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"What keeps Coloradans up at night? What do they think is going well in the state? What do citizens want to see changed in the future?
Those were the three general questions Gov. Jared Polis sought to answer during his recent listening tour across Colorado. He and his cabinet members traveled to four cities — Pueblo, Grand Junction, Greeley and Lakewood — to get ideas about how to best serve citizens and to understand what they want from state government.
“Connecting the cabinet members that run the agencies with community members is really important,” Polis said. “To make sure they are listening across the state is a big goal of this.”"
"The Colorado Sun attended Polis’ final listening stop earlier this month in Lakewood to get a sense of how Coloradans are feeling about the state and what they would like to see changed in the next 10 years.
Roughly 100 people — a bipartisan group from a wide variety of backgrounds — were broken into small groups and shuffled between a host of tables separated by topic areas like transportation, health care and veterans care. The groups then rotated between the tables, each manned by a member of Polis’ office and one or two of his cabinet members, including the heads of the departments of transportation, public safety and education."
- Leaders who treat climate resiliency with the weight and urgency it deserves.
- A governor who will actually show to whiny boomers, with numbers, that taxes have been continually decreasing since the 80s and to shut up if they don't want to pass any bonds that their pocketbooks won't even notice. Polis beats around the bush and clearly has ambitions for federal office.
- Tacking onto the above, any sort of fix for the conflict between the Gallagher Amendment and TABOR. This really hurts municipalities outside the Front Range.
- A Denver metro regional government so that comprehensive planning and funding can be done without thousands of municipal entities competing with each other and without involving state government. The Denver metro contains the majority of Coloradans, but I think we're all better off if Denver metro residents don't impose laws on the rest of the state because it tends to create unintended consequences for rural areas, like the example above.
Here's what I want from state government. Stop screwing us over.
For the sake of discussion, I'd love to have examples of how the state government is screwing the people.
IMO TABOR is screwing the people by gifting Colorado an inadequate, lane-constrained, poorly maintained road network, a lack of mass transit, not to mention some poor school systems scattered around in both urban and rural areas.
Road issues nationwide revert back decades to when the Federal government declared the interstate highway system complete and gave it to the states to maintain / expand as needed. Big mistake IMO.
For the O.P. .... I'm not sure how Veteran's care is a state issue; Veteran affairs and facility funding is in the Federal lane; not sure there's a state hand in this; if the state plays here someone please tell us. Also, transportation and health care, and even education, have at least some overlap in the Federal arena.
If I see any problem in these topics it's one of multiple hands in the pie; Federal and State and County and City. How many governments do we need to be involved when replacing the knees in old Infantry soldiers?
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For the sake of discussion, I'd love to have examples of how the state government is screwing the people.
IMO TABOR is screwing the people by gifting Colorado an inadequate, lane-constrained, poorly maintained road network, a lack of mass transit, not to mention some poor school systems scattered around in both urban and rural areas.
Road issues nationwide revert back decades to when the Federal government declared the interstate highway system complete and gave it to the states to maintain / expand as needed. Big mistake IMO.
For the O.P. .... I'm not sure how Veteran's care is a state issue; Veteran affairs and facility funding is in the Federal lane; not sure there's a state hand in this; if the state plays here someone please tell us. Also, transportation and health care, and even education, have at least some overlap in the Federal arena.
If I see any problem in these topics it's one of multiple hands in the pie; Federal and State and County and City. How many governments do we need to be involved when replacing the knees in old Infantry soldiers?
After the multi-billion dollar boondoggle that is the VA hospital in Aurora, I'd rather the government get its crap together before green-lighting anymore big-ticket items. That project was the epitome of government waste. It came in $1 billion over budget, and the old hospital actually had more capacity than the shiny new one does. Absolutely stupid.
I don't completely agree with TABOR, but I don't want it to totally go away, either. I think we need to raise revenue for education (classroom-focused, not more damn administrators) and transportation infrastructure, but I also like forcing legislators to make their case with voters on tax increases. They don't need a blank check, nor do they deserve one. Without TABOR that ridiculous ColoradoCare crap and the multi-billion dollar shell game to backstop PERA in the name of education would've been ramrodded down our throats. The fiscal restraints of TABOR have helped Colorado's economy grow. It just needs tweaks so that we can expand infrastructure to keep the gravy train rolling.
I agree with Westerner that we need to fix the Gallagher/TABOR mess that's really killing smaller towns on the Eastern Plains and Western Slope. Schools are suffering, towns are having to convert their fire departments from paid employees to volunteers, and city libraries are closing or having their hours curtailed.
Blue, thanks for the info. There are raging failures and raging successes at all levels of government and industry (anyone up for a New Coke or an Edsel, or a pickup truck with exploding gas tanks in the cab?).
One of my big gripes back in El Paso County was FIFTEEN school districts.... with 15 sets of administrators, when one set will do fine as I've ranted in here before ('nuff said, so I'll stop).
I'm hesitant to opine on "more damn administrators" since having been in the Federal government for 30 years I can tell you that new positions must be documented to a proven requirement. I suspect that some added admin types are the result of increased regulatory issues coming down from the Federal and/or state levels - I've seen it before where mandates come down from on high and adding new staff becomes an issue of compliance with new laws or else you lose funding. I wish we knew more about what you speak of but for sure we don't need to have 15 districts in one county that require hiring 15 more admin specialists to implement/measure a new mandate.
True story from my days as an Army civilian.... President Clinton passed a law that all Federal websites be accessible to blind people, usually by making the system speak out loud what's on the screen so the blind person can hear it (to include photo captions), or convert it to work with a device that scrolls braille print under a blind person's fingertips, etc. Caused us all sorts of grief in the Army and DoD since we don't have blind people running tanks or flying F-35s, etc. It took an act of Congress to exempt military combat systems from an edict that came down from on high. For this caper it was your's truly who wrote the Army's implementing language into Army regulations (AR 25-1) and we 'complied' as needed but escaped most of the expense to refit. Other federal agencies had to hire people or hire contractors to make the "improvements" to federal websites.
One thing I hope people take away from all this is that there's usually a lot going on under the hood for at least some of what seems wasteful spending. The devil is in the details.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 12-24-2019 at 12:47 PM..
Their opinions on the natural resources are misguided.
1. We don't need more public land. The state has millions of acres of public land that has hardly anybody using or traversing through it. Animal populations seem to all be fairly well off and better than the last several decades. We don't need more wildernessed off, especially after the What we do need is better access to the land we do have with things such as improved parking lot capacity in popular areas. There's big swaths of national forest, particularly along hwy 285 that are "public" but are only accessible through individual trails that don't connect to a wider trail network and are almost deliberately hard to access.
2. Climate change is a dumb word that people use to mean "everything bad that's happening". Global warming is not a big problem for CO, unless it somehow comes with less rain, but that doesn't seem to be the prediction. What is a problem is our mono culture forests that got eaten by beetles over the last 20 years and are now dry tinder boxes. 2000 F fires are not healthy for any ecosystem. Some areas have done a good job addressing this problem like Summit County, but there's millions more acres that need to be looked at, and preferably replanted with a broader mix of species, so we don't have solid strands of single species forest replacing the single species forest that just died.
Animal populations are all doing fairly well? No, not really. Animals that we had specifically targeted for habitat protection or poison protection, or who adapt to human populated areas, etc. have done better. But meanwhile, other species have suffered greatly. See for example https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nature-...d-populations/.
Global warming is not a problem for Colorado? Depends on if you think our mountains should have snowpack to provide our water, if pikas should continue to exist, if we should maintain our current level of agricultural yield, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat...ge_in_Colorado
I'm fine with public land not all being easily accessible. We don't need to "use" every inch of land. There is great value in land that sits untouched for biodiversity and combating that monoculture you mentioned.
I'm fine with public land not all being easily accessible. We don't need to "use" every inch of land. There is great value in land that sits untouched for biodiversity and combating that monoculture you mentioned.
Not only that, but if you make access easier you run the risk of turning the wilderness into a playground for selfie-obsessed social media morons. They already ruined Hanging Lake and Conundrum Hot Springs. I'd hate to see the same thing happen to Lost Creek and Eagle's Nest. If your orienteering expertise consists of a cell phone and the Alltrails App, you probably have no business being in the backcountry.
Last edited by bluescreen73; 12-28-2019 at 06:13 PM..
Animal populations are all doing fairly well? No, not really. Animals that we had specifically targeted for habitat protection or poison protection, or who adapt to human populated areas, etc. have done better. But meanwhile, other species have suffered greatly. See for example https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nature-...d-populations/.
Global warming is not a problem for Colorado? Depends on if you think our mountains should have snowpack to provide our water, if pikas should continue to exist, if we should maintain our current level of agricultural yield, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat...ge_in_Colorado
I'm fine with public land not all being easily accessible. We don't need to "use" every inch of land. There is great value in land that sits untouched for biodiversity and combating that monoculture you mentioned.
Wish I could rep you more. The world does not exist solely for humans or their auxiliaries to use. Wildlife, flora, and soil have life, just as humans do.
Just because land is owned by the various levels of government does not mean anybody can do anything they want on it. Even on individually-owned private land, one may not do everything he or she wants to do.
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