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Lakewood taxpayers face 30-year shelter obligation after city grant deal
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, Local

Lakewood taxpayers face 30-year shelter obligation after city grant deal

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project From a recent edition of the Lakewood Informer (copied here with links intact): “Lakewood purchased 8000 W Colfax Avenue to use as an emergency shelter and Navigation Center using a grant from the state to fund the property purchase and renovation. As a condition to getting the grant, Lakewood committed the property to shelter use for 30 years. No public discussion about this condition occurred when City Council authorized the purchase. At an annual operating cost of $3,000,000, that’s a $90,000,000 commitment that was not disclosed to the public. That makes the Center severely underfunded, with declining neighborhood support, and may be one reason for the proposed city sales tax hike.” This was startling to ...
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How SB19-180 opened the tap: The funding stream behind Colorado’s eviction defense network
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

How SB19-180 opened the tap: The funding stream behind Colorado’s eviction defense network

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project SB19-180: Eviction Legal Defense Fund gets the money going This will be the first part of a twofer on state grant money going to defend people against eviction. This first part will cover the legal background. The second will cover how a nonprofit got in on the ground floor of an initial trickle of state money and soaked up what would eventually become a firehosing of federal money into our state. In the process of that ballooning, one of their own got into the Colorado statehouse where he sits now and is running for reelection. About a year or so prior to COVID being a thing, in Spring 2019, lawmakers passed and the governor signed SB19-180 (linked first below). The bill created a grant fund which would ...
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Is HB26-1111 a smart ag solution or another TABOR workaround?
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Is HB26-1111 a smart ag solution or another TABOR workaround?

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project HB26-1111: a beneficial enterprise? At my last check, HB26-1111 (linked below) is awaiting either 30-day passage or the Governor’s signature. This is another enterprise-creation bill. It creates an enterprise which charges a fee on pesticide producers and applicators. The fee will, among other things, be used to create a program where pesticide applicators can dispose of leftover pesticide. Per a conversation I had with my State Senator Byron Pelton, as things stand now, prior to this bill, pesticide applicators must pay a disposal company to take leftover chemical, and that price is growing more and more each year. The enterprise created in that bill steps in with a government-run business to take ...
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Where did the road money go?: Examining Colorado transportation claims
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Approved, Colorado Accountability Project, Commentary, State

Where did the road money go?: Examining Colorado transportation claims

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project HB26-1430 (see the first link below for some earlier context) is the Colorado Democrats’ measure to kneecap Initiative 175, the measure that would enforce that road dollars actually go to building roads. The measure passed the legislature with some last-minute fussing, and included some new amendments. The Sum and Substance article linked second below details how things went down in the last days of the legislative session. The purpose of this post is not to look at HB26-1430 in its final form or how that will affect (or not) Initiative 175. There’s more coming in the saga and I’ll hold off on updates til something concrete pops up. No, I wanted to share a couple of quotes from Democrat politicians appearing in the Su...
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Gambling with taxpayer dollars: Colorado bill could allow nonprofits to get paid before work is done
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Approved, Colorado Accountability Project, Commentary, State

Gambling with taxpayer dollars: Colorado bill could allow nonprofits to get paid before work is done

By Cory Gaines | Colorado Accountability Project Gambling taxpayer money to bolster our nonprofit ecosystem. When you hire someone to do something for you, do you give them an advance? I’ve done it both ways: cash on delivery only and an upfront payment for, say, the materials. The bill linked at bottom makes some noteworthy changes to the way our state interacts with multiple nonprofits it pays to do its work. There are multiple directions you could go in with your speculation, but I think it’s reasonable to conclude overall that the bill bolsters the connection between our government and nonprofits, that it enriches the tightly-interconnected ecosystem of NGO’s and nonprofits in Colorado.** Under current law, prior to this bill, if a state awards a grant to a nonprofit for so...
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What’s Likely to Change at Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

What’s Likely to Change at Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Likely changes to the Public Utilities Commission As I write this, the ultimate fate of the Public Utilities Commission sunset bill, HB26-1326 (the first link below), is unknown. I think that its becoming law is solid enough that we can wrap up what changes to this important unelected body we will see. Toward that end, I present you a couple of references which make a decent attempt at hitting endpoints on the ideological spectrum. Link 2 is a wrap up report by the Independence Institute’s energy policy writer Sarah Montalbano. Link 3 is to a contemporaneous article by the Colorado Sun’s Mark Jaffe. I’ll leave it to you to read through either or, what’s better, both. There are some things that stuck out t...
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Kentucky moved to rein in executive power: Should Colorado do the same?
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, National

Kentucky moved to rein in executive power: Should Colorado do the same?

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project An intriguing idea out of Kentucky... I usually stick to Colorado issues, but this idea out of the recent Kentucky legislative session struck me as worth sharing. Since I live in Blue Colorado, the idea of Republicans having a supermajority (and will enough) to push their legislative priorities through, including “tearing through” a series of vetoes by the governor caught my eye. Per the article linked first below, this is the case in Kentucky. The Republican-supermajority legislature there recently overrode a whole lot of Governor Beshear’s vetoes. If you’re interested in Kentucky politics, you can read up on the list, but the one that I want to focus on is shown in screenshot 1 from that article. ...
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Some food for thought on conservatism, common sense and political identity
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Some food for thought on conservatism, common sense and political identity

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Some food for thought... One pattern I see in math and physics is how fruitful it can be to test and inquire into basic assumptions we all have. A look at what it means to count things alongside a look at infinity leads one to the intriguing idea that there is more than one kind of infinity, for example. The Rocky Mountain Voice piece linked below was also intriguing to me, and for that same reason. I’ll leave it to you to read it, but some interesting (if not entirely new) themes are there. Is common sense common? Is a self-evident truth self-evident to us all? What does it mean to be conservative? Is that changing? I wrote in the past about being liberty minded though not a party adherent (see the sec...
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When everything is a crisis, nothing is
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

When everything is a crisis, nothing is

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project How many crises does Colorado have? I don’t know that I can count them all for you, but to give you a sense, I did a Google site search for four major Colorado media outlets: The Denver Gazette, Colorado Politics, CPR, and Colorado Sun. If you’re curious to tool around in there, you’ll find the searches linked below in that same order. We apparently are beset by crises. A quick survey through the first four links below shows a climate crisis, a budget crisis, a Colorado River crisis, a mental health crisis, a healthcare crisis, a childcare crisis — the list goes on. I am not surprised by advocates and politicians using the word crisis. The fifth link below is to Senator Hickenlooper’s Twitter feed and, sure e...
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