Thursday, October 06, 2005

Referenda C & D? No

It’s sooooo confusing!

My little blue booklet on the state ballot election arrived today and I plowed through it. It discusses Referenda C and D. I’ve decided to vote against them.

Whoever put these ballot proposals together does not have his priorities straight. Referendum D depends on passage of Referendum C. Referendum D would allow the state to borrow X amount of money in order to satisfy certain OBLIGATIONS it has regarding police and fire pensions and the repair of public school buildings. It also allows money to be borrowed for other things, like highways. Note that an obligation is something the state has to pay. Yet this request was put in the secondary referendum, not the primary one.

What I got out of Referendum C was that because of the recession in 2002, the state hasn’t been allowed to spend as much money as it would have if there wasn’t a recession because of the passage of TABOR. Well, duh. For some reason which I don’t feel was adequately explained, somebody, who is not clearly identified, but I assume it’s the General Assembly of the State of Colorado, feels that the state should be allowed to play catch up by keeping revenues collected in excess of what TABOR allows. I personally would be a whole lot happier if they just said, “TABOR was a mistake for the following reasons and we want to repeal it” instead of dinking around with a 5-year moratorium, which sounds like it won’t exactly end if D also passes because it allows the state to spend more money regardless after a certain year. If I understood the booklet correctly.

I would have been willing to vote for keeping the “excess” money if it was simply to pay off the obligations the state has regarding pensions and school repairs. The obligations are clear-cut, well-defined and limited, if large. I’m not saying I’m against paying these obligations, I’m just not willing to do it in such a complicated way, with several other things tacked on.

And, if I understood the booklet correctly, the loans taken out in D will be repaid, in part, by the “excess” funds retained by C, except, of course, there’s no guarantees that there will be “excess” funds to be retained.

The booklet was prepared by the research staff of the state legislature and the staff is supposed to be nonpartisan. I didn’t think the booklet was particularly well-written, since some of the statements were unnecessarily vague and I thought the over-all tone was that these measures should be passed.

And I wonder how many voters will spend time trying to figure out where to vote on Referenda A & B?

Full info is supposed to be at ballotbook.