Colo. sports thru Texas eyes

As one of the many transplants who have moved from Texas to Colorado, I’ve picked up on several interesting differences between the sports scenes in Houston and Denver. Denver is one of the most unique sports cities in the country with an eclectic mix of competition for fans to take in.

Obviously there are the big four with the Broncos, Rockies, Nuggets and the Avalanche, but there is so much more. From Major League and Arena soccer to Arena and Australian Rules Football. There are even two professional lacrosse teams in town, not to mention the array of high school and college sports.

In Texas it is no secret that football is king, from high school all the way to the NFL. But while support for the Texans has continued to grow through the years, Houston is light years behind Denver when it comes to supporting an NFL franchise.

High School football is another matter. While it has increased in popularity in Denver, the entire state of Texas is infatuated with that level of football, and the majority of the State champions at the top levels over the last decade have come from the Houston area.

Prep baseball in Houston is far superior to that in Denver, with a laundry list of top MLB players originating from Houston. Meanwhile the biggest MLB player from the Denver area at the moment would probably be Brad Lidge.

Of course that’s not a surprise considering the climate here and how difficult it is to play baseball in cold weather. Anyone who has ever caught a 90 MPH fastball in sub-50 degree temperatures or hit a ball off the end of the bat would agree.

I guess the most obvious difference between the two cities when it comes to sports is the variety. While Houston has the Rockets and the Houston Dynamo, which has won the MLS championship, it is dominated by football and baseball from the professional ranks down to high school.

Denver provides more options which sports fans clearly enjoy, and while the Broncos obviously reign supreme, fans relish the opportunity to take in the plethora of athletic competition the city provides.

Austin Corder has covered sports for the Amarillo Globe and San Antonio Express as well as his hometown Houston Chronicle. He now lives in Genessee, equidistant between Invesco Field and the ski areas.

GOP shapes 'Contract for Colorado'

State Republican leaders are said to be near agreement on a center-right campaign agenda for turning Colorado around in 2010. According to a Mike Rosen column yesterday and a Denver Post story today, the "Contract for Colorado" would include: • A commitment to limit taxes and state spending.

• Rescinding the Ritter executive order unionizing state employees.

• Requiring employers to participate in the federal e-verify program for new hires.

• Establishment of a state "rainy day" fund.

• Responsible development of renewable energy and Colorado's abundant oil and natural gas resources as well as nuclear energy.

• Appointing conservative judges to balance the court and reign in judicial activism.

• Expanding school choice through additional charter schools and education vouchers.

• Reversing property tax and auto registration taxes.

. Banning taxpayer funding for abortion agencies like Planned Parenthood, in pursuance of general statement of principle defending the sanctity of human life.

How strongly will Scott McInnis speak out for these goals in the campaign and fight for them if elected? What will his erstwhile rivals, Josh Penry and Tom Tancredo, do to McInnis to the contract? Will a broad alliance of GOP candidates for state House and Senate line up with the contract as well?

Important questions, all of them, and impossible to answer at this early date. But this is a step in the right direction. Stay tuned.

Ritter's 'freeze' more of a slushie

Walk into a typical third grade classroom, and most students can explain what means to "freeze" something. They can explain that when water freezes it becomes ice and is solid. "Little Billie" Ritter may have missed those lessons because, as governor, he regularly demonstrates a poor grasp of elementary science.

Remember in 2007, when Gov. Ritter and Democrats in the state legislature voted to "freeze" property taxes? Now, as most anyone who owns property can tell you, taxes haven't been frozen at all.

Instead, Ritter froze the mill levy portion of your tax bill which had formerly been allowed to decline so that property taxes didn't escalate as rapidly as property values.

And of course Ritter and his Democrat allies did this without even the "courtesy" of a public vote, despite a state constitutional requirement than any tax policy change that increases revenue must be submitted to voters.

The state supreme court's balderdash that collecting more taxes really isn't the same as a tax increase doesn't make the $150 million cost to taxpayers any easier to swallow.

Ritter's recent encounter with linguistic frostbite started last fall when, after months of denying that the state's budget was speeding toward a cliff, he announced a "budget contingency plan" that included, quoting his own press release, "implementing a hiring freeze for the Executive Branch effective Oct. 1."

Now it turns out, this freeze was more of a "slushie."

In January, Denver Post's Jessica Fender reported that despite Ritter's claims that the hiring freeze had saved $12 million, "a review of hundreds of applications for exemptions shows that in three months, Ritter's office approved 326 new hires and promotions - out of 371 requests - that could cost the state more than $12 million."

Now, more than a year after the freeze was proclaimed, KMGH 7News's Arthur Kane and John Ferrugia report that a state personnel database shows 2,300 new state employees hired.

Ritter's chief of staff, Jim Carpenter, says the actual number is 1,454 but concedes, when questioned by Ferrugia, that "during the freeze, the number of employees actually went up."

Analysis of the "database shows that in the three months before the (freeze), the state hired about 1,300 people and in the last three months of the freeze the state hired about 1,100 employees," KMGH reports.

Maybe the governor can blame global warming for turning his hiring slushie into, at most, a cool breeze.

Sen. Al White, a Republican member of the Joint Budget Committee who is quite measured in second-guessing the governor, said that had Ritter's office managed its hiring practices more effectively, "we may not have had to make some of the more dire cuts" necessary to balance the state's budget.

Unfortunately, Ritter and his administration have never been adept at managing the state's money, and no evidence suggests that they have learned from their mistakes.

Ritter has signed three state budgets, each adding at least 1,450 new state employees, despite budget woes. By comparison, Gov. Bill Owens, who also endured some tough budget years, signed two budgets that actually reduced the number of state employees below the previous year's level.

As late as December 2008, Ritter's budget office grossly underestimated the looming budget shortfall, and even now, his administration somehow imagines $783 million more in tax revenues over the next three years, compared to more conservative projections by the legislature's economists.

Ritter refused to throw his political clout behind proposals to build a state budget reserve fund when revenues were strong. But when revenues were already declining, he called for creation of an "unprecedented" new budget reserve.

Given his poor understanding of things physic and fiscal, perhaps the governor's next move will be to institute a spending "freeze." If so, expect spending to instead accelerate even faster.

The Case for TABOR

By Bill Moloney States with constitutional and/or statutory restraints on taxing and spending have strong financial foundations because those restraints greatly militate toward the positive business climate and robust economy that invariably generate increased revenues across the board. Colorado, which has had such restraints since 1992, is a prime example of their great benefits. California -- today having the nation’s most disastrous state economy -- once had such restraints but cast them aside some years ago and consequently has become the poster child for what happens to states that fall into the trap of unrestrained taxing and spending. Editor: Last week, contributor Bill Moloney took the TABOR success story on a speaking tour of Maine, where taxpayer advocates are fighting for passage of a similar amendment on Nov. 3. Here is the rest of his message from that trip:

Prior to my decade as Colorado’s Education Commissioner I served as a senior school administrator in five other states-Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland- and in all of them had extensive experience regarding the interplay of taxation and spending and how they impacted the financial health of my district, and the state as a whole. These experiences over thirty years in rural, suburban, and urban settings led me to the firm convictions stated above.

In a nation wracked by recession, ballooning budget deficits and soaring public debt the issue of fiscal restraint has an urgency greater than at any time in our history.

Attempts to promote fiscal restraint through constitutional or statutory means however have been a guarantee of bitter political conflict in every state they have occurred.

An ordinary citizen might ask: “Who would be against fiscal restraint, particularly in these perilous economic times?”

The answer is: All special interests that profit greatly from unchecked taxing and spending, most prominently giant labor unions like the National Education Association (NEA), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The main tactics of these special interests opposing efforts at fiscal restraint are always the same i.e. Predict devastating hardship if voters or legislators irresponsibly support mechanisms of fiscal restraint, and flood the state with money from their national organizations to be spent on saturation media advertising, direct mail etc. aimed at scaring people about the dire consequences of any legal barriers to unchecked taxing and spending.

The dire consequences are skillfully invented and invariably include impoverished schools (“This will hurt the little children”) and the disappearance of critical public services like Meals on Wheels (“This will hurt the poor senior citizens”).

These tactics are the equivalent of resisting restraints on a local school budget by threatening the abolition of the band and the football team. Amazingly when citizens restrain the budget anyways the band and the football team somehow survive thus exposing the scare tactics as just that.

In 1992 when Colorado voters were presented with a constitutional amendment- Taxpayers Bill of Rights(TABOR)- to limit the growth of state revenue and spending to the sum of inflation plus population growth they were bombarded with special interest media advertisements predicting a doom and gloom economic future if TABOR passed.

When the voters went ahead and passed TABOR not only did the “dire consequences” fail to occur but instead Colorado entered a period of economic growth and prosperity unequalled in its history.

Since 1992 Colorado has gone from a boom-and- bust-prone economy overly dependent on the energy industry to one that is much more stable, balanced, and diversified. This rapid transformation derived from the state’s growing reputation as a low tax business and investment friendly environment that was generating economic opportunity for companies and citizens alike. A particular success story was the burgeoning high tech industry that ironically owed much of its rapid growth to companies fleeing Silicon Valley owing to California’s steady undermining of those very same fiscal restraints that had been a model for Colorado’s TABOR law.

Among the principal beneficiaries of this new prosperity were the schools of Colorado which had known wide spread hardship during the energy industry bust of the nineteen eighties. After 1992 school district revenues surged owing to the growth and job creation fueling local and state prosperity in the wake of TABOR.

Today following the national economic meltdown of 2008 Colorado is facing the same kind of severe challenges as every other state. However, absolutely none of those challenges are traceable to TABOR.

On the contrary because of the enduring benefits of TABOR Colorado’s economic challenges are markedly less than most other states, and disproportionally less than those states-like California- which have ignored the clear track record and economic wisdom of fiscal restraint.

William Moloney was Colorado Education Commissioner,1997-2007, and is now an international education consultant as well as a Centennial Institute Fellow. His columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. His e-mail address is moloneyvision@aol.com

Maes: Institution meets revolution

Editor: The most provocative comment on current politics that I've seen from any GOP 2010 candidate is this one from Dan Maes, the Evergreen businessman and darkhorse rival for the gubernatorial nomination against heavyweights Scott McInnis and Josh Penry. Unhampered by playing the percentages as the "favorites" for Governor and Senator have to do (or think they have to), Maes in this mass email of mid-September thinks aloud about the meaning of 2009 grassroots upheavals for Republican-politics-as-usual. Congratulations on your candor and realism here, Dan. The race could get a lot more interesting before our nominees are chosen. Who Can Unify the Institution and the Revolution? By Dan Maes (dan@danmaes.com)

The harvest is ready and the workers are few. Who can get the job done?

The Democrats, liberals, progressives or whatever name they go by these days, have awakened the sleeping giant of the silent majority and a conservative revolution is upon us. In my now over 30,000 miles of campaign travel I have seen this revolution in the form of Tea Parties, new grass roots organizations like 9.12, I Caucus, ROAR America, Liberty on the Rocks, R Block Party, and others all around the state by names unique to their own region.

A clear message has been articulated and that is "Enough is Enough" of the recent and not so recent sins of our fathers in both parties. Generally speaking members of these groups want to be republicans but the sour taste of the sins is still wearing off. They want new and fresh faces in their candidates and anyone that has any similarity to a lawyer or "career politician" may as well pack their bags and go home if these folks have anything to say about it. They want common sense candidates and leadership that truly represents them and not party or special interests.

Now, enter the Republican party activists to the harvest field. Their mission is admirable and one that struggles with history that is hard to avoid. Candidates that have "carried the water" seem to get the nod whether they are really the best qualified or not. I can state first hand that state party chairman Dick Wadhams has, and continues to, made every effort to keep the candidate field open and fair. But can we as traditionalists, and a broken party of the past, break with it and move forward? We can and must!

Can we actually look to a candidate that meets the needs of both the party insitution and the conservative revolution? It will take some give and take on both sides but if it can be done it will lead to an overwhelming victory in 2010 at the state and national levels. If not, are we in for a long and ugly future of more taxes and fees, new energy job loss, and liberal agendas politically and socially?

So the question now becomes the challenge....which candidate(s) can beat Bill Ritter and all the other state and federal democrats by honoring and unifying the institution and the revolution? I am one of them.

Dan Maes Republican Candidate for Governor www.danmaes.com 303-670-2010