Bill Ritter's exit challenges Dems

I don't think Bill Ritter likes me.

I endorsed him here (November 23) almost a year before I hoped he would be re-elected governor, yet before two months have passed, he ups and quits the race.

He told us he has failed to give the proper priority to his family over the past year of worrying over that re-election, and that by dropping out, he could discount re-election politics and make the right decisions for Colorado in the last year of his term.

I know nothing of the family failures, but I agree not running frees him up politically to make some tough decisions for the general good of Colorado. But he never made very good political decisions during his term anyway. That's why he faced a very tough re-election bid. (You can read my early take on it here in ColoradoBiz.)

Still, it puzzled me when I heard and read everything said and written about Ritter's surrender to the political forces of the day. Ritter ran for the nomination of his party for governor in 2006 as a stealth candidate, someone no one expected to take the slot on the ballot, yet someone who was well respected for having done the work necessary to earn it.

At ColoradoBiz back then, I refused to endorse Ritter because I thought his campaign reflected "blue-ribbon" positions of the national Democratic Party, and not individual stances specific to Colorado. Funny, he made a joke during his bow-out press conference that his personal decision not to run was not the product of any blue-ribbon commission.

Of course not. This decision had to be individual and inevitably was specific to Colorado. But that was my problem with Ritter. To me, he seemed to speak always from a political platform that was almost alien to him. A platform never upheld by his own, strong, personal conviction.

His decision to quit, based in his concern for his family, seems to come from such strong, personal conviction. I applaud him for that.

Now Democrats face the challenge of picking a candidate who can puncture the cartoon balloons Republicans cannot help but draw around their own staid-and-failed, limited-government policies. How, for instance, can you build highways with no money? Some Republican, especially those re-endorsing TABOR, needs to answer that question.

Ironically, Democrats are going to have to use Ritter's successes to convince Colorado voters that governing and government are honorable pursuits worthy of their support.

For that reason alone, the new governor's race should be an engaging political campaign.

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.

Time to call a Constitutional Convention

Gov. Bill Ritter let his old prosecutor's guard down by calling for the early release of some convicts and shortened paroles for others to help balance the state's budget.

I didn't think he had it in him, but it seems that governing for all the people finally took precedence in a politician's set of values rather than old, staid biases.

Gov. Bill Ritter, like President Barack Obama, has proven himself an agent of change.

Now, he should call the General Assembly into special session to approve the fee hikes he has proposed to improve gun control in Colorado, and have the legislature call a Constitutional Convention so the state can offer voters a permanent fix to its budget mess while the cost cuts are still fresh and stinging, and more than Band-aids are top of peoples' minds.

At a convention, conservatives will finally have to face the issue that state government costs big money, and that taxpayers who are privileged enough to live and grow old in this state, ought to be responsible for the costs of running a top-notch government operation.

The governor's criminal cutbacks will save the state just $19 million this fiscal year, but they had to be one of the more bitter pills Ritter was forced to swallow, given his background as former Denver district attorney. He said during his press conference that he didn't like having to make some of the cuts, but that he had no choice.

Neither do Colorado voters.

They must soon vote to approve a modern method of financing state government at a level everyone in the state can afford. And yet at a level that will ensure Colorado's national leadership toward energy independence, superior health and prosperity for all its citizens, and a style of living to match the natural beauty that surrounds us.

It's time.

South Colo. schools first piece of recovery pie

San Luis Valley schools are to get the first $87 million from a state/federal capital construction program that could help put Southern Colorado small businesses to work.

No one has said anything yet, but it's no coincidence that the governor's "economic recovery team" kicked off a statewide tour in Trinidad, San Luis, Walsenburg and Pueblo to promote small-business and minority-business involvement in contracts that are being cut with stimulus funds coming from the Obama administration.

"Leveraging the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds is one way to help Colorado emerge from this economic downturn faster and stronger," Gov. Bill Ritter said in a statement announcing the tour, led earlier this week by Maranda Pleau, the governor's director of Minority and Small Business Outreach for the state's recovery team.

On Thursday, two days after Pleau first met with small business people on the tour, State Treasurer Cary Kennedy announced the $87 million in financing for school construction between the towns of Hooper and Mosca in Alamosa County, in Alamosa itself, and outside Monte Vista in Rio Grande County.

Pleau answered her own phone when I called her Friday morning shortly before a scheduled staff meeting, but she begged off talking to me about the relationship between the tour and the school-construction funding, saying she had the staff meeting to go to, but also that whatever she had to say had to be cleared through her communications director.

As I said, I have not talked with the outreach director yet, but she said she would be happy to share her thoughts on the subject. I sent her an e-mail asking what she is telling small business owners in the region where the funds are being spent, especially since it's known that few minority-owned businesses have in the past enjoyed participation in large state contracts for capital construction, road building and the like.

Pleau's appointment, in some ways, was a response to complaints from some leaders of the minority business community in metro Denver that minority-owned businesses weren't getting many state contracts, or even encouragement, after two years of Gov. Ritter's adminstration.

Specifically, the Colorado Black Roundtable met with Ritter in February to share concerns that the state was effectively "missing in action" for the first two years of Ritter government when it came to economic development of African-American owned businesses in Colorado, according to Herman Malone, a Republican who attended the session with the Democratic governor.

"He was telling us what he couldn't do," said Malone, who also is my co-author in writing the book "Lynched by Corporate America," which was published in 2006.

Andre Pettigrew, executive director of the city of Denver's Office of Economic Development, told me he hoped Pleau's appointment to the economic recovery team was partly a response to that meeting, although the appointment didn't come until mid-summer.

"I'd like to think the governor, Don Elliman [former state economic development director and now chief operating officer of the state] and that team," Pettigrew said, "that they went out and listened to businesses in our community, that they knew there was an opportunity and an expectation that those communities were going to contribute" to the state's economic recovery.

" ... Our success is going to be measured on whether or not these businesses, these contractors are growing, that they are a vital part of it," Pettigrew said.

Elliman also is chair of the Colorado Economic Recovery Accountability Board, which Ritter appointed to oversee the spending of federal stimulus money. Pettigrew is a member of the board, too, and he told me he has addressed the board on the issue of minority-business participation in spending the government funds.

Pleau's responsibility is to see that minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and other small businesses are included. Let's hope the small business owners she meets with on the recovery team's tour around the state listen up and make sure they get a piece of the action.

Economically lynched one more time

Front page, Denver Post, by Miles Moffeit: "Colorado transportation officials are lagging behind their minority hiring target for federal stimulus projects, prompting a protest that has led to an internal review."

That's what happens when a Democratic state administration, Gov. Ritter's, forgets about the few obligations it has to minority-owned businesses in Colorado, and thinks it can get away with it.

"Since 2007," Moffeit's story continues, "the state highway department also has fallen short of its goal to distribute 12.8 percent of its federally financed road work to companies primarily owned by blacks, Latinos and other groups deemed disadvantaged, hitting about 10 percent."

That goal of the highway department is effectively Colorado's only obligation to minority-owned businesses in the state, thanks largely to the Owens' administration's neglect of disparity in minority-business contracting from 1999 through 2006, when Ritter was elected. But Ritter's economic development team has hardly tried to pick up any slack over the past three years.

And minority business owners throughout the state have, as a result, been the outlyers in feeling the effects of the business downturn that started in Colorado with the foreclosure crisis of 2007.

You haven't heard anybody complaining about that until now because many business owners who are ethnic minorities are as stoic as the next Republican about their lost free-market opportunities, and they simply don't cry a lot.

But the time has come to revive the voice of the minority business community in Colorado.

Herman Malone, my coauthor of "Lynched by Corporate America," which is Malone's story of racial discrimination in business contracting, has been a pioneer in making that voice heard through the last two decades. Our book is as good a textbook/case study of economic and business discrimination as has been written, even if I do say so myself.

Check it out at Herman's website, http://www.lynchedbyca.com/.

Pro-business bills wait gov's signature

Gov. Bill Ritter has a chance to make up for some of the so-called "blows" dealt to the Colorado business community by his pro-labor administration by signing two economic-development bills sent to him by the legislature.

One bill, the Colorado Regional Tourism Act, would provide incentives to economic developers to undertake large "destination" development projects like a NASCAR racetrack or Olympic-game sports venues, future attractions for destination tourists from around the nation and the world.

I have long endorsed Colorado government efforts to attract tourism dollars to the state as well as government effort to attract new business to Colorado.

The second business-friendly bill awaiting a governor's signature would waive a long-standing requirement for a minimum of three bidders on large state procurement contracts, ostensibly to allow the state some flexibility in meeting the deadlines of the nation's economic stimulus package.

Waiting or arranging to get three bids on large state-funded projects can delay their start up, officials told The Denver Post, on whose reporting I am relying on to write this post.

I would normally be wary of the quick passage of such waiver legislation, but I have also been critical in the past of the state's byzantine procurement process, and can imagine the possibility of Colorado missing out on stimulus dollars because it couldn't get an expensive project through the process with dispatch.

Comments from readers on The Post's website were limited this morning to the tourism bill. One of the four comments was vacuous and the other three raised a cry against corporate welfare that is typical of knee-jerk liberal reaction to such economic incentives.

The newspaper quoted University of Colorado economist Jeff Zax saying the legislation was a clear attempt to use public money for private benefit. The story also cited a report by the Bell Policy Center that reportedly shows the state's long-standing enterprise-zone program has failed.

Neither criticism holds up. The tourism bill would use far less state money than private investors would risk to build a venue, and the benefits of a successful public-private venture would swamp the costs. The enterprise-zone effort was miniscule in terms of state dollars, so to criticize it for not having a big return rings somewhat hollow.

Ritter can sign both bills in the knowledge that provisions are made in each for state officials to monitor and prevent his or any future administration from going overboard to favor developers with state money that has no hope of achieving an economic benefit for a large number of the state's citizens.

A metro-area racetrack, even if it were to fail over the long haul (which continued growth of the state's ecnomomy would help prevent), would create small-business jobs among vendors to service it. Olympic games and the longer-lasting venues they often produce in a region also hold out the promise of attracting more tourist dollars over 50 years than the state might attract without them.

Ritter would be wise to sign both bills and prove to his Republican friends that a Democratic governor can be just as healthy for business, perhaps even more so, than one of their own.