Ritter campaigns on too many fronts

Gov. Bill Ritter campaigned all over the Denver Post on Thursday, from a piece he and Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien planted on the op-ed page defending their proposed cuts to public school funding, to a news story at the top of the Denver & The West cover reporting Ritter backed down from taking drunk-driving crackdown funds away from local police departments.

Campaigns were waged against the governor, too. His name was mentioned on the front page of the newspaper as the villain of budget cutbacks to state-funded health clinics, and on page 4B for being the architect of the $260 million batch of cuts overall in order to backfill a $320 million shortfall of revenues in the current fiscal year.

He was praised by the Post's editorial page for both regulating (read: limiting) and promoting the natural-gas industry in the state, and in Susan Greene's column he was the wizard behind the curtain drawn over tragic cost cutting at the state's Fort Logan mental health facility.

One thing you have to say about the governor in all those situations is that he has chosen to govern the people of his state, making tough decisions required of him by state law.

The move to restore funds to pay for drunk-driving arrests was something you might have expected from a former prosecutor once people complained that it would leave more drunks on the road and more victims of drunks in hospitals.

But the Ritter also has stayed firm on cuts that go against his law-and-order grain by releasing some convicts early in order to save prison money, and allowing other convicts shortened parole supervision, also to reduce state spending.

The general impression of Ritter I got after writing a piece in the current ColoradoBiz magazine was that he is doing his job. The report focused on the governor's political prospects for keeping votes in the Colorado business community during his 2010 re-election campaign, specifically by promoting the growth of clean/green industry in the state.

When I briefly interviewed Ritter for the article last July, I asked him if he was already campaigning for re-election given harsh reactions to some of his decisions among his natural supporters. He unabashedly responded that he has been campaigning for re-election ever since his inauguration.

That's the nature of politics today. Campaigns are always on, 24-7.

It's also the nature of being a governor in a state that is divided somewhat evenly between liberal and conservative voters, although large margins of those voting concentrations hone to the moderate center of their groups rather than the outer fringes.

Ritter campaigned as a somewhat undefined moderate and won the day in 2006, but the intervening three years have been hard on his continued efforts not to be pinned down.

He doesn't seem to be brave enough to decide against conservative factions in the state, and yet not liberal enough to provoke them and take his chances. Under that cover, he can claim to be serving the largest number of Colorado citizens, and he's basically right.

But serving a crowd often creates new enemies.

Voters will be making hard decisions for and against him in polling places across Colorado come November 2010. And while pissing off both sides of an argument might be appreciated in a news reporter, it usually doesn't work for an elected official.

Bye Energy, a leader of the "new energy economy"

Bye Energy, a new firm based in Greenwood Village, is the first client of a new cleantech incubator started last month, the CleanLaunch Technology Incubator, which promises to "stimulate the development and success of early-stage companies who will provide the next generation of clean, renewable, and efficient energy technologies" to the nation.

The quote is from the CleanLaunch website, which you can reach by clicking on its title in this text. At the site, you will find the rest of CleanLaunch's mission statement: "CleanLaunch helps companies assemble solid management teams, secure adequate funding, and accelerate the commercialization of sound product ideas into the market."

You are going to hear a lot about cleantech companies in the next few years if you haven't already heard the drumbeat coming from the Obama and Ritter administrations and Congress, which is working on a bill to fight global warming. For those readers who might not be familiar with Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado, that's who he is, our governor.

I'm going to be one of the writers in the media who is beating the clean-energy drum.

I'm writing a story for ColoradoBiz magazine's September issue on Gov. Ritter's record trying to create what he calls a "new energy economy," and the political fallout from that effort, especially in the Colorado business community, which was a critical supporter of the governor during his 2006 eelection.

Clean, "green" energy production is a key element of both Ritter's "new energy economy," and President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan for America. I've found out a lot about the industry while working the ColoradoBiz story, and hope to bring you several pieces here in the next few months that emanate from that reporting.

A front-page story by Peter Jones in the July 31 Centennial Citizen, is an example of the drumbeat, too. "Flying nose first into the emerging world of clean aviation technology can be a bumpy and unpredictable ride," Jones wrote about Bye Energy, which is developing a hybrid electric engine for small airplanes as well as a biofuel to run the engine on.

I talked to George Bye, founder of the company, on Thursday, while he was attending the annual air show for small-plane manufacturers and consumers in Oshkosh, Wisc., to ask him what he planned to get out of joining CleanLaunch. Essentially, he said: Marketing.

Bye said partners in the incubator will help Bye "get our message out better than we can do ourselves." The partners in CleanLaunch are Burt Automotive, the South Denver auto dealer, the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce, Clifton Gunderson, an accounting firm, and Fairfield and Woods, a law firm.

Bye said his Bye Energy is an outgrowth of its two-year old parent company, Bye Aerospace, which he founded after developing the ATG Javelin, a private-size, twin-engine jet aircraft put together at Centennial Airport. Both Bye Energy and Bye Aerospace share about a dozen full-time employees whose work is augmented by part-time and contract workers, interns and volunteers who are interested in seeing Bye's groundbreaking, clean-aviation technology brought to market.

Bye said joining the incubator allows his people to connect with other "great folk with like minds" to further develop all kinds of new, clean, green energy.

I plan to write more about that kind of product development here as my blog develops into a source for news and comment on small business, minority business, women-in-business and other topics as well.

The Centennial Citizen, by the way, is one newspaper -- albeit a small, free one -- that seems to be making it in the harsh business environment all newspapers have been thrown into of late, as I wrote about in the post below this one.

I will also use this space to promote the reading of all newspapers, and intend to quote freely from them, with proper attribution, as a bow to paid journalism, which I think is an important protector of all Americans' First Amendment constitutional rights. I hope you'll continue to read them and me for the same reason.