2013, was convinced of Moses-EL’s innocence and “appalled,” he often said, by Denver’s mishandling of the case – especially the destruction of DNA evidence.

It happened like this…

From prison, Moses-EL – like much of the nation – watched the OJ Simpson trial and paid close attention as defense lawyer Barry Scheck worked with the then-nascent forensic science of DNA fingerprinting. Moses-EL wrote Scheck asking for legal representation to prove his innocence with the DNA evidence gathered in his case. Scheck agreed, provided that Moses-EL could raise $1,000 to have the evidence tested.

Moses-EL went on to win two court orders for DNA testing and raised the $1,000 from fellow prisoners. Police packaged the rape kit, bed sheets and victim’s clothes in a box they marked “DO NOT DESTROY.” Then, before the box could be sent to the lab, an officer tossed it in a dumpster.

Had the evidence been tested, DNA results likely would have revealed the truth about Moses-EL’s innocence claims more than 20 years ago.

“It’s painful how it all went down – years of freedom in the trash with that box,” Moses-EL, 59, told The Colorado Independent.

Morrissey has defended police and prosecutors’ handling of the evidence, saying its destruction didn’t warrant a new trial.

Morrissey kept defending Moses-EL’s conviction even after learning that Jackson has admitted to having sex with and belting the victim.

Benedetti spent months trying to block Jackson from testifying. She even expressed concerns about his legal rights, saying she feared he could incriminate himself if he took the stand, even though she had said the statute of limitations in the case had tolled.

Still, Jackson spoke out.

Bent with health problems, the 48-year-old limped into court with a cane last week, nodding to the judge and then, solemnly, to Moses-EL. Both men have been housed in the state prison system, but hadn’t seen or spoken with each other since 1987.

Jackson first reached out to Moses-EL in a letter.

“I really don’t know what to say to you,” it reads. “But let’s start by bringing what was done in the dark into the light.”

It took three years and much legal wrangling for Moses-EL to be allowed a hearing in which new evidence could finally be exposed.

In court Thursday, Jackson testified that, after drinking with the victim and other friends on the August 1987 night in question, he had sex with her in a position he has said he found “nasty.” He got angry, he said, and lashed out in what he described as a “Dr.-Jeckyll-and-Mr.-Hyde” outburst.

“I can’t remember if it was a punch or a slap. I know I hit her, like two or three times.”

The victim’s face and eye were severely – and permanently – damaged.

Letting Moses-EL serve time for his crime, Jackson testified, sat heavily on his heart for years.

“It was hard for me to stand up,” he said. “I guess I was being selfish.”

He needed to clear Moses-EL of involvement in order to clear his own path to “the kingdom of heaven,” he told the judge.

“I just think this is the way I can relieve myself and not carry all this with me.”

Benedetti tried to discredit Jackson, arguing his testimony didn’t amount to a confession because he admitted only to consensual sex, not rape. The fact that he admitted to clobbering the victim seemed inconsequential to her view of the case.

She went on to theorize – with little or no evidence – that Jackson is making admissions either because he’s mentally ill, felt bullied by Muslims in prison (Moses-EL is Muslim), wants money from Moses-EL (who has none), is doing a favor for a buddy (they’re not friends), wants to retaliate against Morrissey for prosecuting him for the 1992 rapes or is being puppeted by “someone.” Who that someone may be, in Benedetti’s mind, she didn’t say.

Coming from Benedetti, the “puppeting” theory is especially ironic. At her request during a prison interview in May, Jackson wrote a short statement saying he recanted his confession. Benedetti cites that letter as proof of his credibility problems and evidence that he had no involvement in the attack. Jackson, in turn, says he wrote the statement because Benedetti threatened him with prosecution for perjury. He noted that the investigator she choose to bring with her to the interview introduced himself to Jackson as the officer who arrested him in 1987 on a charge for which Jackson went on to spend eight years in prison.

“I felt kinda, like, intimidated, a little bit,” Jackson said on the witness stand. “I shouldn’t have wrote that note.”

In her closing, Benedetti argued that Jackson’s confession wasn’t a confession, that new blood type evidence wasn’t new and that Moses-EL’s lawyers put on “absolutely no new evidence in this case whatsoever.”

“There is nothing new,” she told Judge Gerdes, her former colleague in Morrissey’s office. “The people urge the court to uphold the jury’s verdict in this case and not grant a new trial in this case.”

Morrissey, for his part, is staying mum.

“Out of an abundance of caution, I think it would be better not to comment until after… the judge makes a ruling,” said his spokeswoman, Lynn Kimbrough.

An “abundance of caution,” if that approach had been taken from the start 28 years ago, would have led law enforcers to question Jackson as a suspect, given that he was the first possible assailant the victim named after her attack.

A cautionary approach would have given police and prosecutors pause about pursuing Moses-EL merely on the victim’s dream.

Caution, years later, would have led DAs to make sure police preserved the truth-telling DNA evidence Moses-EL had two court orders to have tested. And it would have kept police from throwing out a box marked “DO NOT DESTROY.” After the evidence was tossed – partly due to the DAs failure to communicate — caution would have prompted prosecutors to let the case be retried.

An adherence to caution probably would have inspired Morrissey to reopen the case after he nailed Jackson on an unsolved rape near the scene of the attack – a case that shared many marked similarities.

And, certainly, even the smallest modicum of caution in the case would have led Morrissey to invite Jackson’s admissions rather than trying to shut them down.

“I am surprised that the DA’s office is resisting the introduction of relevant evidence to allow a judge to make a fully informed decision,” said Beth McCann, who’s running to replace Morrissey as DA and has had what she calls “concerns” about the Moses-EL case. “The job of the DA is to seek justice, not just convict.”

“I absolutely believe that the worst thing a prosecutor can do is put or keep an innocent person in prison,” added candidate Michael Carrigan.

Civil rights activists and others critical of Morrissey’s record – especially his decisions never to prosecute an officer for deadly excessive force — had over the past months sought to oust him through a recall election. They announced this week that they failed to collect enough signatures to make the ballot. Still, they say, they’ve succeeded in publicly raising doubts about his record. Big doubts, they say. Reasonable doubts.

Watchdogs are decrying Morrissey’s long pattern of defending law enforcement at all costs. In Moses-EL’s case, they say, that pattern has caused the DA to stand behind a conviction, regardless of whether the facts suggest his office prosecuted the wrong man.

“Mitch Morrissey has shown time and time again his disregard for justice and fairness,” said Mike Roque, executive director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition, which watchdogs police and prosecutors. “The Moses-EL case is just another glaring example of Morrissey’s arrogant behavior towards the residents of Denver.”

The alarming French’s mustard color of southwest Colorado’s Animas River is now running somewhere between orange Kool-Aid and the yellowish hue of Mountain Dew. But anger over the Environmental Protection Agency bungle that led to the unprecedented fouling of the river is building.

So is longstanding mistrust of the EPA, especially in the historic San Juan Mountain mining town of Silverton where the leak of more than 3 million gallons of toxic water originated last week, and where the possibility of such a disaster has spurred decades of debate over solutions.

“We have trust issues with the EPA,” said Mark Esper, editor and publisher of The Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper that has been printed since before many of the now problematic gold and silver mines were carved out in the 1880s.

The EPA for decades has been holding out the possibility of turning the drainage around Silverton into a Superfund site to mitigate the problem of heavy-metal-laden mine water leaking from mines into waterways. Superfund is the moniker of a federal program that cleans up abandoned hazardous waste sites, including everything from old livestock holding pens to high-profile polluters like the Love Canal.

The EPA had been eyeing the polluted drainage around Silverton for decades before a sudden blowout occurred Wednesday as the EPA was using heavy equipment to investigate a plug at a portal at one of the more problematic mines – the Gold King.

Neon-yellow water burst from the mine portal that day, washed out a road, blew out culverts, swept away a Suburban and rolled through the heart of Silverton where the water has often been the color of Tang or chocolate milk in the past due to mine discharges. Fish haven’t been able to live in those waters for many years.

Then the real disaster began to unfold.

The bright yellow toxic water – 3 million gallons of it as of Monday – snaked its way into the Animas River and chased out rafters, anglers, swimmers and kayakers. The spill prompted utility companies to shut down intakes from the river and forced cutbacks in water use in Durango. Farmers had to close off irrigation ditches. Hundreds of residential well owners had to stop using their now off-color water.

The City of Durango and LaPlata County declared a state of emergency. The Navajo Nation threatened to sue the EPA. Colorado’s congressional delegation urged action. Hickenlooper Monday declared the Animas drainage a disaster area. And the heavy media focus on the visually shocking environmental fiasco moved downstream with the spreading yellow plume.

Reporters pointed fingers at Silverton for the disaster because the town has long opposed a full-blown Superfund EPA cleanup of the leaking mines. A Superfund designation carries a connotation of bad pollution and Silverton residents feared the impact that might have on tourism. Some residents, who have long hoped for a mining comeback, also feared that a Superfund designation would curb that possibility.

Silverton had not been ignoring the pollution problems tied to old mines. The town of 629 year-round residents had been working toward cleanup of mine waste for 21 years as a part of the Animas River Stakeholders. That group works in collaboration with the EPA, local municipalities and counties, environmental groups and other entities to find a solution to old mine cleanups. That collaboration led to the Animas watershed being chosen as a national pilot project for remediation of old mine leakage – a designation that now seems as ironic as the new name residents are using for the EPA: Environmental Pollution Agency.

There are about 200 leaking mines around Silverton and an estimated 1,500 shafts, mills, tailings piles and mine dumps dotting the steep slopes. The area has been called the worst untreated mine drainage in a state rife with old problem mines. There are an estimated 22,000 abandoned mines in Colorado.

The long-discussed possibility of an EPA Superfund designation became alarming to some residents of Silverton this summer when the agency asked to do soil sampling in the town itself. That led to fears that Silverton could be added into a federally controlled cleanup zone.

San Juan County Commissioner Pete McKay said if the term “Superfund” is dropped, he thinks Silverton residents will be ready to push for some quick action once the immediate crisis of the more than 100-mile plume of yellow contamination is dealt with.

“We are all going to say this is too dangerous to not come up with some solutions,” McKay said.

Peter Butler, a member of the Animas River Stakeholders, said that group is split on what should be done, in large part because the EPA has never been more than vague about what the agency would do to effect a cleanup around Silverton.

Elaine Murray, who has been fielding a raft of calls at the Silverton visitor center from tourists wanting to know if it is safe to come to the town, said many locals are frustrated with the EPA and have been for a long time.

They have no trust that the agency will fix either the current disaster or the long-term problem.

“The EPA says, ‘Oh, we’re sorry.’ But they won’t give us the full extent of the damage,” she said. “They make it sound like the pollution is no worse than orange juice. But if that’s the case, what in the sam heck were they doing up there in the first place?”

Photos courtesy of Nancy Fisher

James Holmes killed more people during his movie theater massacre than Nathan Dunlap, Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray combined. Dunlap, Owens and Ray, all of whom are black, are on death row. Holmes, who is white, will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Why?

The three jurors—two wavering, one resolute—who chose to spare Holmes’ life reportedly did so because of his mental illness, not his race. Attorney Forrest “Boogie” Lewis, who defended Dunlap in 1996, said, “It is folly to speculate on the motivation of individual jurors in such emotional, complex cases.”

Still, on the day of the Holmes verdict, Colorado state Rep. Jovan Melton tweeted, “Today’s verdict proves again that the Death Penalty is arbitrary. Only people on Death row in CO are Black. It has no place in CO.”

Melton’s Tweet echoes the “If he was white, he’d still be alive” argument that presents itself each time police kill another unarmed person of color. If Holmes were black, would he now be facing execution?

‘DISQUIETING DISCRETION’

A recent study from the University of Denver Law School adds credibility to a theory as widely reported as it is unpalatable: Colorado’s death penalty has a race problem.

The DU study, titled “Disquieting Discretion,” features statistical analysis of more than 500 Colorado prosecutions from 1999 to 2010. Controlling for both the heinousness of crimes and the variable rates at which different racial groups commit crimes, researchers found that nonwhite defendants here are five times more likely to face the death penalty than their white counterparts. Of the 22 capital cases tried in those years, only two were against white defendants.

The study’s other major finding—that the 18th Judicial District prosecutes disproportionately more than its share of death penalty cases—suggests a potential explanation why. The decisions of individual juries cannot be controlled, but across the state, prosecutors pursue death against many fewer defendants than are eligible for it. District attorneys, in other words, have a large amount of discretion when it comes to deciding whose lives are put on trial.

This finding is not entirely new. Gov. John Hickenlooper acknowledged the discretion when he granted Dunlap an indefinite stay of execution in 2013.

“The inmates currently on death row have committed heinous crimes, but so have many others who are serving mandatory life sentences,” Hickenlooper said. “The fact that those defendants were sentenced to life in prison instead of death underscores the arbitrary nature of the death penalty in this State, and demonstrates that it has not been fairly or equitably imposed.”

BLACK AND WHITE

Bob Grant, a former prosecutor whose case against white defendant Gary Lee Davis led to the state’s last execution in 1997, said prosecutorial discretion is not problematic.

“You can do all the statistical studies you want, and they’re not going to get to the full story.” Grant said. “Race has nothing to do with a death decision. Never has.”

Defense attorney David Lane disagreed.

“The death penalty is, was and always will be about race,” Lane said.

The study’s authors agree with Grant that race is likely not an explicit factor for prosecutors or juries.

“We’re definitely not in the business of saying that these prosecutors or these jurors were out to kill a black person,” said Sam Kamin, one of the study’s authors.

But implicit bias, Kamin said, is a powerful thing.

“I think that all of us in society carry these preconceptions around about people, and it would be surprising if that didn’t manifest in our criminal justice system,” he said.

It’s possible that jurors are more likely to consider mental illness a mitigating factor for white defendants than minorities.

“I think that (Holmes’) mental illness was more important than his race,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “However, if you change his race, I’m not sure the same calculus applies.”

Lane speculated that jurors may have been more sympathetic to Holmes because of his race and class background. He was a graduate student. His parents took the witness stand and spoke articulately about his happy, stable childhood.

“If Holmes had been equally crazy and black, would one juror have said that mental illness for this African American man is so significant that I’m not going to pull the trigger?” Lane asked.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Longtime Democrat Rhonda Fields, a member of the Colorado House, never thought she’d be a death penalty advocate.

“I didn’t support it,” she said. “I didn’t think I would ever be touched by it.”

But in 2009, capital punishment became personal for Fields.

Days before her son, Javad Marshall-Fields, was to testify against defendant Robert Ray for the killing of Marshall-Fields’ best friend, he and his fiancé were ambushed and murdered while driving. Ray had ordered the murders to protect himself from Marshall-Fields’ testimony. His friend Sir Mario Owens, who is also now on death row, carried them out.

“I support the death penalty because I believe that some people commit such heinous crimes that they deserve the worst punishment on the books,” Fields said.

She, along with many death penalty advocates, believes capital punishment differentiates the worst killers from those who commit, in the words of 18th Judicial District prosecutor George Brauchler, “run-of-the-mill first degree murders.”

Fields supported the death penalty for Ray because he was already facing life in prison for the previous shooting, and she also wanted him punished for the death of her son.

“Why would I want to give him a freebie?” she asked.

An African American woman, Fields is hesitant to say that race has anything to do with the decision to pursue the death penalty.

“I really have great confidence in the criminal justice system,” she said. “If a DA doesn’t want to use it as an option, it’s probably because the crime doesn’t meet the criteria.”

Still, she said, “I know race matters. We’ve seen these things play out.”

WITNESS PROTECTION

Grant insists that the specifics of each crime, not race, are what matters. He pointed out that the study’s rough measurement for heinousness—whether a defendant killed more than one person—doesn’t give enough information about a crime to know whether the defendant deserves death.

“Look at the aggravating factors and decide for yourself,” he said. “They are what separate a domestic violence murder, for instance, or an individual dispute murder…from the most heinous, the most aggravated murders.”

One of the main aggravating factors against both Owens and Ray was the fact that they’d killed a witness. Outside the courtroom on the day Ray was sentenced to death, then district attorney of the 18th Judicial District Carol Chambers said, “Killing a witness undermines the very foundation of the criminal-justice system.”

In 2003, Caleb Burns and Nathaniel York – both white – kidnapped, bound, gagged and then murdered two teenagers they believed were witnesses to an earlier attempted murder. Like Owens and Ray, these white men committed their crimes in the 18th Judicial District.

Burns and York were both able to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences.

“Black men who kill witnesses in the 18th Judicial District get the death penalty,” said Lane. “White men get life.”

THE NEXT PHASE

Many state and national studies have indicated that race affects prosecutions and outcomes of death penalty cases.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that statistics are not enough. In 1987, University of Iowa professor David Baldus studied 2,000 murder cases in Georgia and found that killers of white victims were more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of black victims.

But when death row inmate Warren McCleskey attempted to use the study to overturn his sentence, SCOTUS ruled against him. Even if the statistics were accurate, the court ruled, it wasn’t enough to prove any racial motivations for McCleskey’s own case.

In an infamous opinion, Justice Powell wrote for the majority, “Apparent discrepancies in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.’’

The sentencing trial of Dexter Lewis, who stabbed five people to death in a Denver bar in 2012, is set to conclude in the upcoming weeks.

A life sentence for Lewis, who is also black, could imply that Coloradans are simply becoming lukewarm toward the death penalty. Though two-thirds of Coloradans polled said they supported death for Holmes, support for capital punishment is at a 40-year low nationwide.

But a death sentence for Lewis will likely cause outrage, perhaps justified, among death penalty opponents.

In his executive order granting Dunlap a stay of execution, Hickenlooper wrote, “If the state of Colorado is going to undertake the responsibility of executing a human being, the system must operate flawlessly. The death penalty in Colorado is not flawless.”

He then added, “It’s a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives.

Photo credit: Don Juan Triunfante, Creative Commons, Flickr.

Colorado needs a mother lode of water by 2050 – as much, in fact, as it takes to serve about 2 million people.

As our climate changes and population keeps soaring, the future looks scary dry.

That’s why Gov. John Hickenlooper wants the state’s first-ever statewide water plan in place by December.

In question is where to glean more water, who would pay for it, and how to avoid an all-out water war in a state where the Continental Divide isn’t just a hydrological contour, but also a battle line.

When The Colorado Independent last reported on the making of the plan in July, the first draft offered no specific answers. Now there’s a second draft that puts forth a litany of concepts state officials are touting as “win-win solutions.”

“Assembling such a plan, one that outlines numerous feasible steps the state, water providers and water users can take, is unprecedented in Colorado and represents a major step forward for our state,” Hickenlooper’s spokeswoman Kathy Green wrote in an email this week.

Several key water experts are unimpressed, lobbing the same criticisms about the second draft as they did about the first.

They say the revised, 416-page document still is less of a plan than a water study — a detailed account of the struggles faced by water users throughout the state, painstakingly compiled by an administration more interested in making everyone feel heard than in making tough decisions.

With 13 days left for the public to comment, critics say the plan still lacks priorities and actionable specifics and that it fails to address the most practical question – how to pay for solutions. They’re also disappointed that it sets no clear expectations for how much, statewide, all of Colorado’s water users should be conserving.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still not much there in there,” said water lawyer Peter Nichols, one of Hickenlooper’s appointees to Colorado’s Interbasin Compact Committee, a statewide water working group.

“There are a lot of platitudes and clichés and nice words like ‘foster,’ ‘develop,’ ‘encourage,’ and ‘coordinate’ in this draft. But those aren’t action words. Those words won’t carry us. They’re not going to meet our water needs for 2050.”

A “back-of-the-napkin analysis”?

If, as the old adage goes, water runs uphill to money, the slope is especially steep in Colorado. Maintaining current water storage and delivery systems and keeping up with climate change and continued growth will, according to the state, cost $20 billion over the next 35 years.

The problem with that amount isn’t just that it’s ginormous. It’s unclear what the $20 billion would buy.

Colorado Water Conservation Board director James Eklund mentions the figure often in meetings and public appearances. Yet, when pressed for specifics, he says it’s just “a back-of-the-napkin analysis.”

According to the water plan, the $20 billion would pay for projects that have been deemed necessary in each of the state’s eight river basins. Yet, the costs for nearly half those projects are still listed on the plan as “forthcoming.”

“It’s all very much a work in progress,” Eklund said.

Colorado’s water chief is a tall, carefully coiffed and nattily dressed Stanford graduate who comes from a family of Western Slope cattle operators. He’s well versed in the practicalities and legalities of western water use, and seemingly at ease with the plodding pace of policy reform. He served as Hickenlooper’s senior deputy legal counsel before being appointed to lead the state on water.

Eklund lauds his boss for “spending the political capitol” to order Colorado’s first statewide water plan rather than, like other governors, taking a pass on one of the state’s most touchy issues.

“There are people in the water community that said you say the word(s) ‘state water plan’ and that’s toxic, that’s a third rail, you can’t touch that,” he said.

“(Hickenlooper) said I need the white paper on water. We all looked at each other and said we don’t have one of those. He said you’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got a business with an input as critical as water is to the bottom line of that business — you know as water is to the bottom line the state of Colorado. You would say that was unacceptable to the CEO and the board of directors. So go do it.”

Since Hickenlooper’s executive order in December, Eklund’s staff has written and rewritten two drafts of the water plan. They’ve attended months of hearings and meetings asking what Coloradans want in their water future. And they’ve reviewed public comments from throughout the state – including, Eklund likes to note, the input of 26 high schoolers from Dolores.

“That kind of response is something we could have only dreamed of,” he said.

Eklund is especially proud that his staff has responded to all 25,869 public comments.

“We’re looking really hard at each one as it comes in,” he said.

As he tells it, the water planning process is an acme of civic engagement.

Having amassed 25,869 public comments isn’t, in itself, a vision for how to solve the state’s water woes, seasoned water-policy makers say.

“(They) need to sort through it, pull out what the priorities are. It’s not going to define itself,” said Denver Water chief Jim Lochhead. “A process is not a plan.”

The need for specificity

More details are key for Front Range business owners, Western Slope farmers and ranchers, environmentalists, water agency bosses and politicians who, like Eklund says of the Governor, also have their eyes on the bottom line. Although most agree on the need for a water plan, they differ – sometimes bitterly — about which water uses should take priority and who should bear responsibility for the projected shortfall. Without price tags, they say, there can be no meaningful discussion about funding strategies. And without funding strategies, there can be no hard look at what’s even possible.

Several close followers of the process tell The Independent that, as much as they want to show support, they’re finding it tough to buy into a plan that serves up little more than broad concepts.

“The plan, in fairness, offers lots of interesting information about what’s happening with water in Colorado. But it’s a water study, not a water policy and not a water plan. And that’s an important difference,” said Harris Sherman, who ran the Colorado Department of Natural Resources under Govs. Dick Lamm and Bill Ritter and recently stepped down as a top Obama appointee to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The business community wants specificity.

“More substance is needed at this point,” said Dave Bacon, chief executive at BWBacon Group, a staffing company in Denver. “We can and should be looking at this with urgency and a sense of responsibility — not just to our own state, but as a leader who has an obligation to set a sustainable course for the West.”

Eklund aims to have tackled a good portion of the state’s water solutions by the time Hickenlooper is term-limited in three years. Still, he balks when asked about upcoming agendas for water. Should Coloradans expect water bills in the legislative 2016 session? It’s too early to tell, he told The Independent. Should voters expect executive action while Hickenlooper is in office? “It’s premature for me to know,” he said.

“You have to crawl before you can walk.”

Hickenlooper’s office also defends the water plan, saying it’s not the point to chart a specific list of water projects or their costs.

“…To set up that straw man is misleading,” Green wrote.

In fact, she asserted, specifics could mess up the grassroots water planning approach Hickenlooper is committed to.

“The state does not have the authority to determine which projects go where and, should it attempt to do so, the collaboration and cooperation upon which the water plan was so respectfully built would collapse under the weight of such top-down action,” she said. “All parties would return to their traditional corners to fight it out, as they have for decades, with the same kind of infighting that prevents the very kind of holistic approach the water plan seeks to achieve.”

Critics counter that, in a time of climate change and rampant growth, a 416-page articulation of water goals without key financial details and actionable solutions isn’t holistic. It’s naive.

“There’s money involved in most of the ideas set forth in there…, but you wouldn’t know it. Without clear metrics, priorities, deadlines and a sense of who’s going to do what – without all the things I’d characterize as a real plan — there’s no path forward,” Lochhead said. “There are a lot of things on that list – including the funding – that, in my view, are unrealistic.”

“What can we actually do in three years?” state Water Conservation Board member John McClow asked at the July meeting. “The list needs to be more realistic.”

Who should pay? And how?

Eklund’s team has topped its list of “Potential Future Funding Opportunities” with the following: “A federal/state partnership similar to the Central Arizona Project” and “A federal/state partnership similar to the California State Water Project.”

Both are vast water delivery systems launched during the late- and mid- Cold War era, respectively, when the federal government used to pay for dams, pipelines and other projects that made Western deserts bloom.

Emulating those partnerships is unlikely now that the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers no longer have the budgets or mandates for projects that would be as legally risky and expensive as they are politically divisive. The feds aren’t in the business of building massive water projects any more.

“Maybe Colorado didn’t get the memo,” said Pat Mulroy, a Nevada-based water expert with the Brookings Institution.

Funding is more likely to come from the private sector — whose resources can be limited – and from the state and municipal public sectors, mainly though tax or water rate increases.

In an effort to “identify and determine a path to develop a new viable public source of funding,” the water plan cites ways to glean $10 million here and $40 million there through various grant projects and government partnerships. The plan also suggests a container fee ballot measure that could generate about $100 million a year.

But, in the $20 billion scheme of things, that’s chump change.

Besides, counting on voter-backed funding can be risky. In 2000, Coloradans resoundingly rejected Referendum A, an effort to raise $2 billion for water projects. More recently, they’ve chewed up and spit out measures to raise taxes for transportation and education – both issues that poll higher than water among most Coloradans.

Even if voters could be persuaded to back a water tax, policy constraints such as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) could stand in the way. The current water plan overlooks Colorado’s knot of fiscal caps – an issue planners say they’ll be adding to the final draft.

Water utilities point out that because their customers already pay for water projects through monthly water rates, they’d be paying double through a tax increase.

“A statewide funding initiative, in my assessment, it’s not doable,” Lochhead said. “People aren’t likely to support paying twice.

Lochhead said Denver Water’s board would be willing to consider asking its 1.3 million customers to fund more delivery systems, reuse projects and conservation efforts to help stave off a shortfall. Problem is, he pointed out, he hasn’t been approached by state officials about the prospect of making such an ask. Neither had two other water agency bosses interviewed for this story.

As the gatekeepers of the most promising source of money in the state, water bosses wonder whom if not them the administration is so intent on collaborating with.

East v. West

The tension underpinning Colorado’s water situation is largely between urban and agricultural users. Although, by virtue of their populations, cities and suburbs have more money and political clout, agricultural communities generally have the upper hand because their water rights are usually older, giving them higher priority for Colorado’s dwindling water supplies.

Farming and ranching communities – especially those on the Western Slope with rights to Colorado River water – long have fought efforts by city folk to grab their water, pump it east through the mountains and fuel growth along the Front Range. More recently, environmentalists hoping to keep more water from being siphoned out of the at-risk river have echoed the Western Slope battle cry — “Not one more drop!”

That leaves sprawling Front Range cities and suburbs straining to live within their means. The well known “Use only what you need” campaign by Denver Water, the state’s biggest municipal water supplier, is one of many efforts that has been able to slash municipal water use.

It comes as no surprise that the water plan, in its second draft released in July, is calling for city dwellers and businesses to conserve water in hopes of saving 400,000 acre-feet per year. (An acre-foot is enough to serve two to three households per year at current water use rates.) The plan calls for “medium-level conservation” – meaning, presumably, saving more water than residents and businesses currently are conserving, but not so much that it hurts. Eklund’s team calls it a “stretch goal,” which is financial-speak for a way of challenging people to reconsider what they thought was possible.

The conservation plan is a goal, not a requirement. It’s voluntary.

Nobody seems to question cities’ need to keep conserving more water. Several water insiders do, however, question whether 400,000 acre-feet could actually be gleaned by urging city dwellers and suburbanites to cut back their laundry loads and backyard sprinkling. They also question whether the conservation policy is fair.

Even though municipalities serve about 86 percent of Coloradans, they only consume about 2 percent of the state’s water. Agriculture uses between 85 and 90 percent.

The water plan doesn’t set clear expectations for farmers and ranchers to conserve. Their water rights allow them to tap however much water they can put to what’s called “beneficial use.” If they use less, the water goes to the next user – and so on. So, as things stand, there’s a legal disincentive for agricultural users to cut back.

This doesn’t sit right with many city folks, especially knowing how much water goes wasted by inefficient techniques such as the use of unlined dirt irrigation ditches and canals.

“There’s no question that in other parts of the world, agriculture uses much less water,” Sherman said. “Things can be done. Improvements can be made.”

After reading the plan, Patricia Wells, the Colorado Water Conservation Board member representing Denver, said, “I was struck by the disparity of how we treat agriculture and how we treat the people of Colorado.”

“The only mandates in this plan are all about people.”

Calls for broader conservation are coming from unlikely players – the business community rather than from environmentalists.

At the state board’s July meeting about the plan in Ignacio, representatives from environmental groups praised the conservation goals as is and commended the plan’s commitment to keeping water in rivers to protect environmental and recreational flows.

“I’m here with two messages – that of appreciation and encouragement,” Bart Miller, a river expert with Western Resources Advocates, told Eklund and his board. “As it progresses, we’re seeing more details, really good things…”

Business leaders who

The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, in the meantime, is strongly urging that conservation goals apply statewide — including to agriculture—rather than just to certain sectors.

“We want to make sure that all sides are giving,” said Mizraim Cordero, the Chamber’s vice president of public affairs. “I think there’s still room for more discussion about what goals are achievable by agriculture.”

“They own or use THAT significant a percentage of water — it is absolutely their responsibility to take a leadership position,” added Bacon, the Denver staffing company chief.

Eklund notes that there’s a big difference between residential and agricultural conservation because water rights are property rights in Colorado.

“They’re running businesses in agriculture. They’re not doing it because it’s fun… They’re doing it to make money. If you’re telling them they’ve got to add a line item to their balance sheet that they didn’t otherwise anticipate, they’re going to ask you who’s paying for that. And right now, we’re not doing that,” he said.

Given the vastly disproportionate amount of water used by farms and ranches, Colorado isn’t likely to overcome its shortfall without arrangements between agriculture and utilities.

All too often, those arrangements have meant farmers selling off their land and water rights to cities. That practice, known as “buying and drying,” has left wide swaths of the state deserted. Crowley County, for example, once had more than 50,000 irrigated acres and now has only 5,000.

“When we sold our water, we sold our future,” a local town clerk told The Independent in July.

Hickenlooper has made it clear that preserving Colorado’s agricultural tradition needs to be a keystone of the water plan.

The easiest way forward would be if farmers and ranchers could directly market some of their water to utilities. But the “consumptive use” doctrine underlying water law blocks such deals because they put agricultural water rights in jeopardy. If farmers aren’t directly using their water, they risk losing it.

Several top water officials and political leaders have been urging Hickenlooper, in his plan, to enable a market-based system that removes legal barriers. The idea behind so-called “alternative transfer mechanisms” is that farms would step up conservation if cities, through innovative funding, could subsidize efficiency efforts and glean the water savings on a short-term basis. Farmers, in turn, would be assured protection from losing their long-term water rights.

It would be tricky. But it’s doable. Similar deals have been struck in California, which is under crisis with a severe drought. The point in Colorado is to avert a crisis before our next dry spell hits.

“If Hickenlooper wants to make this a priority of this administration, he has limited time to start getting things done,” Lochhead said.

Chiming in

The public has until Thursday, September 17 to submit comments on the water plan.

“We’re waiting with bated breath and open ears. We’re all ears,” Eklund said.

Russell George, former speaker of Colorado’s House and Gov. Bill Owens’ natural resources chief who’s vice chair of the water board, said there’s “a beauty in itself” in the outpouring of civic participation.

“I don’t feel the need for any of us to get hung up on the plan piece of this thing,” he has told The Independent.

But, given the looming shortfall, stakeholders are, indeed, “hung up” — and making sure to speak out while the administration is listening.

Environmental groups and their members are urging the administration to hone criteria for which of the 81 currently proposed “critical actions” are truly critical and should take priority. “Our thought is that it doesn’t really give enough detail such that you could take a giant list of projects and push them through,” Miller said.

Several water experts are pressing Hickenlooper hard to end the stalemate between the Front Range and Western Slope over using extra Colorado River water when it’s available. The water plan proposes a conceptual framework for how negotiations between the two sides should go. But it offers no concrete solutions.

“That’s where the plan falls short and where the state needs to get creative and ambitious and take a leadership role in actually brokering a deal,” said Nichols who, as a member of the committee that oversees compacts between Colorado’s distrusting river basins, has seen deal after deal blow up. “There are discussions going on about putting more meat on the bones before December and how to implement a meaningful plan, maybe by changing some laws.”

The business community is trying to galvanize its members to read the plan and chime in. The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce is pressing for specifics about costs and what, if anything, Hickenlooper will do to prod agriculture to measurably cut back.

“We commend that the Governor has made water a major priority and has moved the ball. But we definitely encourage him and other leaders to continue (giving) specificity to help carry things out,” said the Chamber’s Cordero.

Is he confident that’ll happen by final draft in December?

Said Cordero: “I’m not going to answer that one.”

Photo credit: LadyDragonflyCC – >;<, Creative Commons, Flickr. 

What good is a $4.7 billion transit system in Colorado if passengers can’t reach their bus stops and light rail stations safely?

In many areas around Denver, sidewalks have seemingly gone missing. From Brighton Boulevard to Quebec Street, large sections of heavily trafficked roadways belong to big machines. Bus stops are merely marked with a signpost along skinny dirt shoulders, often offering no protection or even a place to rest for pedestrians waiting for transit services as cars and trucks speed by.

A lack of safe sidewalks was just one of many issues uncovered in last week’s First & Last Mile Connections report from Mile High Connects, an advocacy group working to make transit accessible and affordable for all Coloradans.

The report, developed by Walk Denver and BBC Research, looked at roads and sidewalks across Denver, Boulder, Aurora and other Front Range metro cities, routes from homes to transit stops to final destinations.

Missing or crumbling sidewalks, badly lit passageways and intersections lacking crosswalks concern people who need to access public transportation safely.

“It’s this really ironic thing. We passed Fastracks, the voter-approved billions of dollars that were being invested in the light rail build out, but we didn’t take into account all of these connections,” said Dace West, Director of Mile High Connects. “For instance, you might be able to hear the train coming in an area, but there’s no signage to tell you how to get to a station.

“It’s amazing to think that in some of these areas, we are investing all of these public resources in this huge public investment. But if people aren’t able to access it, this is not a good use of the resource.”

The lack of infrastructure hits low-income communities the hardest, West said.

“So many of the lower income communities in the region have much worse conditions. People have not been investing in those communities,” said West.

Mile High Connects hopes its report will pressure city councils to address how hard it is for folks to get to bus and light rail stops.

“We’re hoping the report will elevate and educate decision makers and that community members will be able to use it as a tool to take to their own elected officials, particularly city council members and say, ‘You know, this is a problem. How are we dealing with it in our community?’” said West.

The study found that missing or damaged sidewalks within neighborhoods were the biggest concerns among those surveyed.

Denver City Councilperson Mary Beth Susman told The Colorado Independent she agrees, saying this is something the city has been working to address for a long time.

“The City Council has made this kind of infrastructure for this kind of transit our number one priority — along with things like pedestrian accessibility and bike accessibility, which are both connected to this,” Susman said. “The city is going to take a look at our whole sidewalk infrastructure. We need to do some major, innovative things for pedestrian safety at crosswalks and intersections.

“The trouble is that in Denver, it’s neither RTD’s nor the city’s responsibility to maintain or even build sidewalks. It’s in the hands of each property owner,” she said. 

Susman thinks that because there are so many cities involved with differing ways of handling the creation of accessible and safe passageways for pedestrians, there needs to be a way to assess these connection issues statewide.

“We need to take a look at how we can fund the ability to put in sidewalks where we have none,” said Susman. “In my district — and in every district — there are neighborhoods that have no sidewalks. Many were built in the ’50s, when I think people thought we would never walk again.

“Right now, we have a policy that all sidewalk installation except on public property is the responsibility of the property owner. I know that there’s a suggestion afoot that we figure out a way to install sidewalks. We can do that, when it is attached to some other project.”

Chris Hinds, an advocate for persons with disabilities in Colorado, agrees that the issue is about more than just funding — it’s about knowing who is culpable. “One of the big roadblocks for achieving accessibility for all forms of transportation is the varied responsibility for last-mile, ADA development.”

He points to the Americans With Disabilities Act itself, a set of federally enacted guidelines that set an accessibility precedent across the country twenty-five years ago.

“Access to transportation is a matter of civil rights,” said Hinds.

If cities can come together and create safer, accessible passageways to public transit across neighborhoods in the metro area, the question of how to fund these projects still remains.

“We saw that in other places like Englewood and Westminster, there was a small fee assessed on people’s utility bills, so the city had a pool of resources to be able to invest in and maintain that infrastructure,” said West. “A city like Lakewood makes an annual allocation — it might not be the hundreds of millions of dollars that you would have to put in to make the system perfect right now, but I think of it like being on a diet — doing a little bit consistently would get us a long way, particularly if there were plans in place that really said, here’s the deep need.”

West said that one thing is particularly clear from the study’s findings: Colorado needs to make accessible, safe transportation an issue of pressing importance for all people, regardless of economic status.

“We would love to see the municipalities really prioritize those neighborhoods where people really need transit the most. Places where it isn’t just a luxury, it’s something that’s really necessary — and then dedicate the funding on an annual basis to really make those improvements consistently over time,” West said.

“Sometimes just having a piece of research or data helps provide a different kind of legitimacy to a problem that people know day-to-day is there.”

To get a look at the complete FLMC report and Mile High Connects findings, visit the organization’s website.

Photo credit: David Wilson, Creative Commons, Flickr. 

There are 800 Jews buried on a scraggly hill on the outskirts of Lakewood, their graves unmarked, unkempt and vandalized. Most years, the Hill, as the old cemetery is known, doesn’t get mowed more than once in the spring, leaving graves lost by summer’s end beneath a tangle of weeds.

When asked why the Hill doesn’t get mowed more than that, one caretaker said, “Because they didn’t pay.”

This year, days before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, weeds were cut down – a rare sign of care for a plot of land that’s all too often ignored.

Denver resident Ted Ruskin was shocked when he first saw the Hill, in 1989, which had already suffered from 30 years of neglect. Ruskin owned a memorial company and also was vice-president of the Synagogue Council of Greater Denver.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said. “There were a tremendous number of memorials knocked over, weeds and garbage. It was terrible. I was appalled.”

Ruskin began marshaling volunteers for an annual cleanup with help from the Council. He did so until a few years ago, when his eyesight failed and he had to stop. Since then, more tombstones have been knocked over, more trash has built up amid the snarl of weeds and rusted markers, and broken beer bottles litter the cemetery’s “Genizah” grave, a sacred place for worn-out prayer books.

The main section of the Golden Hill cemetery, started in 1908, is on the south side of Wide Acres Road in west Lakewood and is still active. The Hill, on the north side of the road and overlooking downtown Denver, was established in 1915. The first burial took place that year. No one has been buried there since the 1980s.

In 1995, the Hill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of only three Jewish cemeteries nationwide with that distinction.

The whole cemetery was built for Jewish tuberculosis victims, many who came from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s for the Colorado cure: isolation from the general population, a good diet, temperate weather and fresh, dry air. Many faced poverty. Tuberculosis was a disease of the poor, spread through crowded living conditions.

Jewish tuberculosis patients went to one of two sanitariums in Denver for the Colorado cure: National Jewish Hospital and the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society. National Jewish opened in 1899 with a motto of “none who pay may enter, and none who enter may pay.”

Jeanne Abrams of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver said that while the hospital did great work, it had rigid rules. Patients were limited to six months of care, and had to have at least $50 in savings so they could return home and not be a burden on their communities.

National Jewish also was nonsectarian, and didn’t observe kosher laws until almost two decades after it opened.

In response to Denver’s need for an observant sanitarium, working class Jewish men founded the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society in 1904 and recruited Dr. Charles Spivak, a Russian immigrant, to run it. The organization’s motto, from the Talmud, is “he who saves one life saves the world.”

Spivak was a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis. He believed people would heal faster in an environment in which they felt comfortable. So, JCRS had a kosher kitchen from day one, and its staff respected the Yiddish language spoken by many of its patients.

The Relief Society also differed from National Jewish in another key way — it took tuberculosis patients in all stages of the disease, including people who might die just days after their arrival. More than 7,000 were treated at the JCRS sanitarium in its 36-year history, and scores of them didn’t survive.

Both sanitariums needed a cemetery. Golden Hill, near the foothills, was the result. It was started by the West Side Benevolent Society, a mutual aid organization founded by prominent members of Denver’s Jewish community to buy the land for the cemetery.

For the first few years, all tuberculosis victims, rich and poor, from JCRS and National Jewish, were buried in the main section of Golden Hill. Those from JCRS — who tended to be more devout and less well-off financially — were mostly buried in unmarked graves.

But by 1915, according to a cemetery ledger from the Foothills Genealogical Society, the poor began to be buried on the Hill so they wouldn’t “infect” those buried in the main section. According to records from the Jefferson County Historical Commission, burying tuberculosis victims on the Hill was a way to segregate them from the general population, since it was believed back then that people “visiting a cemetery could contract the disease through the deceased.” The practice also reflected more than a bit of elitism from wealthy families who buried their loved ones on more level ground in a meticulously manicured part of the cemetery just down the hill and to the south.

Records show that families with money spent between 30 cents and a dollar for a burial. But if burial expenses weren’t paid for, graves were marked with temporary metal plates, most of which rusted, disintegrated or have been stolen. Of the 200 tombstones placed on the hillside, many have succumbed to wind, rain and snow. Or worse. Dozens have been toppled and shattered by vandals.

“The second there are signs no one’s paying attention, that’s when the wrong people pay attention,” according to local historian Jennifer Goodland, who has researched the stories of some of the people buried on the Hill.

Most of the dead on the Hill were men, since Jewish cemeteries, at least until the mid-20th century, were segregated by gender. Many were young — in their 20s and 30s — who had come from their respective “old countries” in search of promise in the western U.S.

There was Joel Cagon who during World War I served in the “Jewish Unit” of the Royal Fusiliers, a British army battalion, and was a prisoner of war in Palestine.

And Martin (Mendel) Abelson, a World War I veteran turned stockbroker who was a delegate to the 1916 Republican convention, according to a local paper. Abelson ran on a platform of respecting the rights of everyone, regardless of nationality, a radical notion in those days.

Morris Rosenberg immigrated from Adampol, Poland, a town of middle-class and upper-class Jews. He came to the United States during the 1912-14 peak of Polish immigration. About 20 years later during World War II, his town of Adampol became a slave-labor subcamp connected to Sobibor, one of three main Nazi extermination camps. Adampol has no memorial to its Jews. The last synagogue was torn down in the 1970s and turned into a parking lot.

One of the first women buried on the Hill was Ida Hayum, who was born in Lohrhaupten, Germany in 1910. Like many Jews fleeing the rise of the Nazi Party, she and her husband came to the United States from Europe in 1935. Her town, Lohrhaupten, had already suffered its share of anti-Semitic attacks. Violence against Jews cut the population from 59 in 1861 to 21 by 1933. By 1940, the last 18 Jews in Lohrhaupten were sent to the concentration camps and to their deaths. Like Adampol and many other communities throughout Europe, Lohrhaupten also never memorialized its Jewish residents.

Hayum’s and Rosenberg’s graves on the Hill are some of the last reminders that those communities ever existed.

“Never forget,” goes the solemn vow borne out of the Holocaust.

But remembering takes both time and money.

Despite its historical importance for Denver and the Front Range Jewish community, the Hill shows signs of years of benign neglect because few funds are available to pay for even the most minimal care. That care now consists of mowing the hill once a year for Memorial Day, leaving it overgrown by early summer and looking like a wasteland by the Jewish high holy days this time of year.

Restoring the Hill and the memory of the 800 buried there will take money, according to cemetery director Neal Price. But making the Hill a replica of the main section, with its manicured grass, isn’t in keeping with the Hill’s historic designation. The cemetery needs new security fencing, road improvements and foundations for toppled tombstones. The yucca plants that have overtaken much of the grounds need yanking. The dirt should be seeded with native grass. Each grave should be properly marked.

Now nearly blind, Ruskin isn’t able to do the work himself. So he’s applying for a $25,000 restoration grant to Historic Denver. Price estimates the total budget at around $100,000, and he also is looking for funding. The work is vast, Price said.

When the sanitariums needed a place to bury their dead, the West Side Benevolent Society bought land that was once part of a farm owned by John Clark Welch, a Golden pioneer who helped found the Colorado School of Mines.

Today, the farm is long gone. In its place, on the north side of West Colfax and across the street from the Hill, a multi-story office building is going up. Businesses line West Colfax from that part of Lakewood all the way to Denver.

Houses line the streets surrounding the main section of the cemetery on its south and west sides.

But somewhat telling of the Hill, its nearest neighbor, on its west side, is an empty warehouse that has been vacant for years.

Photo credit: Jennifer Goodland

Thanks to Historian Jennifer Goodland of Big Year Colorado for this story and for her invaluable assistance throughout this project.

The Denver Sheriff Department has long been a mess.

Some of its deputies have kicked and clobbered inmates without provocation. Other deputies have booked the wrong people – confusing black people for white and old folks for young, and even hauling in a man on a warrant in place of a guy who was long dead.

Department staffers have locked up non-English speakers without translators and deaf people without interpreters. They’ve released some prisoners too early, and others too late. And some have incited inmates to attack each other.

Jail workers let a young woman bleed to death behind bars, untreated for her injuries. Five of them piled on top of a frail street preacher, tasered him and choked him to death, then lost key evidence. When they took the witness stand in that case, they raised their right hands and – as the federal jury found — lied through their teeth about the man they unjustifiably killed without pocks on their careers.

Mayor Michael Hancock’s solution has been to say mostly nothing about the long litany of snafus, and then to throw money at the problem. After commissioning a $295,000 review of what’s wrong with the sheriff’s department, Hancock is now budgeting $24 million to address the list of 270 concerns the study found plague the agency from its lowest ranks to the top.

But some critics say those reforms don’t reach high enough.

An unlikely chorus including sheriff’s watchdogs and the sheriff’s union, pacifist civil rights activists and gun-loving civil libertarians is calling for a massive overhaul of the department. They have little faith in a new sheriff Hancock is searching the nation to appoint. Instead of the Mayor making a new political pick, they argue, it’s time for Denverites to elect their sheriff.

“The fixes aren’t being made because the person leading the department isn’t allowed to lead,” said Frank Gale, a rep for the Fraternal Order of Police, the sheriffs union in Denver. “We need a person who’s directly accountable to voters over how the agency is run.”

The idea of electing a sheriff isn’t revolutionary. Nor is it new. Denver and Broomfield are the only two of Colorado’s 64 counties with a political appointee rather than an elected official serving as sheriff.

Denver’s is the state’s largest sheriff’s department, with about 900 staff members who run the city and county jails and secure Denver’s district and county court systems. Denver has a separate police department run by an appointed police chief, so, unlike other sheriff’s departments, the sheriff isn’t responsible for keeping the general community safe.

For most of the city’s history, the person holding that office was called the undersheriff. Even though the job title became “sheriff” after a 2013 voter-approved charter change, the position remained a mayoral appointment and the duties have stayed the same.

After taking office in 2011, Hancock stayed mostly mum about a long string of videotapes showing wrongdoing in the department, and about a pattern of civil rights lawsuits, cover-ups and repeated failures to control – let alone discipline – wayward deputies.

Questions arose: Was anybody in city government even paying attention?

Months after sheriff’s deputy Brady Lovingier – son of the former department head – slammed an inmate against a courtroom wall without provocation and then lied about the incident to investigators, for example, Sheriff Gary Wilson and his staff seemed unaware and unconcerned that Lovingier was still assigned to train fellow deputies about how to handle “use of force” and accurately report those incidents to supervisors.

In the summer of 2014, when embarrassing headlines started coming at a faster clip, Hancock finally took action by demoting Wilson and appointing Wilson’s friend and protégée, Elias Diggins, as interim sheriff while Hancock pledged a national search to find a replacement.

Diggins’ appointment came with its own embarrassments. The administration claimed not to know about his criminal record. In 1996, two years into his career with the department, Diggins had been charged with a felony of bribing a public official after a traffic stop. He pleaded to a misdemeanor conviction of “false reporting” information to law enforcement authorities. A “false reporting” conviction is a disqualifier in Colorado’s Peace Officer Standards and Training rules, and sources in the department long have said it should have disqualified Diggins from keeping his job.

Yet, nearly fifteen months after his appointment as interim sheriff, Diggins still holds the sheriff position while the administration is still searching nationally for a permanent replacement. In the meantime, Hancock’s office has angered community watchdogs by refusing to disclose not only who it’s interviewing, but also what kind of candidates it’s seeking.

“Transparency is always better than secrecy in a democracy, and right now we don’t have that with the sheriff,” said Lisa Calderon, co-chair of the Denver Metro Chapter of the Colorado Latino Forum, one of several groups concerned about the department’s record mistreating black and brown inmates.

The Latino Forum held a community meeting Saturday during which members discussed the prospect of reforming the way Denver’s sheriff comes to office. A supermajority of those in attendances voted “yes” in a straw poll on the question of whether the sheriff should be elected rather than appointed.

Supporters say the mayor’s office and its safety department have far too much concentrated power. Hancock and Safety Manager Stephanie O’Malley are making key decisions – or non-decisions, as the case may be – even though neither has a background in law enforcement.

“We have a sheriff who isn’t actually running the sheriff’s department. The staff is working for someone who’s not able to pick their own leadership or do their own hiring and firing,” Calderon said. “Fundamentally, the breakdown in the sheriff’s department is a leadership issue.

“I don’t think we’re going to get a real sheriff. We’re going to get another figurehead.”

The Latino Forum – whose members have been vocal critics of the department and its staff — has found an unlikely ally in the sheriff’s union, which long has backed the idea of electing Denver’s sheriff. The switch in structuring the department would require a charter change. Supporters are discussing floating a ballot initiative in 2016.

“There’s a lot of support for the idea from lots of groups throughout the city,” Gale said. “I’m at a loss to tell you who would oppose it.”

The administration – which did not respond to inquiries for this story, at least on the record – is one source of likely opposition.

For one thing, electing a sheriff would dilute power from Denver’s strong mayor form of government. It also would open the possibility that sheriff’s deputies would become POST-certified, with full law enforcement powers – capable, critics in the administration warn, of becoming even more dangerous and uncontrollable than they are now.

Gale counters that electing a sheriff would create a check and balance against the influence of the mayor and build more direct accountability to the public. If an elected sheriff wasn’t succeeding in fixing the department’s problems, he said, he or she would be much easier to unseat than the mayor.

The power dynamics underlying the discussion run deep. Nothing illustrates that better than the firing early this year of Gale, a former division chief and longtime veteran of the department whom, the administration says, gave preferential treatment last year to a colleague who was locked up after being charged in a domestic violence case. That colleague, former Sheriff Gary Wilson’s ex-wife, was allowed to wear civil clothes to her court appearance and then escorted home by two deputies. The administration says that, with Gale’s nod, she was released without the proper paperwork.

Gale counters that his firing was purely political – an assertion that carries some weight given that department staffers who’ve killed and maimed inmates haven’t, in comparison, been docked even a day’s pay.

“There’s no question that the administration wanted me out,” he told The Independent.

Gale is appealing his firing as he has twice before. The longtime union activist lost his job in 1991 and 2000, and then regained it. Such is the revolving door of the city’s disciplinary system.

David Kopel, a public policy and law scholar at the University of Denver and the Independence Institute, says the public is growing tired of the persistent controversies plaguing the sheriff’s department.

“When problems last this long, people expect some leadership and, clearly, that leadership isn’t happening under the current structure,” he said.

Kopel points out that the office of a local sheriff, next to the reign of a king or queen, “Is the oldest office that exists in the Anglo-American system.” If electing a sheriff works in 62 other Colorado counties, the argument goes, it should also work in Denver.

“As things stand, the city sheriff has only one voter – the mayor,” Kopel said.

“The people of Denver should have the same power that people in most other counties here have – to choose who serve in that office.”

Adding to the strangeness of the strange bedfellows who are eyeing a push to elect Denver’s sheriff, the libertarian Independence Institute is expected to join the sheriff’s union and Latino Forum in backing a charter change.

Photo credit: clement127, Creative Commons, Flickr.

The most recent battle in the conservative attack on teachers’ unions erupted in Loveland’s Thompson School District. The fight comes in the wake of similar — and perhaps politically connected — squabbles in Jefferson County and Douglas County where conservative board members have tried to bulldoze the unions — and in JeffCo may get recalled instead.

Those fighting the conservative Thompson school-board majority claim its members share anti-union goals with members in DougCo and JeffCo: Gut the union and institute a pay-for-performance system that critics claim will create unfair wages for teachers.

For seven months the Thompson Education Association tried to negotiate a contract with the board. The board voted twice during the spring, on a 4-3 vote, to reject the contract.

Once union contract negotiations failed, the issue went to an independent arbitrator. According to the arbitrator’s report, presented at an August 19 meeting, board member Donna Rice, also part of the conservative majority, stated to a teacher that she voted against the contract because “I hate the union,” that all unions are “bad” and that it was her intention to get rid of it.

Fellow member Bryce Carlson, in a letter to the Reporter Herald published this summer, said he objected to one organization having an “exclusive privilege” to represent every teacher in the district.

In his letter, Carlson also suggested removing the union as the exclusive negotiator to be “more inclusive” of all teachers.

Thompson District’s conservative board members, Carlson, Rice, Carl Langner and board President Bob Kerrigan did not respond to messages from The Colorado Independent.

About 70 percent of Thompson Valley teachers belong to the union, well above the required “50 percent plus one” district rule that has guided contract negotiations for the past 37 years.

The teacher’s union decided the board was acting in bad faith and had breached contract — also claiming the board was trying to get rid of the Thompson Education Association as the teachers’ sole bargaining agent.

The arbitrator agreed with the union that the board acted in bad faith on a number of points, including that the board was so vague about what it wanted in the contract that it left their own negotiators at times guessing at what should be included. The arbitrator recommended the board hold a new vote on the contract. Instead, the board voted 4-3 to reject the arbitrator’s report and to reject the contract a third time.

“This is about an elected school board that is executing its constitutional authority to make judgements about what is best for our kids, our district, and it saddens me that this arbitrator assumes that I did not act in good faith,” Kerrigan said, according to the Berthoud Surveyor. Kerrigan chose not to run for re-election this year, as did Rice, although she has filed a candidate’s affidavit for the 2017 election.

According to the Loveland Reporter Herald, the three minority vote members said the report showed the majority members never intended to approve any contract.

Bolstered by the arbitrator, the union filed a lawsuit in Larimer District Court and requested an injunction that would keep the terms of the 2014-15 contract in place, and which would allow the union to continue as the teachers’ representative in contract negotiations.

On September 2, Larimer District Court Judge Julie Field approved the injunction against the district. The board members voted two weeks later, on a 4-3 vote, to appeal her decision to the Colorado Court of Appeals.

That same evening, the board’s private attorney Brad Miller informed the board that he had sought and received a $150,000 grant from the Daniels Fund to cover the costs of outside attorneys hired to defend the board in court. Miller obtained the grant on his own, without seeking board authority. The grant was accepted, also on a 4-3 vote.

The Court of Appeals denied the board’s appeal on October 2. The rest of the lawsuit, on the breach of contract claim, is still pending.

In a statement, union President Andy Crisman said the group is disappointed that the board majority “will not collaborate with teachers to make our schools better for our students…Spending time and money in the courtroom instead of mediating is not a good use of the limited resources that we have.”

To date, attorneys’ costs for the district total about $125,000.

One note about the attorney Miller: He also represents JeffCo’s board.

The Reporter-Herald first announced that the JeffCo board had hired Miller’s firm, Miller and Sparks, based on Thompson District President Bob Kerrigan’s announcement at a December 11 meeting — one day before JeffCo’s board approved the hire on a 3-2 vote.

Dissenting board members complained Miller and Sparks was hired without a prior job posting, a request for proposals or any other form of public notice or discussion. JeffCo board members Lesley Dahlkemper and Jill Fellman (the two “no” votes) didn’t know the board was hiring a new attorney until two days before the vote.

The alleged lack of transparency behind JeffCo’s board hiring Miller, which was cited as a major reason JeffCo voters recalled the county’s conservative board majority, is the subject of the so-called “ethics complaint” filed last week by Witt against himself with the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission — a commission that does not oversee school boards.

That Miller, a shared resource between the two controversial board majorities, was able to tap into at least $150,000 from the Daniels Fund, makes him not only a common thread between the two districts — but a well-funded one, too.  

This year, four conservative “reform” candidates are running for the Thompson District school board: Aimie Randall in District A, Tomi Grundvig in District D, Vance Hansen in District C and Bruce Finger in District G.

The first round of campaign finance reports for this election cycle, due Tuesday, didn’t show contributions from the big money donors who funded four conservative candidates in 2013, which resulted in three wins and a conservative majority on the seven-member board. Those donors, Ed McVaney, retired CEO of JD Edwards; and Ralph Nagel, who owns a chain of assisted living centers in Colorado, donated about $7,000 each to each of the four candidates. Those donations made up the vast majority of the contributions made to the candidates, ranging from a low of 60 percent for Carlson to a high of 94 percent for Rocci Bryan, who lost his race.

State rules for filing campaign finance reports differ for school board candidates. They don’t have to file nearly as many reports as other county races, and the ones due Tuesday were the first for this election cycle.

The next report, due October 30, is four days before the election.

Crisman told The Colorado Independent Tuesday that teachers, community members and parents are energized about the upcoming election.

“They see they can win,” Crisman said. He noted that the legal action has in some ways been a plus, in that it takes some of “the load off the teachers’ shoulders. They don’t have to worry about their rights or contracts for a while,” he said. “They can advocate for kids in the way they always have.”

Photo credit: Lucky Lynda, Creative Commons, Flickr. 

“Flat-out deranged.”

That’s how The Denver Post’s editorial board described 26-year-old libertarian politico Jonathan Lockwood’s comments last month about Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet’s vote in favor of the Iran deal.  

Over the past months, the word deranged has appeared in The Denver Post to describe a select few people: the Aurora theater killer, the school shooter at Arapahoe High School and the white supremacist who massacred nine churchgoers in South Carolina.

Lockwood is the only person the paper has referred to as “deranged” this year who hasn’t killed somebody.

So what warranted the editorial board’s vitriol? Lockwood’s signature public relations style, which both critics and admirers describe as flamboyant, hyperbolic, overblown, melodramatic and, at times, delusional.

When Lockwood shows up to interviews, he looks like a fashion forward party boy. He’s a little too stylish for Denver, where hipsters dress like lumberjacks and even in the gay world masculinity rules.

He wears his jeans as skinny as he is, and his hair rises above his pampered angular face in a coiffed Morrissey poof. He has the air of gay twink — young, hot and he knows it. He’s sometimes sardonic, sometimes melt-your-heart earnest, and he’s willing to be more vulnerable than your run-of-the-mill balding political operative decked in baggy khakis, stained oxfords and a veneer of boozy sweat coating a twitching brow.

In short, Lockwood is refreshing.

His conservative colleagues are divided about the effectiveness of this one-man political messaging machine. Some say his bombast does a fantastic job grabbing media attention for the conservative causes and campaigns that that pay him. Others see him as a “sideshow,” drawing attention to himself rather than the issues he’s hired to spin.

In any case, few conservatives are willing to go on record about Lockwood — he’s either too powerful, or too irrelevant, or too volatile, depending on who’s talking.

Lockwood runs Advancing Colorado, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that can do political lobbying — as long as it’s nonpartisan — without having to disclose its funders.

Progressives say Advancing Colorado is a front for the GOP.

Lockwood counters that, “Just because you’re nonpartisan doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for a perspective.”

On September 22, his organization produced an ad attacking Bennet’s vote to support the Iran deal, accusing the Senator of creating a soon-to-be global nuclear holocaust.

The ad harkens back to Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy Girl attack ad on Barry Goldwater. You know, the ad that suggested a vote for Goldwater was a vote for dead girls.

Lockwood claimed the anti-Bennet ad was a six-figure spot. Democrats point out that the ad cost only $46,000 to place on TV, an assertion Lockwood doesn’t dispute. He says the rest of the money was spent drumming attention to the ad on Facebook, Google, YouTube and other online sites.

Advancing Colorado’s doomsday assault – on Bennet’s policy, not Bennet himself, as Lockwood tells it – managed to snag headlines in The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report and papers as far away as Israel and New Zealand. All in all, more than 140 articles about the ad appeared worldwide. For a conservative nonprofit that launched in March, that’s not too shabby.

Democratic consultant Laura Chapin dismisses the political impact of the media attention.

“I think the number of people who read The Wall Street Journal in Colorado is like ten, and the number of persuadable voters in that batch is pretty small. I have a feeling that the Fantasy Football ads are moving more votes.”

Advancing Colorado, in its few months of existence, has been accused by progressive heavyweights of having secret funding sources and nefarious ties with the conservative mega-donors the Koch brothers.

“He is so clearly there to launder Koch brothers money, it’s kind of ridiculous,” Chapin told The Colorado Independent.

Lockwood’s skills as a spinmeister shine when he talks about Advancing Colorado’s funders. He politely changes the subject to the issues his organization is focused on. His attitude: Who cares who’s bankrolling him? It’s the fate of Colorado and the country that matters.

When pressed harder about who’s paying his bills, he points out that liberals want to make a big deal about Advancing Colorado’s secrecy – but progressive 501(c)(4)s, like his political nemeses at ProgressNow, also don’t disclose donors.

So, bottom line: Are the Koch brother backing Advancing Colorado like they do so many other grassroots conservative organizations?

Lockwood’s explanation is circuitous: They don’t fund it. But, whether a foundation, organization or business the brothers run or heavily donate to funds it, Lockwood would not say.

What’s perhaps most striking about this 20-something is his prowess at dodging questions and framing the debate. He started honing those skills a decade ago at his Lutheran private high school in Longmont where he’d act as a de-facto communications consultant for his friends battling it out in student-body elections. Even then, he was a staunch conservative, inspired by his father’s rise from working class roots to a job as a superintendent at a construction site to higher ranking positions in the industry. In Lockwood’s spare time, he read Foreign Policy magazine while his peers were watching sitcoms.

Lockwood went to Colorado State University to study fashion design. Halfway through the program, a professor told him to quit fashion and study public relations. And so he did. He transferred to Metro State University and created his own minor in “Innovative Communications,” where he studied business, culture and psychology, all of which he uses in his work today.

His first forays into professional communications were in the music industry where he secured internships with AEG Live and Tsunami Publicity.

“I had a ton of fun. I was this little hipster kid,” he said. “But I knew that I needed to find something next. It was a horrible time in the economy. There were no jobs to be seen anywhere. I graduated in December of 2011. It was rough times. And I decided I needed to keep working on these P.R. skills.”

Lockwood made friends with Nissa Szabo, the daughter of Libby Szabo, a former state representative, American Legislative Exchange Council member and arch-conservative. Nissa encouraged him to take a job at the Statehouse – something he says he had no idea how to do but jumped into anyhow.

“I always tell her, if anyone’s going to get blamed for getting me into politics, it’s her,” said Lockwood.

While interning in the press office of the Republican majority during the six heated months of the 2012 session, he says, he “worked, worked, worked like a little work horse” to put together a portfolio. From there he started volunteering on political campaigns such as Republican Boulder businessman Eric Weissmann’s losing primary race against far-right state Sen. Kevin Lundberg in the GOP’s failed attempt to unseat Jared Polis in Congress.

Then Lockwood scored a job working as the area political director in Aurora for Mike Coffman’s winning 2012 campaign against Democrat Joe Miklosi. Lockwood’s job was to connect with voters, organize events and build Coffman’s grassroots base. Lockwood lauds Coffman as a candidate who didn’t just stand around. He earned his re-election through hard work, joining the college kids on his campaign in phoning constituents and knocking on doors.

After Coffman won, Lockwood took a gig as the press secretary for the Colorado House GOP during the 2013 session. The Democrats were the majority in both houses and passed sweeping progressive legislation, including an overhaul to the state’s gun control laws — measures some critics say is the reason they lost the majority.

That session Lockwood raised the ire of Democrats and Republicans alike by tweeting about the anti-gun-control motivated recall of state Sen. Evie Hudak: “@SenHudak deserved what she got. She voted against my right to defend myself from violent assailants. #gunrights are #gayrights #copolitics.”

.@SenHudak deserved what she got. She voted against my right to defend myself from violent assailants. #gunrights are #gayrights #copolitics

— Jonathan Lockwood (@JNTHN_LCKWD) December 11, 2013

One Twitter user described the comments as “shrill, hyperbolic nonsense.”

shrill hyperbolic nonsense @JNTHN_LCKWD @SenHudak #copolitics #coleg @cologop #wingnut — Club Twitty (@COTwitty) December 11, 2013

Lockwood, who had an active Twitter profile long before most politicos embraced the medium, believes that his own personality and perspective are key to his effectiveness in politics. But his remarks in 2013, which were unconventional for the typically neutral role of press secretary, worried some party members. By the end of the term, it had become clear he needed to move on.

So he did. He took on leadership roles in Colorado free-market nonprofits. At Compass Colorado, he says he managed to land the executive director and conservative pundit Kelly Maher a spot on The Daily Show. Maher had no comment on Lockwood’s ten months of work with her organization.

He worked at Revealing Politics for 11 months and Coloradans for Real Education Reform for six months.

In each of these jobs, Lockwood was embraced — at least at first — as a refreshing newcomer in a conservative movement that had a rap of appealing only to old, straight, white men.

In the last decade, homophobia has been falling out of style in the GOP, and Republicans know they needed to attract Millennials to survive. So Lockwood has become Colorado’s new conservative poster boy. He’s edgy, cheeky and smart. Nobody looking at him could think Dick Cheney, Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh.

Whether it’s about slashing taxes, fighting for a firearm free-for-all or taking aim at Democratic office-holders  – even successfully organizing to unseat a few – Lockwood has proven to be a cutthroat operative.

Still, he can be unpredictable — a loose cannon.

In 2013, ColoradoPols dug up a picture of Lockwood reenacting a hoax photo of Paris Hilton in which some jokester Photoshopped a t-shirt on her that read “STOP BEING POOR.”

Jonathan Lockwood received loads of criticism after ColoradoPols dug up this photo of him wearing a “STOP BEING POOR” t-shirt. 

Only, Lockwood’s shirt wasn’t Photoshopped. After the story surfaced, he not only was ridiculed by the left, but also by some fellow conservatives who were horrified that he had played into the progressive movement’s stereotype of what a free-market pundit stands for.  

Lockwood’s resume is speckled with short stints at nonprofits, some of which were campaign driven and inherently brief. Other jobs he left after a few months, after his bombastic social media presence proved he could be more harmful than helpful.

Eventually, in June 2014, he found himself leading Colorado’s chapter of the Koch-brothers-funded organization, Generation Opportunity, a classically libertarian nonprofit with hip branding aimed at Millennials. The group works mainly on criminal justice issues and stopping tax hikes across the nation. He worked at GenOpp an entire year, which marked a record on his staccato resume.

While there, Lockwood took two courses at the Charles Koch Institute, an educational and professional training organization for folks with, as the center puts it, a “passion for liberty.” In one, Liberty@Work, he boned up on his management skills. In the other, he won himself a spot in the Koch Fellow Program for Communications Professionals. The Koch brothers and their growing political empire has become a livelihood for Lockwood after three years bouncing around between political jobs.

Jonathan Lockwood and his digital team at Generation Opportunity at the Newseum. Left to right Kristie Eshelman, Charity Corkey, Jonathan Lockwood and Sharon Koss.

This March, the three person board of directors of Advancing Colorado recruited Lockwood to make something out of the organization that has been around, at least on paper, since 2014. He is currently its only staff member. Although the website describes the group as a coalition of Coloradans, citizens, community leaders and other stakeholders, Lockwood seems to be running a more-or-less solo operation.

His targets have been varied. Since taking over in March, Lockwood has swung at the Environmental Protection Agency, attacking the Clean Power Plan and that agency’s role in the Gold King Mine spill. He has slammed the environmental group WildEarth Guardians for its climate change-related lawsuit filed against the Department of the Interior. He has attacked Gov. John Hickenlooper’s support of red-light cameras. He has praised the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. And he has promoted Douglas County’s voucher system, condemned Obamacare and vilified the Department of Veterans Affairs.

All told, the mission of Lockwood’s purportedly nonpartisan “social welfare” group mirrors the agenda of Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation.

Lockwood’s press releases on these issues are sensational, direct, occasionally witty and often indignant.

Alan Franklin of the liberal group ProgressNow — himself a master of heated rhetoric — wrote in an email to The Colorado Independent that, “Lockwood is a clueless peddler of barely-coherent fringe nonsense. Rumor has it that he was fired from jobs at other conservative advocacy groups like Revealing Politics because of his over-the-top word-salad rhetoric and chronic inability to fact-check anything he says.”

“Without the prodigious funding he receives from right-wing donors like the Koch brothers, he’d be marching up and down Colfax with a sandwich board. His role in Colorado politics is an ongoing insult not just to the left, but intelligent conservatives as well,” Franklin continued.

Lockwood is the “Stewie Griffin of Colorado politics,” Franklin wrote.

Stewie Griffin is the maniacal genius baby on “Family Guy.” Alan Franklin calls Jonathan Lockwood the “Stewie Griffin of Colorado politics.” Photo: Family Guy.

Stewie Griffin is the violence-obsessed, flaming, sophomoric, pontificating son of Peter and Lois Griffin on the satirical cartoon show Family Guy — a deranged, but brilliant baby.

Lockwood counters that his brand of rhetoric cuts through ambiguity and gets to the point.

Take, for example, his reaction to WildEarth Guardians’ climate-change motivated lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in September.“WildEarth Guardians locked-and-loaded aiming to kill again,” he wrote.

What his critics see as hyperbole, Lockwood says, is a justified tactic against what he believes is a cold-blooded, extremist environmental organization threatening to destroy the lives of miners. From his perspective, dramatic, populist rhetoric is a winning formula for today’s politics, which is why he believes Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are galvanizing voters this year.

Given Lockwood’s bombast, it’s no surprise that he has been the target of a number of personal attacks — not all of them from Alan Franklin.

Chapin refers to Lockwood as a “joke.” Others have punched much harder, using the fact that he’s gay to deride him and call him a hypocrite for working as a conservative pol.

Colorado Pols used this photograph they dug up on Facebook to condemn Lockwood as a self-hating gay man.

Some call him a “self-hater,” citing a photo of him gleefully buying Chik-Fil-A for his staff. At the time, LGBT organizations were boycotting the fast food chain.

Lockwood says he was called a “Republican faggot” by one of the Governor’s staffers, though he claims, either diplomatically or tactically, to no longer remember that person’s name. Some critics have accused him of trolling on Grindr, a cruising app for gay men, looking for hookups with other men — not exactly scandalous in 2015, but, hey, operatives on the left, much like Lockwood and his peers on the right, love to hit hard.

There’s a sense when speaking with Lockwood that he draws on stories about homophobic snipes against him to gain sympathy before he starts swinging — this time, in this particular conversation, at Bennet’s Iran vote.

Bennet is an incumbent Democrat who, despite his fat campaign coffers, faces the challenge of winning re-election in a purple state. For months, Republicans have speculated about who would be their party’s challenger. First, it was Mike Coffman, who disappointed many by sticking to his current congressional seat. Then it was Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, who tripped up her career in a seeming blackmail scandal against Steve House, the head of the state GOP. Then it was George Brauchler, the district attorney who prosecuted James Holmes, flirted with running for Senate, but then abruptly bowed out. That leaves two GOP candidates certain to run — far right state Sen. Tim Neville and Robert Blaha, a wealthy Colorado Springs businessman with money to bankroll his own campaign.

Without a more moderate, widely known candidate, Republicans had hesitated to hit Bennet on TV. That is, until Advancing Colorado on September 22 put out the ad on the Iran vote – a sure kickoff to months of political hits on the Senator leading up to the 2016 election.

Chapin speculates the ad was an attempt to flush out a serious candidate, secure Brauchler or convince Mike Coffman to reconsider a run.

Lockwood says the ad has nothing to do with the race and that his goal was to educate the public about Bennet’s vote.

His so-called nonpartisan, “educational message,” the one The Denver Post described as “deranged,” goes like this: “Bennet will go down in history as sacrificing Americans in the name of Obama to give terrorists nuclear weapons, training, arms, cash and ICBMs. He chose global chaos and terror over world peace, America and Israel’s safety and security, and ignored the outcry from his outraged constituents who begged him to oppose the deal.

“Bennet is a dangerous puppet, and we will never forget he voted to hold the American people hostage and sided with terrorists and madmen to silence the innocent people he represents here in Colorado. The deadly consequences of this foolish deal will be on his hands.”

Colorado Democratic spokesman Andrew Zucker sees Lockwood’s message as an act of desperation.

“With Washington Republicans lacking an opponent in the Colorado Senate race, it comes as no surprise that a secretly funded group with ties to the billionaire Koch brothers is out with a deeply offensive, fear mongering attack against Sen. Bennet.

“The truth is Michael Bennet passed tough sanctions against Iran, has worked to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon and is authoring legislation to make the Iran deal even stronger. He has consistently fought to make us safer and more secure and this group’s smear attack has no place in Colorado politics.”

Iran isn’t the only issue Advancing Colorado plans to blast Bennet for, and Lockwood’s revival Daisy Girl spot isn’t the only ad the group plans to produce on the issue. Lockwood has no plans to tone down his rhetoric, insisting he’s not attacking Bennet, just Bennet’s policies.

Advancing Colorado released this full-page print ad in The Colorado Statesman opposing Sen. Michael Bennet’s vote on the Iran deal.

On October 8, Advancing Colorado launched yet another attack ad on Bennet’s vote — this one in The Colorado Statesman: “Some people are going nuclear over Senator Bennet’s support of Obama’s deal with Iran,” the full-page ad states. “Most probably the Ayatollah.“

The most recent Lockwood blast against Bennet came this week concerning a letter Bennet and other senators sent to Secretary of State John Kerry: “We are writing to express our profound concern about Iran’s October 11 ballistic missile test…We urge you to consider unilateral and multilateral responses to this ballistic missile test. We believe calibrated pressure on Iran is appropriate due to its clear non-compliance with UNSCR 1929 and to deter future violations.”

Lockwood’s statement: “Bennet’s delayed concern is phony and disingenuous at best because he ignored all the signs and the writings on the wall on this issue. Coloradans are furious with outrage he supported our lawless president’s nuclear deal with a terroristic, theocratic thug. Calculated letters won’t protect Americans from the Ayatollah and terrorists, so it is worthless. This latest act shows how ridiculous supporters of the deal are, playing politics with real American lives and safety. Instead of writing letters and sponsoring show-bills Bennet should have stood up for his constituents and fought against equipping Iran with nuclear weapons.”

Signature Lockwood: amped-up, fear-mongering and spiteful.

As he tells it, his brand of bombast will serve him well if, some day, he chooses to enter politics as a candidate. He knows that his digital shenanigans, flippant Twitter remarks and faux-Paris Hilton-poor-bashing photo scandal will make it easy for Democratic trackers to dig up dirt on him. But, as he knows better than anybody, dirt comes with the job.

In a climate in which any media mention, even scathing critiques, can be considered good publicity, Lockwood thrives. He turns scandal into celebrity — perhaps unwanted by the buttoned up Republican establishment, but attention grabbing nonetheless.

Conservatives say they have yet to figure out how to handle this maverick — either by silencing him because he’s reckless or helping him out because he’s savvy.

Lockwood cites a string of friends — fellow up-and-coming conservatives — who can speak to his strengths. One leads the Libre Initiative, a Koch-funded grassroots organization mobilizing Latinos for the free market cause. Another friend leads Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-funded grassroots organization mobilizing veterans for the free market cause. Neither returned The Independent’s messages.

Only one friend, Charity Corker, a former colleague at Generation Opportunity, answered The Colorado Independent’s requests for comment on the record. In an email, she praised Lockwood as “an alarm clock for our generation.”

“He gets people to wake up and think,” she wrote.

Lockwood has no definitive plans, but his future, as he tells it, will likely be as unconventional as his past.

If he ever runs for office, he doubts he’ll take the predictable journey from city council to the Statehouse to Congress.

He hints that he’s hoping be tapped by the GOP to run for the seat held by beloved Democratic state Sen. Pat Steadman.

But, in the same conversation, the frenetic Lockwood also hints that he has aimed his personal sites on bigger things — like the nation’s Capitol. Having stuck with the same job all of eight months, he seems restless. He’s itching, he says, for the next big thing.

Top photo courtesy of Jonathan Lockwood

Groups opposed to the recall of three conservative Jefferson County Board of Education members are doing their best to keep under wraps how much they’re spending on opposition mailers or TV time. And these groups are getting help in hiding that spending from an industry that normally advocates for the public’s right to know: Denver’s broadcast TV stations.

The Colorado Independent has so far been able to tie at least $261,000 in advertising to the groups that either directly advocate against the recall or in favor of actions taken by the board majority. All but $41,000 comes from groups that are not required by either state or federal law to disclose donations or how they spend their money. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) grants licenses to broadcast TV stations and radio as a matter of public interest. Along with the license is the requirement that the broadcast organizations disclose political speech purchased, including ad buys.

But just try to find out how much is being spent by these groups on TV time, and you run into a stone wall at most of Denver’s TV stations. And according to Colorado Ethics Watch, TV stations have a vested interest in keeping those numbers secrets.

The Jefferson County Board of Education election includes a ballot question to recall three members of the board: John Newkirk, Julie Williams and Ken Witt. All three were elected in 2013 in a low-turnout election, with just 43 percent of the county’s 413,00 registered voters participating. Out of 178,000 ballots cast, more than 40,000 declined to vote on the school board races, meaning only one-third of eligible voters decided the new board majority.

The pro-recall side has been mostly transparent in disclosing how much is being collected and spent. It’s largely come through the candidate committees and from three organizations: Jeffco United, Jeffco United Forward and Jeffco United for Action, which has raised the most money for the election. The latter has so far revealed contributions of $252,305, with $146,000 of that going to Black Diamond Outreach for collecting signatures for the recall petitions. Critics claim that paying organizations to collect signatures flies in the face of the intent of such measures, which is that they are supposed to be citizen-led.

Among the biggest contributors to Jeffco United for Action: former Jeffco superintendent Cindy Stevenson, who kicked in $3,000.  Stevenson also gave money to five candidates backed by Jeffco United, for a total of $7,650, as of October 15. Another big donor: former Jeffco board member Hereford Percy, who kicked in $4,250 to the five candidates and to Jeffco United for Action.

The largest donation to Jeffco United for Action, however, came from Jeffco United, which in July contributed $97,000.

Jeffco United Forward, which also advocates for the five candidates, took in $31,138, as reported in its October 20 filing. However, more than $13,000 of that was in contributions with no identified donor, some in the hundreds of dollars. Spokesperson Lynea Hansen said those donations, which ranged from $10 to $250, were primarily for yard signs, for which the group charged $10 each; and for “getting out the word.” Hansen said Jeffco United Forward, as an “independent expenditure committee” under Colorado law, does not have to itemize donations of $250 or less.

On the anti-recall side, transparency is the exception rather than the rule. And those who are spending the most are ably assisted by three Denver broadcast TV stations that have a vested interest in keeping that spending secret.

Only CBS Denver (KCNC) freely disclosed ad buys made by two organizations advocating either in favor of the actions taken by the school board or to encourage Jeffco voters to vote against the recall.

The two organizations are Colorado Independent Action, Inc. and Kids are First Jeffco. The latter is a project of the Independence Institute; the former shares a mailing address with the Independence Institute, and ad buys are signed by Amy Oliver Cooke, the institute’s vice president.

Colorado Independent Action is registered in the business database of the Secretary of State as a non-profit, although the registration does not say how it is classified for Internal Revenue Service purposes. The organization is not registered as a committee of any kind in the Secretary of State’s campaign finance database, only as a contributor of $10,000 to Kids are First Jeffco. That’s the only contribution Kids are First Jeffco has received so far, according to the October 15 report. And only $1,000 was spent, to Colorado PRFRS for robocalls, the report stated. That company is owned by Cameron Lynch of Lakewood, who is well known in Republican circles for demographic research. He also reportedly helped state Republicans draw congressional boundary maps in 2011.

Colorado Media Group, part of Walt Klein Advertising, made the ad buys on behalf of both groups. According to FCC files, those buys were made to CBS Denver (KCNC), 7News Denver (KMGH), 9News (KUSA) and Channel 20 (KTVD), which is part of KUSA.

CBS Denver got $50,965 for ads that ran in August and September. Kids are First Jeffco paid  $17,290 for ads that ran through Monday, according to the station. While that exceeds the $10,000 the group has so far reported, the ad buys were made after the end of the Oct. 15 reporting period.

But no amount of calls, emails or even in-person requests would get the other three stations to divulge the amount they got from those two groups.

At 9News, “Lawrence,” who would not give his last time, declined to reveal that spending, claiming the station didn’t have to because those races are not of “national interest.” That means races at the federal level, like President, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives.

Brad Remington, vice president and general manager of KMGH, through an email, referred all questions to the station’s corporate owners, EW Scripps of Cincinnati.

Luis Toro, executive director of Colorado Ethics Watch, told The Independent that broadcast TV stations have a vested interest in keeping dark money under wraps.

“TV stations are the biggest winners in the post-Citizens United world,” Toro said. “They have every incentive to go along with the dark money groups that pay them so much.”

Citizens United was the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said corporations were people, and hence they could make contributions in political campaigns and issues just like people. It’s opened the floodgates of millions, perhaps billions of dollars, in dark money: contributions and spending that doesn’t have to be disclosed to the public.

Dark money is the term used to describe non-profit organizations that don’t have to disclose their contributors or spending. Under Internal Revenue Service rules, these groups, known as “social welfare” organizations, must have non-political activities as their primary purpose. That’s been interpreted to allow up to 49 percent of their spending to be on political speech.

There’s two other pieces of the dark money advertising issue: How much is being spent on cable or satellite TV networks and on social media buys.

In addition to the broadcast TV advertising, both Colorado Independent Action and Kids are First Jeffco bought air time through Comcast, which can more precisely target neighborhoods in the metro area, such as in Jefferson County.

Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute would not share the amount spent, stating that the Institute hasn’t disclosed its spending for years and isn’t going to start now. Jeffco United estimates total spending at about $450,000, a figure Caldara disputed in an interview with Sandra Fish, which was published by Colorado Public Radio last week. “I wish I had half of that,” Caldara told CPR.

Today, Colorado Ethics Watch released a series of Comcast documents that shows Colorado Independent Action bought at least $31,000 in air time through Comcast (one document doesn’t say how much was spend on an ad buy).  Add that to the more than $51,000 in TV time, and the total is $82,000, not including ad time bought through the three TV stations that would not release ad buy information.

Kids are First bought $24,000 in ad time from Comcast; combined with the KCNC buy, the total is $41,290. For both Independence Institute-affiliated groups, the total rises to at least  $111,998.

Caldara has not yet responded to a call for comment.

Another dark money group, Americans for Prosperity, is running videos on social media in support of the actions of the Jeffco board: “Accountability” and “Grateful,” both which can be found on YouTube. The AFP Foundation also put out three mailers in the past month in support of the board majority reforms and is running TV and cable ads as well. In the CPR report, AFP estimated it would spend less than $250,000 on those ads and mailers.

The Colorado Ethics Watch documents details $132,314 in Comcast buys for Americans for Prosperity and tied to the Jeffco recall. Another $8,624 was spent in Douglas County.  

The grand total for the Jeffco recall from the AFP, Kids are First Jeffco and Colorado Independent Action is at least $261,602.00.

The AFP Foundation is a 501(c)3, which under IRS rules does not have to disclose its political spending so long as it is done in a non-partisan manner. AFP, a 501(c)4, is under the IRS’s “social welfare” classification, and not required to disclose political spending so long as it isn’t the group’s chief purpose. It’s generally accepted that this can be as much as 49 percent of an organization’s spending.

Social media, the new frontier in campaign spending, is an even greater problem. According to The Atlantic, “social media is regarded as another subset of Internet communications; in 2006, the Federal Elections Commission concluded that finance laws apply to web advertisements and messages that appear on the sites of political organizations, but beyond those two categories, other types of Web-based activities go ungoverned by and large by federal law.”

The advent of dark money at the school board level is a new development for policy personnel at the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, which tracks campaign finance spending, including dark money.

Foundation policy analyst Richard Skinner said that disclosures of dark money spending has never been a priority for TV stations. It’s mostly “we have to keep [these documents]’ for legal purposes” kinds of explanations, he said. “No one will ever get fired at a TV station for failing to keep FCC files.” He blames the FCC in part for that, which he said has weak regulations with little or no enforcement.

But some states are fighting back. Montana, California and redder-than-red Texas now have rules or laws requiring more disclosure of contributions and spending by dark money groups. Montana’s bill had bipartisan sponsorship in the legislature and the state’s Democratic governor signed it into law in May.

The Texas Ethics Commission is pushing for more disclosure in that state, although their actions are opposed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. According to the San Antonio Express-News, the commission this month passed a rule taking on one of the biggest loopholes in campaign finance spending: the so-called “magic words” test that defines whether an ad is directly advocating for a candidate or merely making statements of support for actions taken by a candidate or group.  The Texas rules apply to any group spending money in Texas 30 days before an election.

California has the strongest and oldest laws, administered by its Fair Political Practices Commission. And they aren’t afraid to use them.

In 2012, the commission reached a settlement with two out-of-state groups that gave $11 million to a California political action committee that opposed a tax hike ballot measure supported by Gov. Jerry Brown. The commission ordered the California group, the Small Business Action Committee, to return the $11 million donation. Another $1 million was levied against the out-of-state groups, Americans for Responsible Leadership and the Center to Protect Patient Rights, both based in Arizona, for violations of the state’s campaign finance laws, according to the Los Angeles Times. Both groups are tied to the political network operated by David and Charles Koch.

Colorado Independent Action and Kids are First Jeffco, through the Independence Institute, also are tied to the Koch brothers. According to a 2013 report from the liberal Center for Media and Democracy, the Institute has received money from Donors Capital Fund, which receives money from Donors Trust, which is funded by the Koch brothers. The liberal Center for Public Integrity also reported in 2013 that Donors Trust is a funder of the Independence Institute.

Correction 10/30/15: This story initially stated there were 178,000 voters in Jefferson County. There are actually 413,000. 

Photo credit: Nick Ares, Creative Commons, Flickr. 

After 28 years in prison for a crime all evidence suggests he did not commit, Clarence Moses-EL walked out of jail, saw his family and tasted freedom. Read Colorado Independent editor Susan Greene’s story about his first night out of prison here.

Clarence Moses-EL’s wife Stephanie Burke and son Anthony Burke wait for his release from the Denver jail. Credit: Robert McGoey

A fire alarm at the jail slowed down the release process, but Moses-EL’s legal team negotiated what might have been another delay to his freedom. Here, from left to right, are attorneys Eric Klein and Katie Stephenson, and paralegal Phil Lieder. Photo: Robert McGoey

For the first time in more thank 28 years, Clarence Moses-EL walks free, dressed in a new suit and carrying a copy of the Koran. Photo: Robert McGoey

Moses-EL embraces his wife, Stephanie Burke. Photo: Robert McGoey

Moses-EL speaks to supporters and the press about his 28 years in prison. Photos: Robert McGoey

Clarence Moses-EL with Denver’s press corps. Photo: Robert McGoey

Moses-EL and his wife and son celebrate his freedom. Photo: Robert McGoey

Moses-EL relishes pizza from the free world. Photo: Greg Hoenig

Surrounded by his grandchildren, legal team and friends, Moses-EL rejoices. Photo: Greg Hoenig

Moses-EL, his son, Anthony, stepdaughter, Michelle, and grandchildren are reunited. Photo: Greg Hoenig

Moses-EL and his wife Stephanie Burke. Photo: Greg Hoenig

Moses-EL chats with his family in Baltimore. Photo: Greg Hoenig

Moses-EL and his son Anthony Burke embrace. Photo: Greg Hoenig

A taste of sweet freedom. The cake had 12 candles, one for each grandchild Moses-EL had not met in his 28 years in prison. Photo: Greg Hoenig

Don’t expect to walk into a voting machine and pull a lever to participate in Colorado’s early voting process. Let The Colorado Independent walk you through what you need to do to help choose the next president.

Unless you’re a diehard political party member in Colorado, chances are low you’ve participated in the state’s early voting process. Frankly, to many, it’s baffling. And if you’re an unaffiliated voter who wants to get involved, act fast. You have until January 4 to join a party so you can help determine which candidate gets the nomination.

Then what? Get ready for Super Tuesday. What you think might be a quick trip to a polling place is nothing of the sort in Colorado. Instead, it’s a night of discussion among your neighborhood party members where you’ll find yourself pitching for your favorite candidate, hearing from others about theirs, and maybe even having to fend off the aroma of home baked cookies luring you to another candidate’s side.

This year, since the Colorado GOP canceled its traditional presidential preference poll, Super Tuesday will be a little less super for Republicans here when it comes to the presidential race. But Democrats who are feeling the Bern, crave Clinton or are mobbing for O’Malley have a long road ahead before their candidates win or lose, and this article is geared more toward them.

So if you’re ready to get involved, here’s what you need to know.

Will the 2016 presidential race in Colorado be a primary like New Hampshire, or a caucus like Iowa?

Well, it’s kind of a hybrid, and in Colorado it has four steps.

The first happens this year on March 1, Super Tuesday, when nearly a dozen other states hold early nominating contests. Colorado has a round of precinct-level caucuses in neighborhoods around the state. This is the first chance for a candidate to get knocked out of the running. Presidential contenders need to meet a minimum of 15 percent to send enough delegates to represent him or her at the next level. And it could happen right in the living room of one of your neighbors.

Right now, the top tier Democratic candidates in national polling are Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. So if Martin O’Malley doesn’t clock in with more than 15 percent, he’ll send no delegates to the next stage, bumping him out of contention in Colorado.

The second step is for locally designated delegates to travel to conventions in all 64 counties where another poll for president takes place.

Then at seven congressional district conventions, parties will take a poll to send delegates for each presidential candidate on to the state and national convention. Then, finally, at the state convention on April 16th in Loveland, the same thing happens: more polling.

Bottom line: March 1 is your chance to get in early and will be the first place to make your voice heard. Good news: you won’t have to travel far. Unless you yourself are selected to attend the next steps, your delegates will carry the banner for your candidate from here, all the way to the national convention, which takes place in Philadelphia.

So can someone actually win on March 1?

In a way. A straw poll for president will be taken that will show where each candidate stands. The precincts report to the counties and the counties report to the state. All along the four-step process Democratic Party officials will live-Tweet and release on social media the number of delegates each candidate has.

“We won’t declare a winner or a loser,” says Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio about the March 1 caucuses. They’ll just say Candidate X has this amount of delegates and candidate Y has that many.

Palacio likens the process to a high-school track meet: The first lap is the precinct caucus — where you know who’s ahead, the second lap is the county conventions, the third lap is the congressional district convention, and the fourth lap is the state convention, which somebody actually wins.

Then why are these March 1 precinct-level caucuses so important for presidential candidates? 

The numbers each candidate garners on March 1 in these neighborhood gatherings will help show the level of support and enthusiasm each candidate has in Colorado. Also, candidates that fail to crack 15 percent of support in the precinct caucuses will have lost the state.

OK, so I’m an unaffiliated voter right now who likes Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, or Martin O’Malley, and I want to participate at the precinct caucuses on the Democratic side. What do I need to do?

First, if you’re an unaffiliated voter, you need to become a registered Democrat. And you’d better do it fast. The deadline is Jan. 4. Luckily for you, Colorado makes it easy to switch parties. You can do it online at GoVoteColorado.com — and you can even use your iPhone or tablet. (You can always switch back to being an unaffiliated voter if you choose.) You’ll have until Feb. 1 to make sure your address is updated so you can vote in your neighborhood precinct.

I’ve been a registered Colorado Democrat, but I’ve never participated in this process. What are these ‘presidential precinct caucuses’ happening on March 1? 

These are neighborhood events that are the first step for Colorado’s Democratic voters to make their voices heard about the candidate they like in the 2016 race for the White House. They’re also the first chance for a candidate who doesn’t get enough support to get the boot.

The 2008 battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton broke records for attendance at these typically low-turnout local events. “It was a real zoo,” one current precinct captain recalls of 2008. Some voters showed up thinking they were going to vote on a voting machine not even knowing how the caucus system actually worked.

And how does the presidential precinct caucus system actually work?

These March 1 presidential precinct caucuses in Colorado are typically meetings where loyal local party poobahs gather to oil the Democratic machine. The meetings are sometimes held in the homes of loyal party worker bees, but they can also take place in public spaces — schools, churches, community buildings, whatever. If you go to one of these precinct caucus meetings, you’ll help illuminate the support for your favorite candidate by selecting delegates to attend the party’s state convention.

All this sounds quaint and community oriented, like a big neighborhood discussion where hearts and minds are changed through debate and discussion. Right?

Pretty much. The point is persuasion: You’re going to hear a lot from people trying to get you to pull for their candidate, and you’re going to want to be able to convince others why they should send a delegate on behalf of the candidate you support. You might be there for a few hours.

Some folks mark off a corner of the room for a candidate and try to lure neighbors over. “There’s definitely movement … it’s on the margins,” says Jim Matson, a former Democratic precinct captain in Colorado Springs who has participated in the process. “People can advocate, and if they can sell it, they can bring others to them.”

It’s familiar friends-and-neighbors politics and some might not be above saying “we have cookies,” to bring others over to their corner, Matson says. “It’s very retail, very personable, and kind of quirky.”

Got it. I’m going. How do I know when and where to show up?

On March 1, the caucuses will begin at 7 p.m. at locations determined by your local county Democratic Party and will happen somewhere near where you live. The Colorado Democratic Party will publish locations on its website when they’re available. And the party has a summary of exactly what to expect, and the mathematical formulas involved in delegate selection, on their website here.

This whole precinct process in Colorado … is it good or bad?

That depends on who you ask.

“Some critics say the party precinct caucus is a poor way to begin the party nominating process in Colorado,” write Colorado College political science professors Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy in their 2012 book Politics and & Policy in Colorado: Governing a Purple State. “Every registered member of a political party can attend his or her party precinct caucus, yet relatively few bother. In some cases, there can be lively discussion and competition between candidates for delegate to the county convention at precinct caucuses, but that is a rare occurrence.”

More from the book:

In many of the precincts, probably a majority, the same party stalwarts dutifully attend the precinct caucus, vote themselves and their friends a trip to the county convention, and adjourn, often without ever discussing which of the various candidates might make the better nominee for office.

“Those who like the current precinct caucus system point out that it places power right where it belongs, and that is in the hands of faithful party members who are sufficiently committed to the party to take the time to attend precinct caucuses, county conventions, and periodically, state conventions,” the authors write.

In 2008 the Obama-Clinton caucus crush was a record breaker. What are expectations for Democrats this year?

Yes, 2008 was a big year for the precinct caucuses in Colorado because officials moved the date up to coincide with 21 other states that were holding primaries or caucuses that day. They called it “Tsunami Tuesday.” Lynn Bartels, the current Secretary of State spokeswoman who at the time was a reporter for The Rocky Mountain News, recalls a cover photo of her newspaper showing raised hands all over the place when someone asked who the first-time caucus-goers were.

So, what about this year’s three-way race between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley?

“If I knew that I’d be living in Las Vegas,” quipped Antonio Esquibel, an official with the Adams County Democratic Party. He said so far there hasn’t been much excitement, but he expects it to pick up closer to the middle of January. Most of those who’ve gotten in touch with him about the caucuses, he said, are local party people who would probably show up anyway.

Over in Arapahoe County, precinct captain Jean Greenberg says she’s been telling folks at House District meetings to gear up for the caucuses, but the same people just keep showing up. “It’s the die hards,” she says. “But I haven’t been able to get a lot of precinct people who really need to know what’s happening to come.” She says she’s losing sleep over it.

What does she expect on March 1 at her precinct?

“I’ve heard everything from nobody to everybody,” she says. “As far as I know, we have absolutely no idea.”

There have been years in the past when just one person might show up to a particular precinct caucus. 2014 was pathetic in some parts. But some precinct captains, county party and House District chairs, have already been getting calls from Clinton and Sanders people about the caucuses.

Mary Beth Corsentino, chair of the Pueblo County Democrats, says a contingent for Sanders formed seemingly out of nowhere and filled a room in a pubic library one day over the summer. “Not party regulars by any means,” she said of the group. “They said they were unaffiliated.” But when she told some of them they had to register as Democrats if they wanted to participate in the caucuses, “that was a kind of shock to them,” she says.

Bernie was an independent for a long time, but now he’s running for president as a Democrat. What’s an unaffiliated Sanders supporter to do?

There are more voters in Colorado who choose to be unaffiliated than to register as Democrats or Republicans. People opt not to declare themselves as members of a major political party for a variety of reasons. Being unaffiliated does keep you from participating in the precinct-caucuses. With so many Coloradans registered as unaffiliated, there’s no telling which candidate — Democrat or Republican — might be the most attractive.

Some Sanders supporters in Colorado are hoping they can reach out to unaffiliated voters and sway them over to the Democratic side with the lure of a Democratic socialist from Vermont.

“A lot of the Bernie Sanders fans are independents who have registered with the Democratic Party for the first time,” says Michael Gibson, a volunteer organizer for Sanders on the Western Slope. “He’s got a huge following among independents.”

Gibson says there’s a big push going on right now in Colorado to persuade those feeling the Bern to become Democrats so they can be part of the early process, or at least make these voters aware of the Jan. 4 deadline to do so.

“A lot of people — if they don’t know about that — are going to feel like they are disenfranchised,” he says.

One grassroots organizer for Sanders in Glenwood Springs, Barb Coddington, says she’s had some success in urging unaffiliated voters to switch by the deadline. At least they told her they would, anyway. How many? Not many. She could probably count them on both hands.

“I certainly don’t know if they followed through,” she says.

But supporters for some Democratic candidates have been organizing for the caucuses for a while now, right?

Yes. In late October, for instance, supporters for Hillary Clinton gathered at the home of former U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar for a get-together where attendees were asked to fill out cards pledging their support for Clinton. Current Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper was there, as was former Dem Gov. Roy Romer and other party big wigs. Hickenlooper said he’d be caucusing for Clinton, has been strategizing with Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet about how they could help her, and he urged those there to fill out their pledge cards.

“We have to make sure that she gets a catapult out of our caucuses,” Hickenlooper told the crowd.

He continued:

“That’s March 1. So make sure you’re going to be at your caucus— I will be at my caucus. Make sure you drag at least two neighbors to your caucus, maybe volunteer and make some phone calls in the week or two before. Especially with the caucuses, that seven days right before is when you can really begin to move people. If we can get the turnout there in the caucus and just really give her that springboard … March 1 is going to be one of the most important days of the campaign, certainly in Colorado but really across the country.”

It is meetings like those at Salazar’s house, Clinton’s Colorado campaign manager Brad Komar told The Independent at the time, that are “what wins a caucus.”

But what about the Republican caucuses this year? 

Oh, they’re still having them on March 1 where they’ll decide a whole bunch of important party and candidate-related stuff. But the state Republican Party executive committee decided to cancel the presidential preference poll. So Republicans around Colorado will still be going to caucuses on March 1 to pick delegates and vote on other party-building matters, and basically form the Republican organization for the next two years. They just decided not to hold a presidential straw poll on March 1 because of rules that would bind delegates to specific candidates going into the national convention.

Soooo … who should I support on caucus day? 

Sorry, voter, but that’s one you’ll have to figure out.

Photo credit: Lara604, Creative Commons, Flickr. 

Next week begins another legislative session in Colorado where Republicans who control the Senate and Democrats who control the House will hash out bills under the gold dome of the Capitol all while Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper continues to shape his legacy a year into his final term.

Democrats and Republicans are offering differing agendas but they’ll both be dealing with budget cuts and will be debating laws this year under the pressure of a presidential election cycle and while every member of the House and half the Senate is up for re-election themselves.

The following is just some of what lawmakers have been talking about on the brink of another split session that begins Jan. 13.

‘A lot of potential out there’ for ethics and accountability

Lawmakers this session are looking at trying to rid inherent conflicts of interest at Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission, the currently director-less panel tasked with hearing complaints about potential political wrongdoing in Colorado. Denver Democratic Rep. Beth McCann told The Colorado Independent she’ll introduce a bill that would stop the attorney general from giving legal advice to the Ethics Commission while at the same time offering legal advice to those under investigation by the panel. McCann wants the IEC to have its own lawyer. She’ll also look at changing the way Colorado handles complaints against politicians. Currently, the state is the only one in the nation where citizens have to investigate and prove claims of potential wrongdoing by public officials, while those officials can use state money for their defense. McCann wants to bring Colorado in line with other states on the issue. Denver Democrat Pat Steadman will support the effort in the Senate.

“There is, I think, a lot of potential out there” for accountability reforms this year, says Peg Perl, senior counsel for the nonprofit Colorado Ethics Watch. Another proposal she expects to see is one to shore up loopholes in state disclosure laws, like extending into election years certain disclosure laws that apply only to non-election years. (Currently the disclosure rules for those years vary, so voters can be left in the dark about who is giving money to whom.)

“Money can come in during odd years but is not disclosed the same way as it would in an election year,” Perl says, adding that multiple lawmakers she’s talked to have shown interest in plugging the loophole.

Civil liberties: Regulating the police drone zone

This year the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado plans to help advance legislation that regulates the way local police use drones.

“Laws to protect our privacy have not nearly kept up with all of the technological advances to invade it,” says the group’s public policy director Denise Maes.

Marijuana: In ‘da clubs

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers — Longmont Democratic Rep. Jonathan Singer and Colorado Springs Republican Rep. Kit Roupe — wants to get a statewide grip on social pot clubs that are popping up around Colorado. The problem, Singer told The Gazette, is that some of them “are glorified drug fronts and some of them are legitimate organizations wanting to make sure that people can safely consume outside their own homes.”

One bill would allow people to smoke dope at social clubs, but not allow them to buy it there. Another agenda item might be to allow pot smoking at retail stores similar to how wineries do tastings.

The death penalty: Do, don’t, dead?

Will there be an effort to repeal the death penalty in Colorado this year? Not likely, especially in an election year, says Denver Democratic Sen. Pat Steadman. That’s what he’s hearing from legislative leaders, advocates, political consultants and handlers who work on the issue. “I’m disappointed,” he says. “I thought we were going to do it this year, or at least make a good run at it.”

Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman confirmed to KRCC’s Bente Birkeland in an interview that she wouldn’t be carrying a bill this year to repeal the death penalty in Colorado, though she feels strongly about doing so and will work on it over the next three years. But the decision, she said, comes from her current position as minority leader.

On the other side of the issue, Douglas County Republican Rep. Kim Ransom told The Independent she’s proposing a bill that would give district attorneys a second chance with a jury in a death penalty trial if they can’t convince the first to put someone to death.

All this while Arapahoe District Attorney George Brauchler says he wants to see a ballot measure in 2016 asking voters to decide whether to keep or scrap the death penalty. “You want to end the death penalty? Put a ballot initiative on there,” he told The Indy. “I would think that you’re going to get the best turnout and the best sense of people in a presidential year.”

Public records: Let the sun shine in

Lawmakers plan to tackle a handful of measures to crack open secret info and let the sunlight in. “The biggest-impact proposal is meant to ensure that public records maintained in spreadsheets and databases are made available to requesters in similar file formats that can be searched and analyzed,” writes Jeffrey Roberts, director of The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

Democratic Rep. Jessie Danielson of Wheatridge aims to make sure the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment discloses names of employers here who are violating wage laws. A century-old law in Colorado keeps that information secret in Colorado. A new law that went into affect in Colorado last year helps those who had their wages stolen recover what they’re owed.

Another proposed bipartisan effort would bring the judicial branch of government under the Colorado Open Records Act, giving the public more access to administrative records in the state court system.

Meanwhile, an advisory task force set up to review how police use body cameras in Colorado is slated to wrap up with recommendations sometime in the spring. Whether anything that comes out of it would be something lawmakers will address in state law remains to be seen. In Colorado, more police are wearing body cams, but when the footage becomes public is up to each individual police department. Roberts, who has sat in on the task force panel, tells The Independent the issue of when footage becomes a public record hasn’t really come up a lot yet.

It’s time to talk about rural Colorado…

Only about 30 percent of lawmakers represent rural areas of Colorado, a state where more than 80 percent of the population lives along the Front Range. But some lawmakers this session might try to focus more on the needs of rural Coloradans, said Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman, a Democrat from Denver.

“The people in rural Colorado – whether it be west, north, east or south – are oftentimes left out,” she said, according to The Durango Herald. She said one idea could be to launch a state fund where money could go to help rural communities in a time of crisis, like what happened in Durango with the Gold King Mine spill into the Animas River.

The spinning blade of budget cuts

Get ready for the buzz saw.

In economic forecasts, the executive and legislative branch differ some on the expected shortfall of revenue this year to the tune of $208 million and $157 million. But either way, a piggy bank deficit is one lawmakers will grapple with this session, meaning they might have to dip into reserve funds and do the old snip, snap, snoop on state program spending.

“We are in a situation where all the additional revenues we collect has to be capped and refunded, generally speaking it’s not very much, to residents of the state of Colorado,” said Democratic House Speaker Dicki Lee Hollinghorst. “They would much prefer to have that invested in important infrastructure like transportation and making sure we have the best education for our kids.”

Loveland Republican House Minority Leader Brian DelGrosso said, “It looks like the revenue is going to come in lower than projected, and for what we needed to basically fund all of our mandated spending, so I think you’re going to see cuts that will have to happen this year.”

Energy and a water war

Colorado this year has a historic state water plan aimed at making sure the state has enough of it, and Gov. John Hickenlooper wants lawmakers this session to examine how to fund goals in the plan. So far Hickenlooper has said his priorities include “water storage projects and alternative transfer methods – ways to meet growing municipal water demand without resorting to buy and dry, which is what happens when a municipality buys land from a farmer for the water rights and lets the land go dry,” reports The Coloradoan.

On the fracking front, nearly a dozen ballot proposals “aimed at Colorado’s oil and gas industry — including increasing setbacks to 4,000 feet and a statewide ban on the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — have been filed with the state’s Legislative Council, the first step to getting on the 2016 ballot,” according to The Denver Business Journal.

Closing a Cayman Islands loophole vs. staying out of the way

House Democrats, who are in the majority, say they aim for getting equal pay for men and women this session, and to make sure Colorado can get its hooks into tax money held in offshore accounts. Democrats in the Senate will also try to get better broadband access across the state, they said. In towns and cities across Colorado, voters in the recent November elections overwhelmingly supported allowing local governments to get involved in broadband service.

When it comes to an economic agenda this session, House Republicans plan to do what they can to keep government out of the way of business, House GOP spokesman Joel Malecka told The Independent. They’ll work more on repealing regulations and removing obstacles rather than putting forward new laws, he said, adding, “Maybe staying out of the away is the better way.”

In that regard, Republican Rep. Patrick Neville, R-Castle Rock, says he’ll focus on requiring state agencies to give a break to small businesses if they’re first-time offenders who violate new rules. He wants them to get a written warning instead of a fine.

Also, remember these three words: construction defects reform. For members of the business community and House Republicans, legislation that would choke off the prospect of class-action lawsuits about construction defects from condo owners will likely get plenty of discussion. But this is likely a nonstarter for the majority Dems who like the idea of tax-free savings accounts for first-time home buyers and setting up an assistance fund for renters.

Transportation: Hard on the brakes, chains on the tires

No money for transportation this year seems to be a theme.

One local group has formed a “Fix Colorado Roads Act,” that would generate money in the form of a bond, “because there are no permanent, reliable general fund dollars set aside for transportation improvements in Colorado,” according to North Forty News.

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers from the mountain region wants to bring back a bill to clarify laws about what kinds of passenger vehicles should have chains and traction devices on their tires to ease congestion along the I-70 corridor.

LGBT issues: Ready to fight

Leaders in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community hope lawmakers this year will work on making it easier for residents to update their gender on birth certificates, ban conversion therapy for minors, and align the state’s civil unions laws with Supreme Court rulings, according to One Colorado.

The group will also try to defeat “any and all bills that allow individuals and businesses to claim their religion gives them permission to ignore the law, stop all attempts to stigmatize and attack transgender Coloradans and their families, and fight any other bills that will hurt LGBT Coloradans.”

It’s 2016, so don’t envy any of us

What does a presidential election year mean for the Colorado legislative session? Political reporters Joey Bunch of The Denver Post and Peter Marcus of The Durango Herald told KRCC’s capitol reporter Bente Birkeland what they think in an interview this week. Bottom line: Look for wedge issue bills introduced by lawmakers so they can use them as talking points during their campaigns. Campaign operatives and reporters will also be trying to get lawmakers on the record about national issues or candidates.

“You’re going to see anti-Planned Parenthood legislation, you’re going to see pro-Planned Parenthood legislation, and it’s all going to feed into this national narrative,” Marcus said.

“I think we’re going to see people try and write campaign ads during this session,” Bunch said. “Putting poison pills into very good bills just to say a candidate voted against it. It’s going to be a tough job for voters next year, I don’t envy them, and I don’t envy the reporters who have to figure all of this out.”

Healthcare: The three words that won’t go away

Hospital Provider Fee.

This biggest issue in the healthcare debate for Colorado this session will focus on the role of this $2.4 billion program that’s made up by money hospitals pay each year depending on how many patients they had stay in their beds. Each hospital pays a different amount — some pay a lot, some pay nothing— and the aggregate figure came out to more than $600 million last year. That money is then matched almost dollar for dollar by the federal government to expand Medicaid, insure more residents who visit emergency rooms, and reimburse hospitals for care. In addition, the money helps hospitals pay for indigent care. The more money brought in from the HPF, the more money the feds give Colorado.

But so much of that money coming in to the state triggers a Taxpayer Bill of Rights tripwire, meaning money would have to go back to the taxpayers, and state government would have to trim budgets in other programs. A fight over how to deal with this issue and whether Colorado can keep more money in the budget for state programs is likely to fall along party lines with Democrats wanting to change how the HPF operates, and Republicans opposing it.

Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. John Kefalas of Fort Collins will try to help disabled Coloradans find jobs.

Last but not least. Hunting colors: code pink

Because this is Colorado, Democratic Sen. Kerry Donovan of Vail told KVNF radio that one thing she wants to do this session is add “blaze pink” to the safety colors hunters here can wear.

Even before lawmakers gaveled the 2016 session into order on Wednesday, three words have dominated debate at the Capitol: Hospital Provider Fee. Understanding the issue, why it’s an issue, and the political implications around it — as well as what makes it important to regular folks outside the Statehouse  — can be confusing. Here’s our explainer.

First of all, what is the Hospital Provider Fee?

The hospital provider fee is a state program requiring hospitals to pay money each year depending on how many patients stayed in hospital beds overnight and how much outpatient services they provided. That money is then used, among other things, to help Coloradans who can’t afford insurance plans get care, and to help the state pay for people who are on Medicaid, which is a government healthcare program for low-income Coloradans and their families. 

Each hospital pays a different amount — some pay a lot, some pay nothing — and the fee hauled in nearly $700 million last year. This money is then matched almost dollar for dollar by the federal government to expand Medicaid, provide health coverage for Coloradans who are using emergency rooms for non-emergency treatment, and reimburse hospitals for care. The more money the fee brings in the more money the feds give Colorado to make sure people who can’t afford healthcare get it. Since 2009, the program has helped more than 300,000 people get insurance coverage.

Former House Speaker Mark Ferrandino, a Democrat, carried the bill establishing the hospital provider fee program in 2009. That year, Republicans derided the plan in their campaigns. Some candidates said Democrats had pushed through a billion dollars in “new taxes” and fees. For years, some Republicans have tried unsuccessfully to repeal the fee, calling it a “hospital tax.”

In November, when Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper laid out his $27 billion state budget plan to lawmakers, he cited the hospital provider fee as a vital source of revenue.

“By converting the hospital provider fee to an enterprise, we can ensure that we can use the money we have for the essential priorities most Coloradans expect from us,” Hickenlooper said. He also proposed reducing the amount the hospital provider fees rake in by $100 million in order to retain more money in the state budget, which would mean less federal dollars following that money and going to hospitals. 

Um, what does that last part mean?

Well, Colorado has a budget crunch this year, and politicians are looking for ways to fix it.

In 2016, the hospital provider fee program is expected to bring in some $750 million in revenues. And because of Colorado’s complex tax system involving the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, all that money will help push state funds over the limits set by the 1992, voter-approved constitutional amendment — meaning more money would have to go back to the taxpayers in the form of refunds instead of staying in state budget coffers to pay for programs.

Focus on the hospital provider fee sharpened last year when the state realized Colorado was poised to hit its spending caps under TABOR. During the 2014 elections, Republicans took control of the state Senate. Now, any attempt to work around TABOR constraints has to go through Republican-led committees and a Republican Senate. And, well, good luck with that.

During the last legislative session, Democratic House Speaker Dicky Lee Hullinghorst of Boulder introduced a bill to convert the hospital provider fee into an enterprise (see below). But she unveiled the legislation late in the session — in April — and the bill died before the legislature adjourned in May.

So now re-classifying it as an enterprise is back. What’s an ‘enterprise’ anyway?

As defined in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights constitutional amendment that passed in 1992, an enterprise is a government-owned business that meets three criteria. To be an enterprise and not subject to TABOR limits, an entity must be a free-standing business operation of government (think of a concession stand at a park or the state lottery), that doesn’t get more than 10 percent of its revenue from the government (think Parks and Wildlife, which generates revenue from hunting and fishing licenses), and has the legal ability to issue revenue bonds— a form of money borrowing. 

Once an entity is established as an enterprise, the money generated to it becomes money for the enterprise, keeps it from being included in the larger pot of state revenues, and protects it from being designated as money that could trigger TABOR limits — and, therefore, taxpayer refunds.

Democratic Sen. Pat Steadman, who sits on the state’s budget committee, explains it like this: Picture a bucket with water pouring in. The incoming water is state revenues, and when the bucket fills to the top (or hits its TABOR limits) water starts pouring over the edge— and that overflowing water (money) goes back to taxpayers in the form of rebates. Now, picture rocks in the bottom of the bucket. One of those big rocks is money from the hospital provider fee. It’s money that takes up space in the bucket, and those who want to take a big rock out can do so by reclassifying the hospital provider fee into an enterprise.

In short, if the pool of money funded by the hospital provider fee is turned into an enterprise fund, then state government can keep more money — some $370 million to help solve some of the state’s budget woes. When the hospital provider fee was created in 2009, the economy was in a slump and there was little worry money generated from the fee would push up against TABOR limits. Now the economy has gotten better, and here we are.

Well, how much of a refund for an average Coloradan are we talking about if the hospital fee isn’t turned into an enterprise? 

It’s nearly impossible to say exactly because so much can change and we’re dealing with economic forecasts. But under current expectations, if everything stays the way it is Coloradans could expect to get a rebate of anywhere between say, $25 and $125 on their 2017 taxes.

So would making the hospital provider fee an enterprise be a way to circumvent TABOR?

Some critics of the plan to move the hospital provider fee into an enterprise say it’s a TABOR “workaround,” or that it sidesteps TABOR, meaning that it’s essentially a shell game to avoid principles of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Opponents see the plan as an underhanded scheme to keep more money in government coffers and rebate less money to taxpayers, which they say goes against voters’ wishes when they passed the TABOR amendment in the first place.

Proponents of the plan counter that TABOR is what created the whole enterprise system in the first place. So, when it comes to TABOR, they say the hospital provider fee plan is more like a “work-within” than a “work-around.” In other words, the framework for enterprise funds was put in place by the TABOR amendment and could be a legal way to avoid TABOR’s fiscal constraints.

Who is against re-classifying the hospital provider fee and why?

Republicans. They’ve opposed Hickenlooper’s plan to create an enterprise fund. Much of their objection is ideological. They’ve spent years opposing Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, a program that makes up a big portion of the state budget. “Democratic lawmakers added the Medicaid expansion to the hospital provider fee program in 2013, making the total size roughly $2.4 billion in the 2014-15 state fiscal year,” reported The Denver Post. The more money the hospital provider fee brings in, the more federal matching dollars come with it. Some worry what would happen if the feds were to stop paying.

Others don’t like the idea of having a hospital provider fee in the first place.

Kevin Grantham, a Cañon City Republican senator on the state’s budget committee, told The Denver Post in December, “A lot of this goes back to when it was first put in … the money (Democrats) are wishing for in this endeavor is money that’s already been spent by them several times over because of their legislative actions. So they are wanting us, and the taxpayers, to bail them out of their own bad policy decisions over the last decade.”

Most recently, just before this week’s start of the legislative session, the Senate’s top Republican, Bill Cadman of Colorado Springs, made public a non-binding legal opinion from legislative lawyers that argues it would be unconstitutional to convert or reclassify the hospital provider fee into an enterprise.

Hickenlooper’s administration has looked askance at that memo, saying an opinion by the state attorney general’s office made the opposite argument and gave them a legal green light for the enterprise plan. Former Republican Attorney General John Suthers said when the fee was created that it should be an enterprise so as not to affect TABOR limits.

Cadman has said the state doesn’t have a budget problem, and lawmakers will have to make unspecified cuts.

Another idea Republicans have floated would be to put the question about changing the hospital provider fee up to voters as a 2016 ballot initiative. Hickenlooper doesn’t think voters would approve it.

This is a budget fight. But what does it say about power dynamics at the Capitol?

This year is another session with divided government under the dome. Republicans control the Senate by one seat, Democrats control the House by three.

Converting the hospital provider fee into an enterprise fund is the Democratic Governor’s top priority. Last year, he sent a four-page letter to lawmakers urging them to embrace the plan. So, it has become a partisan issue that pits Democrats who control the governorship and the House against Republicans who control the Senate. Democrats will need Republicans to help them reclassify the hospital provider fee. Republican leaders are saying no way, while they haven’t yet  been super specific beyond bonding options about where they plan to get the money to pay for transportation, education, and more when it comes time for lawmakers to write the budget this session.

In his State of the State address on Jan. 14, Hickenlooper said, “If we can’t make this very reasonable change— like many already allowed under TABOR— then what choice do we have but to re-examine TABOR? Right now, no one can say with a straight face that our budget rules are working for us.”

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman told The Independent the hospital provider fee issue is “by far the most important action” lawmakers could take this session, and said Republicans are “paralyzing things by refusing to have the discussion.”

The conservative group Americans for Prosperity is engaging on the issue. So, what does that mean?

Here’s where it gets sticky for any Republican who might consider helping to reclassify the hospital provider fee into an enterprise fund: The Colorado chapter of AFP — the main political arm of the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers — has made fighting the plan and protecting TABOR its top priority this year. The group, which is adept at merging grassroots activism with big money, was following the issue last session and became concerned that, although an effort failed to reclassify the hospital provider fee then, some lawmakers might bend and support it this time around, especially with the Governor making such a big case for it. The issue also lines up with AFP’s opposition to Medicaid expansion in the states and Obama’s federal healthcare policies in general.

Hickenlooper, in turn, has challenged AFP about how the group would suggest the state pay for major programs without reclassifying the hospital provider fee. In response, AFP’s state director Michael Fields said he rejects the premise of the question. The government shouldn’t be concerned with generating revenue, but rather focus on better managing the limited resources it already has while cutting waste and making government more efficient, Fields says.

There’s a “disconnect in how people in the Capitol look for revenue and how the people look for it,” Fields tells The Independent. The group calls the hospital provider fee a “bed tax.”

The context of AFP’s involvement is that it’s a big-time, strategic pressure group with loads of resources and activists that will keep certain lawmakers holding the line on this issue, especially at a time when they need backing to run for re-election.

Meanwhile, the business lobby in Colorado is speaking in a near-monolithic voice for reclassifying the hospital provider fee into an enterprise, as have editorial boards at some of the state’s regional newspapers. 

So is it really a fee? Or is it a tax?

Argument: It’s a fee because the money generated from it benefits the hospitals that pay into it. And the same legislative legal entity that says converting it into an enterprise would be illegal also stated, “The hospital provider fee would not be a tax requiring prior voter approval” when it was created.

Argument: It’s a tax because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services refers to it as a tax in their Medicaid regulations, and because certain hospitals don’t reap the benefit of what they pay into it.

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner called it a “provider tax” when he was a Republican state lawmaker. (He was a little more colorful, too, saying it was “a legislative colonoscopy” and “we know what that means for the taxpayer in the end.”

A lawsuit filed by a pro-TABOR group argues that it’s a tax, so this question might eventually be up to a judge — or several judges if it reaches the Supreme Court.

Last June, a TABOR protection and enforcement organization called The Tabor Foundation filed a lawsuit alleging the hospital provider fee is unconstitutional. “The complaint argues that because revenues from the fee have been used for things other than the provision of a direct benefit to its payers — Colorado hospitals — it is actually a tax that requires approval from state voters to be operational,” The Denver Business Journal reported. The lawsuit also seeks to have Colorado repay fees with interest.

That lawsuit is still pending.

What will happen if the status quo remains this year?

Supporters of converting the hospital provider fee to an enterprise fund say if it doesn’t happen and the state hits its TABOR limits, then about $350 million will have to be cut from the state budget for programs like transportation, education, and other services. Converting the revenues to an enterprise fund would mean less refunds to individual Colorado taxpayers, but more money state government could use to fund vital programs. Proponents say the impact of pooling the money to pay for much-needed state services is, in the long run, far more valuable to Coloradans than an individual tax refund of up to perhaps $125.

What does a rural senator who was the only Republican to vote for Medicaid expansion in Colorado say about the hospital provider fee?

We’re talking about Larry Crowder, an Alamosa farmer and rancher. He represents a large swath of the rural southeastern part of Colorado that includes 16 counties, 15 of which are under the federal poverty level. His district also includes several hospitals. Crowder isn’t big on pledges, so he won’t be signing AFP’s pledge to oppose the hospital provider fee issue. He thinks hospitals in his district — and he has been lobbied heavily by them — need the hospital provider fee because it keeps them operating sufficiently. “They want it in the enterprise,” he said of the hospitals in an interview with The Independent. 

For Crowder, the big question is whether converting revenues from the hospital fee into an enterprise is constitutional. If it is, then he’d be open to it, but he’d want some kind of compromise, whatever that looks like.

Crowder worries lawmakers who represent metropolitan areas don’t understand what rural Colorado is like. “You’ve got to realize I’m a Republican. I’m really not interested in raising taxes,” he says. “And I consider myself a staunch Republican. But if we can work within our means, and since this is put together as a fee, and the question is, ‘Is it constitutional?’ that’s a question we’ll have to answer.”

Activists working to put a stop to Colorado’s death penalty have decided not to push a legislative agenda this year. Capital punishment advocates are moving forward to make it easier for prosecutors to secure a death sentence.

One day in early December, a group of about two dozen activists, academics, lawyers, funders, and others gathered at the First Baptist Church in downtown Denver. Lawmakers were about to return to the Capitol for another year of legislative pugilism, and the meeting was set up to strategize about an issue the group had been working on for years: How to get rid of the death penalty in Colorado.

In the spring, lawmakers next door in conservative Nebraska had voted to abolish capital punishment, overriding Gov. Pete Ricketts veto, and becoming the first conservative state to do so in four decades. But a measure to thwart abolition hit Nebraska’s ballot soon after. Funded by that state’s governor and his father, the ballot measure has put the issue on hold for Nebraska voters to decide later this year.

Meanwhile, within the borders of our own square state, jurors in August decided not to sentence the killer in the Aurora theater shooting to death because they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict. Not long after, a different jury chose to give a man convicted of killing five people in Fero’s Bar and Grill in Denver life in prison instead of lethal injection. Then, in December, a gunman had shouted out in a Colorado Springs courtroom that he was guilty of slaughtering three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic, perhaps setting the stage for yet another made-for-TV death penalty trial against the backdrop of the Rockies.

It was around the time of the Colorado Springs rampage that a conservative Nebraska legislator named Colby Coash would travel to Colorado. His charge: Meet one-on-one and in groups with Republican lawmakers here to explain the success of repeal in Nebraska, and to talk about his personal Road to Damascus moment when he’d attended an execution rally outside a prison in college. On the pro-death side of the rally, he told lawmakers, he recalled a raucous bacchanal complete with fireworks, a band, and whoops and hollers as a clock counted down toward the execution. On the other side of the rally, people prayed silently and soberly in protest. That night, Coash saw an ugliness to state-sponsored execution that he didn’t want to be a part of.

In an interview, Coash told The Colorado Independent that he left his meetings with Colorado lawmakers feeling like he’d given them some new things to think about when it comes to the conservative argument for ending capital punishment.

“My hope for Colorado is that they will follow Nebraska’s lead … and see the death penalty in the same way Nebraska saw the death penalty, which is a broken, inefficient government program that just doesn’t need to be on the books anymore,” he said.

‘Quite divided’

By the time of their December meeting, with the legislative session just around the corner, some of the anti-death penalty allies felt the time was ripe to get behind a big push to repeal capital punishment in Colorado once and for all. If, of course, lawmakers saw an opportunity to do so this year. After all, 2016 is an election year in a split-partisan Capitol when each member of the House is up for re-election along with half the Senate.

“The group was quite divided about whether this was the right time or not,” says Stacy Anderson who runs Colorado’s anti-death penalty Better Priorities Initiative.

There were essentially three camps.

In one camp was Bob Autobee, the father of a prison guard who was killed in 2002 by an inmate already in prison for the death of his 11-month-old daughter. Autobee, a former corrections officer himself whose life unravelled after his son’s murder, originally supported the death penalty for his son’s killer, Edward Montour. But over the years, Autobee refound religion and became an ardent opponent of capital punishment. He’s forgiven the man who fatally bashed his son’s head with a giant soup ladle, and even protested outside the courthouse telling potential jurors in Montour’s case, “My son wouldn’t want the death penalty.”

Autobee doesn’t want to see any time wasted in the legislature or at the ballot box. So he made his case at December’s meeting to support a repeal bill he hoped lawmakers would introduce and try to pass by the end of the legislative session this spring.

In an interview with The Colorado Independent, Autobee said he doesn’t know if he has “10 good years left,” and is sick of playing the waiting game.

“My point is we’ve got to do it now and we’ve got to do it loud and hard,” he says, noting he doesn’t see the point in putting legislative efforts on hold. “We’ve waited too long.”

Also at that meeting was Jeremy Sheets, an exoneree who spent four years on death row in Nebraska before the Supreme Court there overturned his conviction in 2000.

He now lives in Aurora and wears a shirt almost every day urging people to talk to him about his experience as a death row survivor. He wants immediate action on abolition and was frustrated at the meeting by the presence of some who were there from out of state and were suggesting they all cool their heels a bit because one lawmaker or another isn’t ready. At the time, Sheets remembers thinking: Why are you even wasting my time asking me to come here if you’re just going to try and tell me not to do anything?

“I’m kind of frustrated with what’s going on— that there is really nothing much going on,” Sheets told The Independent.

His view: “We have to keep pushing to end the death penalty.”

In another camp were people like Michael Radelet, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the death penalty and takes the long view — a very long view — on abolition. The professor had earlier predicted that if Nebraska’s legislature scrapped the death penalty, the issue would come right back on the 2016 presidential-election-year ballot. The chances, he believes, are good that voters in November might send abolition down in flames, setting the movement back who knows how long.

Radelet isn’t one for quick fixes.

“I oppose the death penalty, and I think that to try to abolish the death penalty this year or next year would be the dumbest thing in the world for death penalty abolitionists,” he told The Independent.

At December’s meeting, Radelet made his case for putting the issue on hold this year. He believes public opinion in Colorado right now is just about split between death and life without parole. An election-year bill to repeal capital punishment, he believes, would increase the likelihood of a ballot measure aimed at keeping the death penalty in place. His concern: an effort by death penalty proponents — police and prosecutors, among others— would wage a well-funded campaign to keep capital punishment on the books at a time when the Colorado electorate has yet to reach a tipping point on abolition. Public opinion just isn’t there yet for a confident win for abolitionists at the ballot box, he asserted.

Instead, Radelet would rather see Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper commute the two-and-a-half sentences for the three inmates currently on death row. Hickenlooper has already given a temporary reprieve to one, Nathan Dunlap. Fully commuting Dunlap’s sentence and those of Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray would, in effect, push forward the next scheduled execution about two decades. By then, public opinion will shift in abolition’s favor, Radelet believes.

“We know the direction that public opinion is going in,” he says. “It’s going firmly against the death penalty.”

Colorado hasn’t executed anyone since 1997. The last time a jury unanimously sent someone to death was in 2008. Because of how long these cases drag out in Colorado’s justice system, some death penalty opponents argue the state already has de facto abolition.

Hickenlooper has no plans to commute sentences at this time, says his spokeswoman Kathy Green.

In the third camp at December’s meeting were those on the fence between pushing immediately for abolition and waiting until after the election year. One of them was Carla Turner who runs Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

“I feel divided,” she says about it now. “I really see the reason on both sides.”

Ultimately, some in the group left the meeting that day in December feeling ambivalent.

If a lawmaker were to introduce a repeal bill when the session started this month, they’d support it. If not, well, they’d continue their work outside the legislature, educating the public, holding forums, and generally tilling the soil of public opinion in a way they hope some day will better the conditions for their cause.

‘The opposing team is going full speed ahead’

Fast forward to this week, and no one has come forward with a repeal bill in the legislature.

Hickenlooper told reporters at the start of the session he would not support one this year, though he believes Coloradans are moving in the direction of repeal. Democratic Minority Leader Lucia Guzman said she would not sponsor a repeal bill this year even though she’ll work to fight for abolition over the next few years she’s in the Senate.

Over lunch on a recent Wednesday at his office across the street from the Capitol, Denver Democratic Sen. Pat Steadman said he’s disappointed in the lack of legislative effort.

“I thought we were going to do it this year, or at least make a good run at it,” he said.

But at the start of the session, legislative leaders, advocates, political consultants and funders had all circled the wagons and basically told him and others they were hitting the snooze button.

For his part, Autobee says he plans to start picketing outside the Capitol just to let the political class know he’s not going anywhere.

“Every minute we waste is putting us further behind because the opposing team is going full speed ahead,” he says.

Indeed they are.

Last week, Republican Sen. Kevin Lundberg of the Loveland area dropped something of a bombshell. He introduced a bill that would make it easier for juries in Colorado to put people to death.

Currently, all 12 jurors in a death penalty case must unanimously decide on a death sentence. Lundberg’s bill, if passed, would make it so only 9 out of the 12 jurors would be enough. The move was in direct response to the recent non-unanimous jury verdicts in the Aurora theater shooting trial and the Fero’s bar killing trial over the summer, Lundberg says. Five other Republican supporters are on the bill. No Democrats currently support it.

In an interview with The Independent, Lundberg said he came up with the idea on his own and hadn’t talked to the District Attorneys Council before he filed the bill. He said he isn’t totally set on nine jurors, either. Maybe it could be 10 or 11, but no fewer than nine. He just doesn’t think one juror should poison the well in a death penalty trial.

“Part of what I’m trying to do is say ‘Let’s look at it, let’s talk about it, let’s determine what should be occurring here,’” he said. “If the policy is that the death penalty is appropriate for the worst of crimes, then a jury should not be composed of people who disagree with that basic point. And yet a juror could misrepresent their views until they get to that point, and I’m saying I don’t think one juror should skew that principle.”

Death penalty opponents were quick to point out a particular irony: It would still take a unanimous jury to convict someone for driving under the influence or for shoplifting in Colorado, but not to sentence someone to death.

Doug Wilson, the head of the State Public Defender’s Office, said he’d been expecting such a bill to drop this session. He’s not so sure it would pass constitutional muster.

“If it were to pass, they will once again jeopardize their death convictions and death verdicts as they did when we had three-judge sentencing as opposed to jury sentencing,” he said. In 1995 lawmakers changed the law so a three-judge panel could decide a death sentence, but that was deemed unconstitutional less than a decade later, and now only juries can deliver execution verdicts.

Meanwhile, in the lower chamber, Republican Rep. Kim Ransom of Douglas County told The Independent she’s considering a bill that would give prosecutors a do-over with a new jury if they fail to win a death penalty verdict with the first.

A statewide conversation

With no proposed legislation to roll back capital punishment this year, people with loud voices on the other side of the issue have been making noise.

One of them is George Brauchler.

Brauchler is the 18 Judicial District Attorney who prosecuted the Aurora theater shooting trial last year. For years, long before Brauchler took office, the 18th Judicial District had been a hub for death penalty prosecutions, something he calls a historical anomaly.

Once the Aurora theater trial ended in August and the national reporters went away, Brauchler’s profile did not diminish. In the weeks after the trial, Republicans courted him to get in the GOP primary so he could take on Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet who is up for re-election this year. In late September, Brauchler announced that he would pass on the U.S. Senate race, but he still remains a prominent political figure beyond his stature as a suburban prosecutor.

In December, Robert Sanchez of Denver’s 5280 magazine profiled Brauchler for a multi-page feature that called him “Colorado’s most visible proponent of capital punishment.” Among other personal details, the article examined how Brauchler’s support of the death penalty runs up against his Catholicism.

In a recent interview with The Colorado Independent, Brauchler said he did not feel Coloradans have had a substantial statewide conversation about the death penalty. This is despite two death penalty trials over the summer, and a 2014 gubernatorial race that at times seemed to revolve solely around the fate of Nathan Dunlap, the man who in 1993 murdered several people in a Chuck-E-Cheese and to whom Hickenlooper gave a temporary reprieve. Once a pro-death penalty governor, Hickenlooper has since come out against it after immersing himself in research as Dunlap’s execution date neared. In his executive order granting the Dunlap reprieve, the Governor wrote that the “Repeal of the death penalty ought to be raised with the people of Colorado and not just their elected representatives.” That’s when he called for a statewide conversation on the issue.

Nearly three years — and one re-election — later, some on both sides of the issue say that conversation hasn’t happened.

“My guess is the only person having this conversation is the guy you’re talking to right now … Nobody else is having this conversation,” Brauchler said. “In what way has this conversation taken place? If it’s the vote of a single juror in Aurora theater and a single juror in Fero’s bar and therefore we’ve had a public discussion about it, that’s nonsense. That’s ridiculous.”

In the weeks prior to the start of the latest legislative session, Brauchler said he expected a repeal bill to come up this year. And if it did, similar to what’s happening next door in Nebraska, Brauchler said he would like voters to decide whether to keep or scrap capital punishment at the ballot box this year. That, he says, would be a real conversation.

“I’d want to participate in the information part of that and say ‘Look, here’s why I think the death penalty is appropriate to have and why [in] Colorado— unlike maybe Texas, Georgia, Kentucky and others— we use it the right way,” he said. “I mean, we don’t drag it out for murders of one in most cases. We don’t drag it out for routine murders.”

On the other side of Brauchler on the death penalty debate is Doug Wilson, who runs the State Public Defender’s Office and oversees the attorneys who represented Aurora theater shooter James Holmes and now the admitted Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Dear. Lately, Wilson and Brauchler have been locking horns, sniping at each other in the press and on social media, largely about one key aspect of any informed conversation about the death penalty— how much it’s costing Colorado taxpayers.

In response to dozens of open records requests from media, Wilson’s office has released an aggregate figure showing how much it spent on capital cases— $6.3 million on 10 cases since 2002— but didn’t break them down by case. Wilson says he’s ethically bound not to divulge information about particular cases. Brauchler says that seems “silly.” But the two agree on one thing: The public has no idea how much Colorado taxpayers spend on trying to carry out capital punishment — and not enough people are talking about it.

To find out the true costs of the death penalty in Colorado will likely take a lot of open records requests, perhaps even a lawsuit. But there could be another way.

Wilson says he’d like to see lawmakers this session convene a legislative hearing. That process could happen formally or informally. It could come in the form of an existing committee or a new select committee set up by leadership specifically to deal with this issue. Committee members could invite all the stakeholders to the table: prosecutors, public defenders, agency employees from the departments of Corrections, Human Resources, Public Safety and others, staffers from the attorney general’s office, local law enforcement, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, members of the judicial department — whoever. They could bring in every government entity involved in dealing with death penalty cases (or just a specific case) to ask about particular costs.

In Colorado, committees can obtain subpoena power and can put people under oath, but it’s not necessarily easy and is rarely done. To issue a subpoena for someone to testify before a committee would require approval from the General Assembly.

‘Live From Death Row’

Whether such a committee will convene in the absence of a death penalty repeal bill this year remains to be seen, though some in the abolition movement are pushing for it. In the meantime, they plan to keep a conversation going as best they can.

Carla Turner, who directs Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, a nonprofit educational campaign, is working with the Better Priorities Initiative, which is dedicated to ending capital punishment, on a string of public forums beginning next month.

In February, the groups will kick off a ‘State of the Death Penalty’ lecture series on the third Wednesday of each month when they’ll talk about combating bad legislation, work on figuring out how to uncover the hidden costs of capital punishment in Colorado, and the possibility of pushing for a statewide commission or task force on the issue.

In March, the groups are planning an event called ‘Live From Death Row’ in partnership with the Jesuit Regis University. A panel of experts will give a presentation along with family members of murder victims, and they hope to schedule a call-in from a death row inmate, though not from Colorado.

For Radelet, the University of Colorado professor, more education on the issue and no executions scheduled for the near term is the best hope for abolition.

“There are many kind Coloradans who think the solution is to go out tomorrow and abolish the death penalty,” he says. “And I think if we did that it would come back and bite us in the ass.”

Photo credit: Abd allah Foteih, Creative Commons, Flickr.]

*A previous version of this story misidentified the university where a professor taught. 

Now that Colorado’s Super Tuesday caucuses are over, attention is shifting away from the candidates and onto something else: the process.

Enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders fueled record-breaking turnout from Democrats on March 1, and threw caucus locations into chaos around the state. In Boulder, hundreds were turned away as frustrated voters likened the situation to a Japanese subway car or a Nicaraguan election without the machine guns.

Related: Unexpected turnout throws Boulder caucus into chaos

“We just weren’t ready for that kind of an onslaught,” says Julie Mordecai, chairwoman of the Alamosa County Democrats, whose caucus locations were packed.

On the Republican side, some voters who showed up to caucus for a presidential candidate were confused when told they wouldn’t be able to do so. The Republicans had cancelled their presidential straw poll this year, but the news clearly hadn’t made it to every rank-and-file Republican who showed up.

“We had some people who were sad to find out there wasn’t a binding straw poll,” says Joy Hoffman, who chairs the Arapahoe County GOP.

In the two weeks leading up to the caucuses and in the days following it, Hoffman says phone calls she fielded at her local Party office have been dominated by one thing: Why not have a regular presidential primary in Colorado?

“People were delighted and excited to help and talk about the local candidates, but they’re also saying we wish to have a voice on the national level,” Hoffman says.

Because of what happened to both sides on Super Tuesday, leaders of the state Democratic and Republican parties have tentatively agreed on an effort that would change the way early nomination contests are handled in Colorado, according to The Associated Press. (Meanwhile, The Denver Post published a post-caucus editorial urging the state to return to a presidential primary.)

Colorado’s Republican secretary of state, Wayne Williams, is also on board with having a primary despite the price tag.

Although a prez primary will cost state, counties abt $5 million, it's time for CO to return to them. #copolitics pic.twitter.com/V94bGQdZ7E

— Wayne Williams (@ColoSecofState) March 4, 2016

What that switch might look like, though, isn’t entirely clear yet.

“We’ve got to do something different to involve more people because it’s our country we’re talking about here,” Republican Party Chairman Steve House told the AP.

Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio was similarly vague.

“People have caucuses on their minds,” he said. “What better time than now to work on perfecting the system?”

The two had been a little more specific in the days just before the March 1 caucuses, however. With more than one million unaffiliated voters in Colorado choosing not to declare themselves a member of a political party, The Colorado Independent talked to both party leaders about their feelings on allowing those voters to somehow participate in a potential primary.

A group called Let Colorado Vote is trying to get two measures on the 2016 statewide ballot that would create a presidential primary and allow unaffiliated voters to participate in it. If passed, registered Democrats would be mailed ballots featuring the Democratic candidates, and Republicans would be mailed ballots featuring GOP candidates. Unaffiliated voters would get both, but would only be allowed to mail in one for their vote to count.

Palacio, who opposes the ballot measures, does support the idea of having a presidential primary. If that happens, he told The Independent, his party would be be open to allowing temporary registration. So, if a primary election is coming up, an unaffiliated voter could temporarily register as a Democrat in order to vote in that party’s primary, and could later change back to an unaffiliated voter.

“We think because a primary really is a function of a political party … we think that only registered Republicans or registered Democrats or people who temporarily affiliate with us should be able to participate,” Palacio said.

He also worried about a larger flood of money in politics as campaigns in primary season would have to raise and spend greater funds in order to reach a million more voters, tipping the scales in favor of candidates who can raise the most cash.

The Republican Party of Colorado said it would be open to a system allowing unaffiliated voters to participate, but only if voters would automatically become registered Republicans once their ballots are cast in a GOP early nominating contest.

Curtis Hubbard, a spokesman for Let Colorado Vote, wants the state’s unaffiliated voters to be allowed to participate — and stay unaffiliated if they wish.

“They don’t view themselves as Republicans or Democrats,” he said of the state’s largest voting bloc, and he doesn’t think voting should be any more difficult for an unaffiliated voter than a registered party member.

Colorado held primaries in 1992 and 1996, and held its last one in 2000, when the cost of running it swayed lawmakers to switch back to a party-financed caucus system.

Last year, an effort in the state legislature to bring back primaries failed. When the government runs primaries, it costs money, obviously, and the cost of last year’s proposal was pegged around $3 million to $4 million. Having the parties control the caucuses saves taxpayer money.

Part of Let Colorado Vote’s message is that when taxpayer money is used to run elections like primaries then all voters should be able to participate.

“When the parties run something, you saw the result on Tuesday night,” Hubbard says. “Tuesday night demonstrated that Colorado is ready for a presidential primary, and we think that a primary is one that should be open to Republicans, Democrats, and the more than one million unaffiliated voters in Colorado. And that’s how a majority of states do it.”

Bob Nemanich, a Democratic Party activist in Colorado Springs who organized a precinct caucus Tuesday, says the caucus system disenfranchises voters by design because of the limits it puts on time, space, and other inherent factors. “We’re in an era in society of convenience and me,” he says. “And we’re used to that even with mail-in ballots for the election.”

But he defends the current system which he says engages voters. Caucuses foster participation among those who show up at a much greater level than in primaries where voters simply check a box and drop it in the mail. With a mail-in ballot or a primary election, he says, you vote, and then you go home and watch the news to see if you’re on the winning side. At caucuses you see your neighbors, you talk it out, and you engage and participate at a higher level.

Colorado Common Cause was one group that supported the failed legislation last year, and the good government group is again keeping an eye on whatever emerges this time around.

Elena Nunez, director of the group, says the current system is kind of an irony. Colorado has done a lot in recent years to make voting easier. Big statewide elections can now be conducted entirely through the mail, meaning more people can participate including those with mobility or child care issues that might keep them from being able to wait in line somewhere.

Having the party caucuses on a single evening, starting at 7 p.m., not only cuts unaffiliated voters out of the process, but also voters who work second shift.

“I think there are a lot of people who are either disenfranchised because they can’t participate or it’s really difficult,” Nunez says. “Either way it’s antithetical to how we set up elections in Colorado, and there’s no reason at this point.”

Photo credit: Susan Greene