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It's been difficult to decide how to vote on Referendum C, which would allow the state government to keep some tax revenue that would otherwise have to be refunded under the TABOR Amendment.
One major argument against Referendum C is that even in a time of financial constraints, the state has wasted tax money, and thus if the state got more money, the waste would grow.
Part of that argument is unfair and deceptive. Any organization, public or private, that spends $14.6 billion a year is going to waste some of it. Good management will minimize the waste, but there will always be some.
There will be things which seemed like good ideas at the
time (perhaps Project Beanpole,
which was supposed
to link county seats with high-speed fiber-optic data
lines), but did't work out. There will be salaries paid to
incompetent people like Marc Holtzman when he was state
technology director and overpriced software purchased from
monopolies like Microsoft. Those things happen in any large
enterprise, no matter how frugal it tries to be.
Thanks largely to John Caldara of the Independence Institute, there is some confusion about the Hanging Dildo Controversy. The state hasn't bought any with our tax money.
Here's what happened: Tsehai Johnson, an artist who
applied for a $5,000 grant from the Colorado Council on the
Arts (CCA) in 2003, listed that 2000 work on her resume in
the application. Note that she did not seek a grant for
that work; the state was not being asked to pay for Hanging
Dildos. And if she hadn't listed it on her resume, any
half-smart scandal-monger could have devised
Grant-seeking artist attempts to evade connection with
Hanging Dildo sculpture.
I dread the day when intrepid Independence Institute
investigators discover that I occasionally get a speaking
honorarium from an event partly funded by the CCA, and they
issue a gaudy press release announcing that Your tax
money goes to a former porn-theater manager who also wrote
adult westerns under a pen name!
Ari Armstrong, a Libertarian who produces the Colorado Freedom Report, has done some useful research into state spending. Naturally, he questions the need for a state arts council, but he also delves into Colorado's corporate welfare system when he examines wasteful state spending.
His website (www.freecolorado.com) provides links to annual reports from the Colorado Economic Development Commission. The 2004 report, coming from a time when the state and many local governments were complaining about funding constraints, offers these examples:
· $347,000 from the City of Loveland, state job-training funds and the EDC for Group Publishing Co., Inc., in Loveland. This raises a couple of First Amendment problems: 1) Why is government subsidizing any publisher? and 2) especially a publisher of religious materials?
· $781,000 from Weld County and the EDC to attract thermal-media production capacity to Eastman-Kodak's plant near Windsor.
· $825,000 from the City of Denver and the EDC for a corporate headquarters for ProLogis, a real-estate investment trust.
· $151,200 from Arapahoe County, state job-training funds and the EDC to locate the corporate headquarters of Red Robin Gourmet Burgers in Greenwood Village, a place I had never imagined as being poor and in need of assistance.
· $852,890 from Douglas County, state job-training funds and the EDC, plus an unspecified amount of school-tax rebate, to Echostar (DISH satellite TV) for offices in Douglas County.
The EDC report goes on for pages about subsidies and
rebates. However, it does not mention Article XI, Section 2
of our state constitution: Neither the state, nor any
county, city, town, township, or school district shall make
any donation or grant to ... any corporation or
company.
I'd like to support Referendum C for two reasons. One is that some opponents are running a deceptive campaign. Another is that I'd like to live in a Colorado that has schools, roads, prisons, parks, courts and the like that we can be proud of.
But when our local governments are making us pay full price for utilities and schools, meanwhile giving rebates to big companies, and when our state government is handing out money to corporations in what looks like a flagrant violation of the state constitution, I have to wonder whether they can be trusted with the revenue they get now, let alone any increased funds from Referendum C.
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