John Tomasic Posts

National Rural Assembly Poll results on the presidential race released Monday found unsurprisingly that swing-state rural voters preferred Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 14 points. Also not surprising is that the pollsters found that party identification likely matters more in determining whether or not a position will draw support or opposition from these voters than does the substance of the policy position in question.

Demonstrating the point, 600 likely voters were asked to choose between the Republican and Democratic party platform position statements on immigration. A majority of the rural voters (50 percent to 39 percent) chose the Republican position. When party labels were removed from the same two position statements, however, opinion among the voters swung to support for the Democratic position by virtually the same percentage spread (40 percent to 49 percent).

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Mitt Romney campaigned in Pueblo, Colorado, on Monday, telling about 3,000 supporters that, as president, he’d create jobs in the state by developing U.S. energy resources. Yet, even before he touched down at the city airport where the event was held, Romney was under fire by wind-power advocates for leading opposition to the federal tax credit extension tied to the loss announced last week of roughly 100 jobs at a Pueblo wind tower factory.

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Republican Party donors and strategists alarmed by the trajectory of the embattled Romney presidential campaign won’t find much to boost their spirits in swing-state Colorado. On the contrary, what’s happening on the ground here suggests the party’s nominee is failing to execute the strategy he said he “inelegantly” outlined in the hidden-camera videotape that has dominated the politics news cycle for the last two days.

In the video, after writing off the 47 percent of the U.S. population that doesn’t pay income tax, Romney said that what he “[has] to do” is win over independent voters.

“I have to convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not,” he said.

As his campaign surely knows, the Colorado electorate is divided roughly equally among Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated voters. It’s a gold mine of “thoughtful” “independent” voters. In fact, September registration numbers available at the secretary of state’s website list unaffiliated voter totals ahead of those for Republicans and Democrats:

Unaffiliated: 1,224,288

Republican: 1,129,955

Democrat: 1,102,167

Yet the Romney campaign has only 13 offices open on the ground in the state. The Obama campaign has opened 55 offices– and the President’s campaign has been working the state almost from the time he defeated John McCain here in 2008.

Keating Research and Onsight Public Affairs for Project New America survey results released last week but based on polling done in August, before the shocks suffered by the Romney campaign this week, suggest the GOP nominee was already struggling to win the state’s key unaffiliated voter bloc.

“Obama’s five-point lead [in Colorado] is due largely to growing support among the key demographic of unaffiliated voters,” wrote Onsight in its Sept 13 release. “A poll conducted August 21-22 showed Obama with a four-point lead over Romney, 48 percent to 44 percent. Since that poll, Obama has added nine points to his advantage among unaffiliated voters.”

The President has visited the state eight times this year, drawing overflow crowds on college campuses in Boulder, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. Last week, Obama rallied campaign staff and helped recruit volunteers among a crowd of more than 8,000 people packed into Lions Park in battleground Jefferson County.

Romney, who plans to visit the state Sunday and Monday, has made roughly half the number of visits here and his visits have not gone well by comparison. Last week he planned to visit Pueblo, a Democratic Party stronghold and home to a great number of Latino voters, but a small-plane crash derailed his visit. It was his first planned visit to Colorado in more than a month. Obama also canceled a visit to Pueblo that weekend.

On a visit to Colorado Springs in February, Romney made news for attacking the Obama stimulus program at a metal factory that had received $2.3 million in stimulus funds. At a May visit to tiny Craig, Colorado, far from the Front Range counties that will decide the election, Romney similarly made news for deriding the renewable energy industry and emissions regulations he said were hurting Colorado workers. But, as reporters noted at the time, the state’s renewable energy industry under Obama has employed thousands of Coloradans and clean air regulations have not prevented coal town Craig from weathering the recession relatively well.

Romney lost the primary season caucuses in Colorado to Rick Santorum. Eight of the state’s 36 GOP delegates at the convention last month refused to support his nomination. Some of the delegates said they wouldn’t vote for him in November.

The first presidential debate will take place at the University of Denver next Wednesday.

[Image of Mitt Romney by Austen Hufford via Flickr ]

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Pueblo City Council made headlines Monday when it voted 5 to 1 to indefinitely table an ordinance that would have extended benefits to the domestic partners of gay city employees. The move came as a shock to the sponsor of the proposal, to the members of the public who packed the council chambers and to state political analysts long used to seeing solidly Democratic Pueblo lead on gay rights.

“I was flummoxed at what happened. We’re a Democratic town with Democratic principles,” Sandy Daff, the council member who sponsored the ordinance, told the Independent. “We were looking to have a good public conversation about this. The vote took the whole room by surprise.”

It also generated heated response from activists who supported the proposal.

“It was twenty years ago that Colorado earned the moniker ‘the hate state’ by passing Amendment 2, a referendum which rescinded state and local laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” read an email blast from the Colorado Progressive Coalition. “Last night’s action [in Pueblo] was a reminder that those dark times have not been completely dispelled.” 

Have new dark times descended on Pueblo?

The problem was not ideological, according to Councilman Chris Nicoll.

Pueblo City Council is dominated by Democrats and it unanimously voted more than a week ago to advance Daff’s ordinance to public hearing. None of the members are up for election this year and two of the members told the Independent there has been no substantial lobbying against the ordinance from interest groups or members of the public.

Nicoll told the Independent the hitch in support stemmed from concern over a major looming budget deficit. And the uproar, he said, justifiably stemmed from bungled communication among council members and between the council and the public at the hearing.

“I think the controversy came from how we explained what was happening to the crowd. So folks who came down to testify were sort of left in the dark,” he said. “We received a report that [the ordinance] would cost the city between fifty and sixty thousand dollars and we just needed to think more about that. But [at the hearing] I only said there was ‘new information’ and then I used the words ‘table indefinitely’ and that language seemed very negative to people there,” he said.

“No one is trying to stop this [ordinance]. We’d just like to see it go through a [Council] workshop session and then first and second readings– to go through the full process, like most other proposals.”

Theresa Truillo, southern Colorado director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition, who was at the hearing and who helped generate support for the ordinance, said getting the proposal passed is the top priority among supporters but that the bungled hearing held other important lessons for the city.

“The room was packed with people prepared to testify in favor of the bill, and probably some who would have testified against it. These people were well prepared… but the council members were not prepared. I think they were just totally disorganized. After the vote, boos went up from the crowd. ‘What new information?’ ‘What about transparency?’ they were saying.”

Trujillo said that after it became clear the ordinance wasn’t going to be considered, the crowd streamed out of the room, leaving the council members alone to deal with other proposals.

“I looked back at the room. All I saw were a few suits walking around at the front. The public was gone,” she said. “The lesson to me was that citizens have to demand transparency and that the council needs the community’s participation to do their job well.”

Daff told the Independent she’s determined to reintroduce her ordinance later this month so it might pass Council and take effect before the deadline this year to enroll for Pueblo employee insurance, which she said falls in October.

“We got an initial estimate from the city that the cost [of providing the benefits] would be about ninety thousand, but then on Monday, before the hearing, we got the revised lower estimate, about fifty-eight thousand or something like less than 1 percent of the budget.”

Nicoll told the Independent he expects the ordinance will be reintroduced and that it will likely pass. But he added that the council is weighing deep cuts across the board to head off a predicted $5.8 million deficit and that every penny counts.

“We feel the right path is just to discuss this at length… We tabled [the ordinance] because we didn’t want to kill it. This way, we can bring it back.”

He said he wished he could have been more clear on that last point on Monday.

[Image of Pueblo City Hall via Pueblo]

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With two months left in the election cycle and swing-state Colorado still up for grabs, the national spotlight keeps flickering over state politicians, giving them opportunities to raise their profiles.

Last night at the Democratic Party convention in Charlotte, 2nd District Congressman Jared Polis spoke on diversity as a great American strength.

“My great-grandparents were immigrants. I am Jewish. I am gay. I am a father. I am a son. I am an entrepreneur. I am a congressman from Colorado.”

Polis, a two-term congressman, is being challenged this year by Republican State Senator Kevin Lundberg. Polis has defeated Republican congressional opponents in the past by comfortable margins but the newly drawn 2nd District is less reliably Democratic and, as is the case with an increasing number of congressional and state legislative districts in Colorado, voters face a stark choice at the polls this November. Polis, a multimillionaire web entrepreneur who with his partner Marlon became a father last year, is unapologetically liberal and has not shied away from hot-button topics. He has led high-profile battles to expand immigrant and gay rights since taking office, for example. Lundberg is unapologetically conservative, a religious-right crusader over the course of years at the capitol in Denver who routinely cites scripture in support of policy positions.

In his convention speech, Polis argued for mutual respect as the best way to move beyond culture-war impasses and legislative gridlock.

Now is our chance to tell the dividers no, tell the special interests and cynical Washington insiders no, tell the lobbyists and PACs no…[W]e must continue bringing America together. So tonight, I don’t just ask my fellow Americans to respect my relationship with my partner Marlon and my role as a father to our son. I also ask them to respect the Christian family concerned about decaying moral values and crass commercialism. I ask them to respect the difficult decision of a single mother to bring a child into this world, because of her heartfelt beliefs.

And it is why we must help that courageous woman have the support she needs after her child is born. We celebrate Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs, even Republicans, because this is their future, too. Republicans mocked our desire to heal the planet, but we will heal it for Republicans too, and we will create jobs for Republicans too.

Lundberg didn’t receive an invitation to speak at the Republican National Convention in Tampa last week and some analysts believe he isn’t likely to win enough votes among Front Range social conservatives to counter the votes that will stream in for Polis from the university towns of Boulder and Fort Collins. Lundberg seized an opportunity to gain some exposure in July, however, appearing with prominent Republicans when Mitt Romney visited the state. Lundberg posed for photos at Romney bus-tour stops alongside Colorado Congressman Cory Gardner, former Colorado Congressman Bob Beauprez and Ohio U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, who at one point was reportedly in the running to join Romney at the top of the GOP ticket this year.

Colorado 7th District U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter joined the Democrats who met President Obama on the tarmac at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora in July. Perlmutter easily defeated Republican Ryan Frazier in 2010′s Tea Party-wave election. But his newly drawn district, like Polis’s 2nd District, is now less reliably Democratic. What’s more, Perlmutter’s facing a tougher reelection challenge this year from Colorado beer-family scion Joe Coors.

For his part, Republican Congressman Mike Coffman hasn’t had to lean on top-of-the-ticket candidates to make national headlines. His once-solidly Republican 6th District is now a toss up, evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters. Yet Coffman’s campaign has been marked by speeches he has made to Republican crowds where he has dabbled in talk radio-style disparagement and conspiracy theories unlikely to win over moderate voters.

Speaking in August to the Arapahoe County Republican Men’s Club, Coffman said he thought Pres. Obama might launch a “superficial” military action in the weeks leading up the election as a way to gain support. Coffman characterized the prospect as one of his “fundamental concerns.” He said the action would be a “rally around the flag for the American people to boast [the Obama] presidency.” Audio of the remarks captured by a Democratic Party tracker appeared at multiple news outlets and is now being pushed out by Coffman’s Democratic challenger, state Rep. Joe Miklosi.

“[The accusation] is outrageous and irresponsible,” Miklosi wrote in a release sent out Wednesday. “Coffman has disgraced his office… by spreading extreme conspiracy theories and attempting to undermine our Commander-in-Chief for his own political gain. These are the kinds of things we expect to hear from right wing radio hosts not members of Congress.”

Coffman’s “October surprise” theory bookends comments he made in May at an Elbert County fundraiser, where he said the President was “not American in his heart.” Video of the remarks aired at national news sites, where Coffman was criticized for seeming to lean on the so-called birther movement, which holds that the President is not a true citizen of the country and ineligible for office.

[ Image: Obama meets with Colorado Democratic members of the state's delegation in DC on the tarmac at Buckley Air Force Base July 22. From left, Rep. Ed Perlmutter, Sen. Michael Bennet, Sen. Mark Udall. Also pictured Gov. John Hickenlooper; Police Chief Dan Oates; and Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan. (White House Photo by Pete Souza) ]

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DENVER– The Colorado secretary of state announced today that the petition drive to land an anti-abortion “personhood” initiative on the November ballot failed to qualify, missing the mark by roughly 4,000 signatures. Personhood Colorado plans to protest the signature tallies released by the secretary of state and is confident the measure will appear for a vote this year.

“Out of the 112,000 signatures we submitted, the secretary declared 3,700 invalid. We have carefully reviewed the signatures and we think we do have enough. We will be filing a protest of the decision in the next few days,” Personhood Colorado Spokesperson Jennifer Mason told the Independent. “We want to make sure every voice is heard and counted.”

There is some discrepancy in the numbers released by the secretary of state and by Personhood Colorado.

In a release, the secretary reports that the personhood campaign turned in 106,119 “qualified signatures.” Personhood Colorado reports turning in 112,121 signatures.

At press time, the secretary’s office didn’t return messages asking for elaboration on the different numbers or to comment on the likelihood that Personhood Colorado’s protest of the tallies would reverse the secretary’s decision to reject the ballot initiative this year.

Secretary of state personhood petition checkers threw out 23,873 signatures as invalid, according to the press release. The campaign needed to submit 86,105 valid signatures to land on the ballot.

“This is just great news,” Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains spokesperson Monica McCafferty told the Independent. Her organization is part of the No Personhood coalition recently formed in Colorado to campaign against the measure.

“Now we can direct our attention and our resources elsewhere,” McCafferty said. “The past two years, personhood made it onto the ballot. This year, you know, not so much– so perhaps it shows that signatures have been harder to get, that more Coloradans are deciding not only to vote against it at the polls but to not sign for it in the first place.”

The news that Personhood Colorado may well not make the ballot this year is another recent major setback for the movement, which aims to win full legal rights for fertilized human eggs as a way to outlaw abortion. Personhood measures have been voted down by Colorado voters in landslides the last two general elections and a similar measure was solidly defeated in conservative Mississippi last year.

Personhood has been criticized widely as a radical proposal. Its opponents say it would not only outlaw abortion but also outlaw some of the most popular forms of birth control, fertilization techniques and stem cell research. They say it would also subject pregnant women to a host of laws governing their actions, from smoking and drinking, for example, to exercising and driving in carpool lanes.

Conservative politicians here have struggled with the movement.

In 2008, Colorado Republican candidates mostly opted against supporting the personhood initiative. In the 2010 Tea Party wave election, nearly all of Colorado’s Republican candidates supported the measure. This year, Colorado’s Republican candidates for federal office, at least, have mostly backed away from the measure and declined to discuss it with the press.

Likely GOP Vice Presidential nominee Congressman Paul Ryan has recently drawn criticism from the left for sponsoring national personhood legislation with Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who has been embattled for comments he made on “legitimate rape” this month. The GOP policy platform unveiled this week in Florida includes a vow to ban abortion without exceptions.

[Image: Denver Personhood rally by Joe Boven ]

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Colorado state Representative B.J. Nikkel, R-Loveland, this weekend said the experience of bigotry and intimidation she experienced last spring during the debate over a same-sex civil unions bill has strengthened her position in support of the bill. She said that, even though she’s not running for reelection and won’t be at the capitol to vote, she’s confident that conservatives will come to see the bill as consistent with their social values and that next year’s version of the bill will pass with significant Republican backing.

“I voted my conscience. I thought it was the right thing and I still do,” she told attendees at the the Ally Awards ceremony at the University of Denver Cable Center hosted by gay-rights group One Colorado on Friday.

“I want more people to commit to long-term relationships, to be able to protect their families, just as the law now helps [straight couples] protect their families.”

One Colorado Executive Director Brad Clark commended Nikkel for the swing-vote she cast last spring as a Republican Judiciary Committee member in favor of same-sex civil unions. The vote sent tremors through the state political landscape and cleared the way for a full chamber vote on the bill, where more than enough lawmakers from both sides of the aisle were committed to vote to pass the bill. In the end, however, Republican leadership ran out the clock before a vote could be called and, in a special legislative session, headed off the bill by sending it to a loyalist party-line “kill” committee.

Nikkel talked about a visit to Israel she made last year and how her thoughts about civil unions evolved partly as a result. She reflected on the discrimination Jews faced in Europe and referred to relatively open gay-rights laws in Israel now. She said she came to believe that “life would be better for a lot of Coloradans if we passed a civil unions bill” and then talked about the strong reaction she weathered in the days before and after her committee vote.

“There was a truck circling the capitol with a sign that said I was going to hell. I became aware of the bigotry many of you face every day and I happened to find out some of it would be directed at me… I received phone calls, texts, calls to my home, Robo calls, in-person criticism at my church.”

She said Rep. Daniel Kagan, D-Cherry Hills Village, told her the story of how some brave person had helped his grandparents escape from a Nazi ghetto.

“They escaped because of one person with a heart,” she said. “I understood just a little bit of the persecution Jews and gay people have been subjected to… I understood why Jews would support gay rights. We need to be consistent in our fight for equal rights for all.”

Nikkel praised conservatives who supported the bill this year– including Republican Reps. Don Beezley and Cheri Gerou and Spokesman for the Republican pro-civil unions group Coloradans for Freedom Mario Nicolais. She also added that she was confident that more Republican lawmakers in Colorado would come to support the bill in 2013.

“We have to have stamina, backbone… I wish we resolved this issue last session, but we will this coming session. I look forward to more Republicans voting in favor of this bill,” she said.

One Colorado hosts its award ceremony annually to celebrate individuals and organizations in the state that have worked to advance gay rights.

This year, the group hosted Rep. Nikkel as its “Honored Guest” and gave awards to Faye Tate, an executive and diversity champion at Englewood-based international engineering and construction firm CH2M Hill; Dr. Chris Urbina, chief medical officer at the Colorado School of Public Health at CU’s School of Medicine; the Girl Scouts of Colorado; and Compañeros, a Durango-based immigrant rights and resource group. The ceremony hosted roughly 400 guests in the courtyard space set against the stone walls of the cable center in the shadow of the 200-foot gold-topped Williams Tower.

Nikkel was mapped out of her House District 49 in the legislative reapportionment process last year and decided against running for election in a new district. The general election to represent HD 49 pits Democrat James Shelton against Republican Perry Buck.

Buck told the Independent she “couldn’t support” civil unions. Her website describes her as a “constitutional conservative and a third-generation Coloradan fiercely committed to protecting our way of life.” Shelton didn’t reply by press time.

[ Images: Top, Rep B.J. Nikkel at the Ally Awards by Ernest Luning; bottom, anti-gay rights "truth truck" by John Tomasic ]

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DENVER– A rally hosted here Thursday on the steps of the capitol by this year’s “No Personhood Campaign” featured speakers who decried government intervention into citizens’ private lives and admonished overreaching political activists who would tap the organs of the state to solve perceived social ills.

“Government needs to stay out of my family decisions,” said one speaker.

“As a person of faith,” said another, “I’m troubled that some would take away our god-given right to make these kinds of personal decisions.”

“These aren’t decisions that should be made by politicians,” said a third, who argued that the decisions under discussion clearly belong to the realm of intimate topics best weighed by adults with their families and their spiritual leaders, not by officeholders or bureaucrats like those who manage traffic rules or regulate power plant emissions.

Yet, for now at least and likely for the foreseeable future, the No Personhood Campaign is far from any anti-government libertarian or Tea Party affair. It’s so far made up of 24 generally lefty organizations opposed to the “personhood” initiative that anti-abortion activists are attempting to land on voter ballots in Colorado for the third general election in a row.

Campaign coalition members include mostly medical associations and rights groups, like the American Fertility Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, the ACLU, One Colorado, Planned Parenthood and ProgressNow.

The personhood movement seeks to grant full citizen rights to fertilized human eggs as a way to outlaw abortion in all cases. But personhood could also outlaw some of the most popular forms of birth control, such as IUDs and the pill, and likely significantly curtail the state’s fertilization industry.

Personhood supporters have played down the larger likely effects of the initiative, emphasizing their contention that it would save fetuses and present a strong challenge to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

Keith Mason, co-founder of the Arvada-based national organization Personhood USA and one of the proponents of Colorado personhood initiatives in the past, told politics and criticism site The Awl in 2010, for example, that he didn’t want to speculate on possible ramifications. He said that the legal questions the initiative has generated– questions grave and petty, where women who miscarry due to substance abuse might face murder charges, for example, or where pregnant women might be allowed to drive in carpool lanes– can be worked out by the courts after Colorado’s constitution is amended and the law takes affect.

“It’s hypothetical,” he said, explaining that he preferred to “worry about the [legal] details later,” after the initiative passed.

Personhood Colorado submitted more than 112,000 signatures in support of its initiative to the secretary of state earlier this month, well more than the roughly 86,000 required this year to land on the ballot. The Secretary has until September 5th to verify the validity of the signatures. Supporters and opponents of the initiative equally expect it to make the ballot.

Indeed, personhood in Colorado has been as resilient a political movement as it has been unpopular among voters.

In 2008, Coloradans voted down the initiative 73 percent to 27 percent. In 2010, the year conservatives made historic gains across the country, Coloradans again overwhelmingly voted against it, 71 percent to 29 percent.

Increasingly, personhood is proving a briar patch for state Republican politicians. Colorado conservatives seem torn between a traditionally western libertarian small government strain on one side and on the other a Christian-right interventionist strain on social issues that has risen with the fortunes of the evangelical organizations based in Colorado Springs since the 1980s.

Most Colorado Republicans running for office in 2008, for example, opposed that year’s personhood initiative, arguing that it went too far. In 2010, however, almost every Republican candidate for federal and state office supported the measure– and many analysts believe the party suffered at least one key loss in Colorado as a result. U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck was stridently anti-abortion and initially a strong supporter of personhood and he lost the vote among women by a landslide to Sen. Michael Bennet, who only bested Buck among the general population by a few thousand votes.

This year, three of four of the state’s Republican congressional incumbents don’t seem to want to be pinned to the initiative. Congressmen Mike Coffman, Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton have yet to come out in support of the initiative, although Coffman and Gardner have been unabashed supporters of the initiative in the past. Joe Coors, candidate for the seventh congressional district, has refused to take a position, even though he donated $1000 to the initiative campaign in 2010. The candidates have avoided talking about the issue to news media.

The launch of the No Personhood Campaign comes just as the national news cycle is consumed with the politics of reproductive health.

Just days before the party’s presidential election year convention, Republican officeholders and candidates, including likely presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have rebuked staunch anti-abortion Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin for saying he thought that, in cases of what he called “legitimate rape,” women’s bodies prevented conception. Akin was blasted for being either uninformed or willfully confused about basic biological facts, but the intent of his comments– to play down the need for exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape– has been widely embraced by the party for years and this week was written into the party platform to be unveiled at the convention, which begins Monday in Tampa.

Crystal Clinkenbeard, Colorado’s No Personhood Campaign communications director, told the Independent that she hails from Missouri and was not in the least surprised by Akin’s remarks. She said the attention they have focused on the Republican Party’s position on reproductive health matters that include rape, contraception and abortion are long overdue.

“There couldn’t be a better time to launch our anti-personhood campaign,” she said.

Amy Runyon-Harms at Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado, a Planned Parenthood political committee, agreed. She said she hoped that, when formulating policy stances on reproductive health issues, including personhood, Republican politicians would start to lean more on the views of their constituents and less on the views of anti-abortion activists.

“We have yet to see an outpouring of support from Republicans for our [No Personhood] campaign,” she said smiling, “but I think they understand that the initiative does not reflect Colorado values. It’s just not what Colorado voters want. So, while they’re not coming out publicly on our side of this issue, I don’t think they’re going to necessarily side with the personhood supporters.

“Colorado will play a huge role in the election in terms of how personhood relates to other contests. As we’ve seen, women here in particular realize that a candidate’s values matter,” she said, referring to the Buck-Bennet race. “If a candidate supports personhood, women will see him or her as out of touch.”

[ Image of rally protest sign by the Colorado Independent. ]

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Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains announced this week that it is launching a new breast cancer prevention and screening project at its Arvada clinic.

The project is being funded with cash donated in response to news last spring that the juggernaut cancer-fighting Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, reportedly steered by anti-abortion executive Karen Handel, had decided to discontinue its long-standing grant funding for the Planned Parenthood national organization.

In the wake of the controversial announcement, donors gave $67,000 to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, Communications Director Monica McCafferty told the Independent.

Staffers at the new Arvada Breast Health Services Project funded by the donations will provide cancer examinations and education training. McCafferty said her organization hopes to continue funding the project in part with repeat donations.

The Arvada clinic had previously offered only minimal breast health services. It was not, for example, one of the Planned Parenthood clinics in the state that receive breast health funding through the Komen Foundation’s Denver and Aspen affiliates. That money goes to programs at clinics in Greeley, Fort Collins, Aurora and Glenwood Springs.

The Arvada clinic served 8,000 patients last year, nearly 70 percent of whom carried no health insurance, according to a Planned Parenthood release. The release added that Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains screened 15,452 women for breast cancer last year.

The regional Planned Parenthood organization operates 23 clinics in Colorado, three in Nevada and one each in Wyoming and New Mexico.

As news broke in January of Komen’s intended shift in funding away from Planned Parenthood, negative public reaction exploded. Some donors said they felt that Komen, the nation’s top charity battling breast cancer, was putting politics above women’s health. Komen was quick to reverse the decision but not before probing news stories piled up and local affiliates began pushing back. The two Komen affiliates in Colorado spearheaded resistance to the plan, announcing early on in the news cycle that they would continue to fund Planned Parenthood in Colorado because Planned Parenthood delivered the biggest bang for the buck here. Denver Komen reported that Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains received only 4.3 percent of the nearly $3 million Komen spent in the state but that Planned Parenthood clinics here detected nearly 20 percent of all of the cases of breast cancer discovered through Komen spending.

“The slogan ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ has been a popular soundbite among staunch anti-choice politicians,” McCafftery told the Independent, “but in reality, there is broad support for what Planned Parenthood does, as demonstrated by the [reaction] to the Komen announcement.”

McCafferty said 93 percent of the services Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains provides do not concern abortion.

[ Image via Flickr by Ennuipoet Freeverse Photography ]

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Longmont residents this November will vote on whether or not to ban within city limits the oil and gas drilling technique known as fracking.

Supporters of the anti-drilling initiative for the city submitted more than 8,000 signatures last month to land the proposal on the ballot. Sam Schabacker, spokesman for Food and Water Watch, one of the main groups backing the proposal, told the Colorado Independent that at least 6,600 of the signatures were accepted by the city clerk as valid last week, well above the 5,700 or so signatures required.

If the initiative passes, the northern Front Range city, perched atop the oil and gas-rich Niobrara Shale formation, would be the first city in the state to ban the controversial but increasingly common extraction practice.

“We collected those signatures in six weeks with the help of more than 100 community volunteers, people from all kinds of political backgrounds, from all age groups, from all walks of life. So we’ve seen the enthusiasm for this measure on the ground,” Schabacker said.

As Pew project Stateline reported last week, each instance of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, includes anywhere from 2 million to 12 million gallons of water. The water is mixed with chemicals and sand and blasted deep into underground rock formations to loosen trapped oil and gas. Critics say the effects of fracking on groundwater supplies are not completely understood. Fracking supporters say oil and gas companies have been employing the practice for decades and that no solid evidence linking fracking to contamination has ever come to light.

But the industry has stepped up use of the technique in recent years, opening up formerly inaccessible parts of the country to development. Bob King at the U.S. Energy Information Administration told the Independent that the industry shares the total number of oil and gas wells it drills each year but not statistics on the number of wells being fracked. King said that any well can be fracked and that from 2000 to 2010 nearly 376,000 wells were drilled across the country. Roughly 57 percent of the drilling has come since 2006. King said fracking is the the only effective way to bring up oil and gas from the dense shale formations now being worked intensely in states like Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Thom Kerr, permit manager at the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, told the Independent that, over the course of 2011 and 2012, the state has so far issued 3,655 permits to drill just in counties included in the the “Denver Basin play,” where the Niobrara Shale holds oil and gas created through heat and pressure– specifically Larimer, Weld, Morgan, Boulder, Adams, Arapahoe and Broomfield counties in the northeastern part of the state. That “thermogenic” section of the shale spreads out under the sparsely populated plains far north of Longmont in Colorado and under the windswept flatlands of Nebraska and Wyoming.

Longmont, a Boulder County city that sits on the western border of Weld County, has been close to the center of the activity as it has increased over the course of the last decade. In just the last two years, Colorado has issued 3,296 permits to companies looking to drill in Weld County. That number dwarfs the number issued for any other county in the state, the nearest being Garfield County on the western slope, which saw 1,888 permits issued in that time. (See COGCC report (pdf), page 17.)

The fracking boom has increased the country’s natural gas supplies enormously but, as drilling moves closer and closer to residential areas, it has also sounded alarms among community and environmental groups.

The Longmont initiative — a charter amendment called the “Longmont Public Health, Safety and Wellness Act” — has drawn attention well beyond city limits for the way it underlines the larger war being fought between local communities and the state to control oil and gas industry regulation and burgeoning fracking activity here.

Indeed, Longmont is one of Colorado’s many home rule cities, where greater local authority is prized by residents and protected by the state constitution.

What’s more, the ballot initiative comes after the Longmont City Council last month passed amendments to its own 12-year-old oil-and-gas regulations and drew a lawsuit from the state just days after the fact. Representatives of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission argued that it was the state’s responsibility to establish regulations governing oil and gas activity and to create a relatively smooth permitting process that a patchwork of local regulations would undermine.

Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper, a former oil-and-gas industry geologist who opposes local regulations and who has worked to ease public concerns about fracking, told attendees at an energy conference in Denver on Wednesday that the state is determined to overturn the Longmont regulations and halt any similar moves the Longmont regulations might spur among other Colorado communities.

“We want to get to the point that we can convince Longmont there is sufficient flexibility in state rules in meeting the needs of local communities,” the Denver Post quoted Hickenlooper as saying. “[T]his is one case where there has to be a limit.”

The amended regulations (pdf) were developed by the City Council over the course of the last year with input from citizens, oil and gas operators and state regulators. They limit the number of wells that can be drilled within the city, ban on-site “open pit” storage of fracking fluid waste, “outline” a water-quality monitoring program and increase the distance that must separate well sites from buildings. The state presently requires setbacks of 350 feet. The Longmont rules would establish minimum setbacks of 750 feet.

Conservationists have been urging state authorities without success to extend setbacks to 1,000 feet from residences and 1,500 feet from buildings that house more vulnerable populations, such as schools and hospitals.

The amended regulations exempt wells that already exist within the city from the new stiffer rules regarding setbacks, and they provide for wider exemptions from much of the rules if a company can argue successfully at a public hearing that “compliance shall result in an operational conflict with the state statutory and regulatory scheme.”

Longmont Mayor Dennis Coombs told the Post he is determined to defend the new regulations in court. Longmont Public Information Officer Rigo Leal told the Independent that the city’s motion for an extension in the case won approval this week.

Schabacker, however, dismissed the new regulations as a half measure designed less to limit drilling and more to “derail the initiative process.” He points to a map that shows where drilling could take place in Longmont based on present state regulations. The fracking “red zone” that bleeds across the map abuts schoolyards and parks and golf courses.

“The [initiative] is about the constitutional right of the citizens of Longmont to decide for themselves how best to protect our health and safety and our property values,” he said.

Given the size and richness of the Niobrara formation, Schabacker questioned why the state would begrudge citizens the right to fence off relatively small municipal land areas from drilling and the industrial traffic and construction that accompanies it.

He also dismissed the idea being pushed by oil and gas industry supporters that any dip in real estate values caused by operations would be offset by the creation of oil-and-gas industry jobs and the alleged lower gas prices that might come at the pump as a result of drilling within the city.

“The oil companies will make money while driving our property values down by drilling next to our homes and schools,” he said. “We want to keep Longmont a great place to live. This is moms and nurses and retirees standing up to the oil and gas companies.”

Eric Brown, spokesman for the governor’s office, told the Independent that the governor has yet to weigh in on the Longmont ballot initiative and the precedent it might set for other Colorado communities.

Schabacker said that establishing that kind of precedent was “part of the reason [supporters] are excited about the initiative.”

“We think it will be a model for other communities to step up and establish high-quality local control and determine what happens in their neighborhoods.”

[Image via Flickr by Chiot's Run ]

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BOULDER– Marty Neilson, Republican Party election watcher, walked out of the Boulder County Clerk’s building in disgust as workers there tabulated primary voting results the last week of June. Neilson said she couldn’t see anything of substance and felt like she was participating in a sham exercise in oversight.

“[Clerk Hillary Hall] kept us behind [solid] walls and behind glass walls,” Neilson told the Colorado Independent. “We are there to view the whole process, which is what the statutes say we’re supposed to do, from the time the [election workers] get the ballots to the time they verify the signatures and then count the votes. But it was a charade. I left because why stay? There was no reason to be there.”

Neilson said she phoned Secretary of State Scott Gessler to complain and that he later called back to say he was sympathetic to her concerns. His office didn’t return messages left by the Independent seeking comment, but the update to election law Rule 8.6 (pdf) he has proposed with the aim of bringing clarity to the regulations governing election watchers may well exacerbate the kind of problems watchers complained about in Boulder. The new version of the rule would give greater discretion to county clerks to direct watcher activities. The secretary of state’s office is holding a public hearing on the rule June 23.

Neither Neilson nor any of the other Boulder County watchers the Independent was able to contact– members of the public appointed by political parties to oversee the election process– as well as members of the county’s canvass board, doubted the veracity of the election results produced by Hall and her staff and they commended the efficiency of the operation. Yet most of them shared Neilson’s concerns.

“We were just too far from everything to do proper monitoring. It’s totally inadequate,” said Mary Eberle, a watcher for the American Constitution Party who is also a member of the watchdog group Citizen Center, which is suing six county clerks, including Clerk Hall, and the Secretary of State for using ballots that Citizen Center believes can be traced to voters.

“We used to stand beside the workers and look to see if the person reading an ID number and the person typing the ID number into the system were doing it properly,” Eberle said. “We could see how well they matched the signatures on a ballot envelope with the voter signature on file in [the state's registered voter database]. Well, we can’t do that anymore from 10 feet away behind a glass wall.”

The facility and election division operations at the Boulder Clerk and Recorder’s office are impressive. On primary night– the county’s second all-mail primary election– a team of something like 20 people manned stations in what staffers call the “ballot processing center,” a light-industry-style warehouse space divided by waist-high partitions and walls of glass. Separate rooms have been created for envelope and ballot sorting, signature verification and vote counting and for reviewing ballots that the computers won’t read for various reasons. Trucks drop off mailed ballots at a lower-level dock and an elevator delivers them to a conveyor on the main floor. This year, the county is test-driving a new Bell and Howell election-industry sorter, a machine roughly the size of four washing machines that can read ballot envelopes, gauge whether the right number of inserts have been included and then capture images for staffers to review of the voter signatures that appear on ballot envelopes.

Eberle, who has been a watcher in four Colorado counties for elections held over the last six years, said her frustrating experience this year in Boulder was unique but, she fears, a harbinger of things to come. She notes that the conduct of elections is moving from polling places, where sorting lists are spread out on tables and members of the public read each other’s faces, to backstage sites like the one in Boulder, where machines and computer screens dominate.

Of the roughly 145,000 active registered voters in Boulder County, about 95,000 have registered as permanent mail-in voters, according to the clerk’s office. For the primary this year, the county sent out 109,000 ballots and about 37,000 were returned for counting, about 34 percent. Roughly 43 percent of voters participated in the county’s 2010 all-mail primary and only 29 percent of voters participated in its last polling-place primary held in 2008.

Clerk Hall, a high-profile and influential county clerk in the state, told the Independent that, in keeping the watchers at a remove from her election workers, she was simply weighing concerns for security and efficiency against concerns for transparency. She said that election-watcher rules were designed when polling place interactions predominated and that they don’t squarely address activity that takes place over the course of days or even weeks at a high-volume ballot processing center like the one in Boulder. She said that, where the rules aren’t clear, responsibility falls to the clerks to balance competing interests.

The rule scheduled to be heard Monday, would bolster that reading of the law.

The six-foot limit

Watchers are appointed by political parties, candidates or issue committees. The same laws govern watchers as govern other election observers, including members of the media. Watchers are meant to provide checks and balances on and against each other and against the clerk’s office. County clerks in Colorado are elected officials and mostly members of the Republican and Democratic parties.

The law governing watchers is just one among many election laws, some on the books for more than a hundred years, according to irrepressible election law activist and founder of Citizen Center Marilyn Marks. The laws have been elaborated with rules formulated by successive secretaries of state, part of the executive branch’s regulatory authority, where rules are proposed to carry out the intent of legislation. The original Rule 8 (pdf), which carries the force of law, grants watchers the right and responsibility to “witness and verify… each stage of the election.”

[Watchers] may observe polling place voting, early voting and the processing and counting of precinct, provisional, mail, and mail-in ballots. For mail ballot elections, or mail-in ballot processing, watchers may be present at each stage of the election including the receiving and bundling of the ballots received by the designated election official.

That rule, however, was complicated by a letter drafted by Deputy Attorney General Maury Knaizer for the secretary of state’s office in 2010. Knaizer was asked to address the role of election watchers in an era when identity verification, ballot reading and vote tallying increasingly takes place in the absence of actual voters.

A key provision of long-established election law referenced by Knaizer appears as statute 1-5-503 on the “arrangement of voting equipment or voting booths and ballot boxes.” It states that “No person other than the election officials and those admitted for the purpose of voting shall be permitted within the immediate voting area, which shall be considered as within six feet of the voting equipment or voting booths and the ballot box, except by authority of the election judges or the designated election official, and then only when necessary to keep order and enforce the law.”

That statute is meant to ensure voter privacy as ballots are cast. It applies to watchers and has been informally used as a reference point even in the age when watchers are witnessing less voting and more ballot sorting and counting.

Knaizer cautioned that his letter “contained only [his] analysis… not an official opinion of the Attorney General,” but he endorsed the reading of the law proffered by then-Secretary of State Bernie Buescher, who thought the “six-foot limit” should apply to watchers in ballot-processing centers, keeping them at a remove from the machines. Knaizer added that “any potential disadvantage to the watcher [would be] mitigated by the requirement that the equipment booths and ballot boxes must be in plain view.”

The clerks’ kitchens

Martha Tierney, one of the state’s top election lawyers who has led voter-protection efforts for the Democratic Party here for a decade, agreed with all of the other sources contacted by the Independent for this story that no laws were being broken by clerks who kept watchers at a distance. Yet, like many others, she suggested that the spirit of the law is likely being violated in some of the state’s counties.

“If you’re made to stand at the door across the room while people are sorting and counting ballots, what can you ‘witness and verify’?” she said.

She commended Gessler for seeking to clarify the rules but she said her firm, Heizer Paul Grueskin, submitted feedback on the rules critical of the discretion they would grant to clerks.

“Every county has a different set up. Some clerks provide tremendous access. Others are basically not interested in having watchers in their ‘kitchens.’ They’re the ones who will limit access. And then what we have is an equal protection problem,” she said, suggesting that, if Gessler’s rule goes into effect without change, citizens across the state could not rely even theoretically on the same level of monitoring or “witnessing and verifying” meant to protect the integrity of their votes and elections.

“This is not a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans are on the same side,” said Tierney. “We all want clarity but we’re just not there yet. With mail elections it’s true that there is less opportunity for watchers to participate… but they play a critical role.”

The plan to ‘protest mightily’

In speaking about her experience in Boulder last month, Eberle conceded that the equipment at the ballot processing center, including desktop computers, were “in plain view” but that the work being done with the equipment happened at a distance from election watchers and that the data on computer screens, the images of voter signatures, for example, was simply too far away to read.

At the Boulder center, it’s physically possible for watchers to stand as close as two feet from two desktop computer stations where signature images are being compared. But a glass wall separates the watchers and the computer stations, and the rest of the stations where workers compare signature images sit on the far side of the walled-off room, ten or more feet away.

“How can we see if ballots are falling under the scanner machines and not being read?” Eberle asked. “How can we judge the quality of the signature verification work being done?”

She said that in the past she has asked for election workers to re-examine signatures and to explain why they believe this or that rough signature match should be or should not be OK’d. She said that kind of conversation can’t really happen in Boulder the way the processing center is set up.

Marks at the Citizen Center said election watchers and their supporters are depending on Gessler in the end to make rules that take into account the new reality of Colorado’s election processes and sets a statewide standard that prioritizes transparency.

“We are going to protest mightily,” she said, referring to the hearing Monday. “This is an attempt to strip us of our statutory rights.”

The Secretary of State can adjust the proposed rules after the hearing. Whatever shape they take will be in effect for the presidential election this fall.

What’s at stake

The push and pull in Boulder underlines battles being waged in Colorado this year over what critics see as a trend on the part of officials toward limiting the public’s ability to monitor elections. Gessler with the support of county clerks recently loosened security regulations on electronic voting machines, which have been a source of election-integrity anxiety for years. And a recently passed controversial law, HB 1036, narrowed the ability of the public to review voted ballots as well as digital tallies produced by voting machine, even though ballots physical and digital are clearly subject to the state’s open records laws.

Ralph Shnelvar, a libertarian and Boulder County canvass board member for the American Constitution Party, told the Independent that Clerk Hall runs a tight ship. He was confident in the election results, the same as were the other primary election watchers in Boulder.

“But what if we didn’t think it went so well?” he said. He was sitting on the floor with his legs crossed in the hallway outside the clerk’s office. He turned the palms of his hands toward the ceiling. “What if we didn’t think it went so well? That’s what’s at stake.”

[ Image by JaulaDeardilla via Flickr ]

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