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Our legislature has finally adjourned, accompanied by some grumbling that it devoted more attention to highways than to education. But the legislature presumably considers our economic well-being, and so this focus makes sense when you realize that a major industry in Colorado is the development and sale of real estate to new arrivals.
Assume you're shopping for a place to live. No matter where you are, the Realtor will tell you that the local schools are great, even if last year's valedictorian has to take off his shoes to count to 20, and you've got no easy way to check on the quality of the schools.
But if he tells you that the roads are great, you can form your own opinion of whatever congestion, chuckholes, random road rage, washouts, rockslides and gridlock you endured to get to the house he wants to show you.
Thus, if you're selling real estate, attractive highways mean a lot more than first-rate schools, and so the priorities of the Colorado General Assembly are quite sensible. We wouldn't want anything to hurt this boom cycle now, would we?
We might also be grateful that the legislature didn't pass, or even consider, any of these bills:
· Expanded HOT-Lane Status. The Lexus
Lanes
bill that did pass allows upscale motorists to
pay a fee which permits them to use the freeway lanes that
had been restricted to high-occupancy vehicles like
carpoolers and buses.
That wasn't enough for some people, though. Not all
of our driving is on freeways with HOV lanes,
one
explained, and so even if we pay that fee, we can still
get stalled on city streets or boulevards, and our time is
precious.
We wanted to add a provision that would give us the
same right-of-way that ambulances and fire trucks enjoy --
when a permit-holder starts flashing his special lights,
then all the peons must pull aside to let us one of us
through.
· Corporate Privacy Protection Act of 1999.
Under this bill, all negotiations and arrangements between
a real-estate developer and the state or any of its
subdivisions would be classified as state secrets,
and any release of such information would constitute a
Class 3 felony.
Every once in a while, some nosy journalist or
obnoxious citizen gets her hands on some agreement about
tax-increment financing, sales-tax rebates or
utility-extension subsidies,
a lobbyist explained,
and the resulting biased agenda-driven anti-American
propaganda creates all manner of needless complications for
the honest and hard-working big-box shopping-mall
innovators.
The lobbyist conceded that There is public money
involved, but there is no good reason for the general
public to know about these things. Irresponsible publicity
serves no one, while it can irreparably damage vital
matters like credit ratings and construction schedules. We
have every hope that we will be able to purchase this
necessary legislative protection in the next
session.
· Civic Duty to Bear Arms. Under this proposed law, a citizen who could have been armed, but was not, would be exposed to civil liability for any damages that might have been prevented if he had been armed.
It's sort of like the duty motorists have to stop at
an accident and offer such assistance as they can,
a
proponent explained. In this case, if people could have
acted, and they did not act because they were not
exercising their right to bear arms, then victims should
have every right to hold them responsible for their
inaction.
Gun-control advocates professed horror at that proposal, but said they were making progress, even in a Republican legislature, with a new approach.
It's all a matter of presentation and spin,
one
explained. Our usual approach just gets the NRA riled
up, and that gets us nowhere.
But we're going to sell it to the legislature as a
logical extension of the War on Drugs. Look at it this way
-- here's a chance to turn thousands of otherwise decent
Coloradans into felons just because they own something that
used to be legal. It means we'll need hundreds, maybe
thousands, of new police officers to kick in doors while
searching for contraband, and it will mean more funding for
law enforcement when they start seizing homes and
autos.
Plus, we'll have to build a couple dozen new prisons
to handle all these new felons, which means construction
jobs right away and a lot of long-term guard jobs.
I'm pretty sure that if we position it this way in
our presentation to the legislature next year, they'll go
right along. After all, they've never resisted anything
like this before. In fact, they'll probably give us more
than we want.
Considering all that, we probably shouldn't be complaining about the legislative session just past. It could have been a lot worse.
And happy Mother's Day to one Dorothy Quillen of Longmont.
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