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A new report blasts the state agency charged with regulating the oil and gas industry for failing to enforce its own rules.

There were 516 spills in 2011 but the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) only assessed five fines, according to the report that Earthworks released today.

“The COGCC’s mission is to foster responsible oil and gas development by balancing drilling with protection of landowners, public health, and the environment,” Gwen Lachelt, the director of Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project, said in a prepared statement. “Right now, the COGCC’s rules, like its mission statement, are just empty words on a page. There is no balance here.”

Western Slope residents took to the X Games in Aspen this winter to promote stronger rules for oil and gas drilling in Colorado. (Photo by Eric Allen)

As the number of wells drilled increases in Colorado, the number of inspections is decreasing, the report found, noting it is physically impossible for existing COGCC staff to annually inspect every well. The report also claims many rule violations are not recorded. The few who are penalized are subject to maximum fines of ,000 per day, which the report deems “inadequate to deter irresponsible operations.”

“There is always room for improvement in anything that we do,” Colorado Department of Natural Resources spokesman Todd Hartman said on behalf of COGCC. “At the same time, the issues addressed in the report today are not simple. We are and will continue to be aggressive in our enforcement when operators take actions that pose significant threats to the environment and public health.” COGCC’s staff, he added, “works diligently, responsibly and effectively to ensure protection of the public and environment from any potential impacts of oil and gas development in Colorado. We enforce the most comprehensive set of oil and gas regulations in the country, including, beginning April 1, the strongest and most transparent hydraulic fracturing chemical disclosure rules yet adopted in any state.”

The Earthworks report comes amid heated debate about whether local governments should be able to make their own laws regarding oil and gas drilling. Competing bills — one introduced by a Democrat to empower local governments and another one introduced by a Republican to solely empower COGCC — died at the state capitol. Gov. John Hickenlooper recently convened a task force to help clarify and better coordinate” the regulatory jurisdiction between state and local governments.

The task force’s findings are due April 18.

Boulder County, Longmont and Colorado Springs have temporarily halted drilling activity. Commerce City, Erie and Aurora, Arapahoe County, Douglas County, Elbert County, El Paso County and Huerfano County are vying for their own regulations.

The proliferation of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is fueling much of the community concern.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying the risks that fracking poses to drinking water after complaints have been made in Colorado, Wyoming and other states.

This week the University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Health announced that an analysis of residents in Garfield County living within a half-mile of oil and gas fracking operations found they have been exposed to air pollution five times above the federal hazard limit.

U.S. Reps. Diana DeGette and Jared Polis, both Democrats from Colorado, have asked President Obama to strengthen environmental and public health standards to protect against fracking.

“COGCC’s inadequate performance shows why citizens need to have federal standards, as well as state regulations,” Earthworks’ policy director Lauren Pagel said. “In Colorado’s case, state regulation means inadequate regulation, and therefore, irresponsible development.”

She recommended that COGCC increase its inspection staff, standardize and publicize inspections, and increase fines for violations.

COGCC has doubled its staff size over the past seven years during hard economic times, responded Hartman, and the agency will hire an additional seven people, including two more inspectors, over the next fiscal year at a time when government agencies continue to cut budgets.

Moreover, COGCC’s website is “perhaps the most open and informative in the country, with wholesale public access to documents associated with complaints, inspections and alleged violations – as well as all follow-up documents that follow from those,” Hartman noted. “We publish updated statistics monthly on a wealth of material, including violations, complaints, spills, remediation and inspections.”

Still, critics remain.

Last month, 18 conservation and citizen activist groups questioned the ties between industry and regulators at the COGCC and asked Hickenlooper to improve the state’s oversight.

The Earthworks report is just the latest to question Colorado’s ability to regulate the energy industry.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week criticized the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for its oversight of radioactive materials. State officials strongly defended their processes and called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s comments “unprofessional.”

The Colorado Independent

“I really have no idea what he is talking about,” Republican Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Sheila Reiner told the Colorado Independent.

Reiner was referring to allegations made again recently by Secretary of State Scott Gessler that non-citizens are registered to vote in the state. Reiner said she has asked Gessler in the past to share what he knows so that she and the other clerks in the state can address any potential problem. She said that, in roughly the year that has passed since he first brought up the issue, details from Gessler’s office have not materialized.

“I asked for the lists when I first heard about this. I haven’t gotten any information. I just don’t know,” she said.

Gessler shared more detailed information on the topic last month at an Arapahoe County Republican Men’s Club fundraiser. He said that 150 or so non-citizen residents of the state who had been erroneously registered to vote contacted him before he had even become secretary of state and asked to be removed from the registration rolls. He said that in 2011, his first year in office, 400-some erroneously registered non-citizens had asked to be removed from the rolls, the climbing number, he said, clearly indicates a wider and more serious problem.

This week, Gessler told KLZ talk radio listeners not only that non-citizens were being registered to vote in the state but that they were also casting votes.

“We’re continuing to do the analysis on the issue… of non-citizens being on the voting rolls here in Colorado and some of them voting,” he said. “We did a study last year and we’re going to do some more analysis and come up with more evidence to show people that there, in fact, are problems here in Colorado.”

At the end of last month, the Colorado Independent asked the secretary of state’s office to elaborate on his concerns and findings for the record but received no response.

The Independent then filed an open records request (pdf) with the office asking for any communication conducted between non-citizens registered to vote and the secretary’s office and/or conducted between the secretary’s office and county clerks on the subject of non-citizens asking to be removed from the voter rolls.

Secretary of State spokesman Rich Coolidge responded to say his office “is not the custodian” of such records. “You’ll need to submit your request directly to the county clerk and recorders, who register and cancel voter records,” he wrote in an email.

Voter rights watchdog group Colorado Common Cause subsequently submitted a similar records request and told the Independent that Coolidge had asked for an extension on the three-day statutory delivery period.

County clerks and staff contacted by the Independent so far in some of the state’s most populous counties, including Adams, Boulder, Denver and Pueblo, have said that they, like Reiner in Mesa County, have no knowledge of any non-citizens ever being registered to vote nor have they knowingly received any requests to be removed from the voter rolls from non-citizen residents of the state.

The Colorado Independent today submitted another open records request asking for any related “work product” created or commissioned by the secretary’s office, including any database searches seeking information concerning non-citizens being registered to vote in Colorado.

A standard form

“There’s nothing on the form like that,” Adams County Clerk Karen Long told the Colorado Independent, referring to the state’s standard “Withdrawal of Colorado Voter Registration (pdf)” form, the one available online that anyone seeking to remove their name from the rolls must submit to their county clerk. (Click on the image to the right for an enlarged version.)

“[The form] doesn’t ask anywhere for the reason you want to be removed,” Long said. “It asks for your name and ID or social security number and then you have to affirm it–you have to sign it and affirm it’s what you want and it’s accurate. That’s it. The only time we would know why someone wants to be removed is if they tell us, voluntarily. Maybe they’re moving out of state,” Long said.

Reiner said people sometimes come into her office upset about politics in general and want to be removed from the rolls.

Joan Fitz-Gerald, the highly respected former Jefferson County clerk, state senate president and now president of nonprofit watchdog AmericaVotes, said occasionally people asked her to remove them from the rolls because they were looking to avoid jury duty.

Boulder Clerk Spokesman Brad Turner didn’t hesitate to let on he was baffled.

“I don’t know how [Gessler] would know whether non-citizens were asking to be removed from the lists. That information just isn’t here, as far as I can tell.”

‘No need for a bill’

Gessler pushed hard last year at the state legislature for the “Proof of Citizenship” bill sponsored by Rep. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, and Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch. The bill came in response to a study Gessler conducted based on database search and comparisons that he said suggested thousands of non-citizens could be voting in Colorado.

The bill, HB 1252, would have granted the secretary power to “periodically check” voter registration records against a collection of databases “maintained by federal and state agencies.” If the secretary suspected any registered voter “may not be a citizen,” he could suspend that voter’s registration, giving him or her 90 days to (re)submit documents proving their right to vote.

The bill failed to pass but, as the Colorado Independent reported in January, Gessler waved off Holbert and Harvey this year, saying there was “no need for a bill,” according to a Holbert staffer, because he felt he could address the issue outside the halls of the capitol with means available to him through his office.

Trimming voter rolls based on database searches like the ones described in the “Proof of Citizenship” bill– searches centered on comparing ID numbers listed in the state’s voter registration database, known as SCORE, and ID numbers listed in databases that include state or federal immigration information– is a prospect that alarms voting-rights watchdogs and at least some of the state’s county clerks, who openly doubted the accuracy of such an approach.

Clerks said that conducting those kind of database searches would give Gessler numbers of likely “suspects” but no confirmation that the people he thinks he is dealing with are actually the ones tied to the information on his lists. They added that he wouldn’t know whether people’s citizenship status had changed or to what extent human error had fouled up his searches.

That kind of skepticism has been the reaction among government watchdogs since Gessler first began talking about non-citizen voters.

Estelle Rogers, director of advocacy for Project Vote, looked closely at the six-page report Gessler produced last March that started the conversation in the state. In the report, Gessler said his office, working mainly from the Department of Revenue driver’s license database, was “nearly certain” that 106 immigrants were improperly registered to vote in Colorado. The report concluded that perhaps as many as 11,805 people were improperly registered to vote in the state and that 4,000 of them had voted in the 2010 elections.

Rogers told the Colorado Independent that such claims should come with more detailed supporting material that could be independently reviewed.

“The secretary says he is ‘certain’ that 106 people on Colorado’s voter roll of 3.7 million are ‘improperly registered.’ That’s about 0.0028648648649 percent of the voter roll,” she wrote in an email. “Obviously such an error rate is to be expected whenever human beings are copying data from one list to another. Before the secretary of state jumps to the conclusion that these are 106 cases of voter fraud, he should have a lot more evidence than mere suspicion. Non-citizen voting is a fashionable political theme these days, but it has no basis in reality. And the right to vote is too important to confuse with sloganeering.”

Fitz-Gerald echoed those sentiments.

“Clerks know that you never do anything without documentation. There are very specific processes outlined by law when you’re dealing with voter registration. There has to be a paper trail.”

She said that accuracy and accountability is everything when it comes to removing voters from the registration lists.

“You have to be sure that somebody isn’t removing someone else’s name. It can be very basic. Neighbors could be fighting.”

Fitz-Gerald pointed as a cautionary tale to the error-ridden “scrub lists” controversial Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris used in 2000 to purge voter rolls there of alleged felons. Roughly 173,000 names made it onto Harris’s list but many of the names were tied to people with only misdemeanor convictions, others merely shared the same name with a felon.

Florida tried to rectify the problem as the errors came to light but evidence from Election Day polling places suggest thousands of legally registered voters may have been turned away as a result of the purge.

‘This matters’

“If I’m a clerk in Colorado, I wanna know who are these people [Gessler] is talking about. I wanna know what he’s doing. I’d be camping out in his office,” said Fitz-Gerald. “This matters. This is important.”

A high-profile conservative politics election and campaign finance attorney for years before he took office, Gessler has drawn heat for pushing election rules changes that he says are necessary to prevent voter fraud and that critics contend would make it more difficult for many legally registered Coloradans to cast votes. In addition to seeking the power to independently purge the voter rolls of suspected noncitizens, Gessler sued to prevent clerks from mailing ballots to inactive voters.

His efforts reflect moves Republicans have made nationwide since the GOP “wave election” of 2010 to stiffen voting requirements, efforts watchdogs and Democrats characterize as attempted vote suppression of left-leaning constituencies, including young people and members of minority groups.

Given that context, Fitz-Gerald says you would expect Gessler to be taking greater pains to justify his proposals.

“He’s not just a partisan attorney anymore,” she said. “He’s in a much different role. He’s an officeholder responsible to all voters– Republican, unaffiliated and Democratic. If something is wrong with the voter registration system, it is his responsibility not just to call it out at party dinners but to fix the problem and to work with the clerks to do that. It has to be a collaborative effort to keep the system solid.

“If he’s right there’s a problem, then it’s a state problem and it’s tied to the public trust. So take it to the clerks. Let’s get it worked out. You either want to solve the problem or you don’t. There are laws about how you go about these things and for good reason, too.”

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The Colorado Independent

FRISCO — Saying the economy is intrinsically intertwined with the environment, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall rolled out a proposal Sunday to designate 236,000 acres of new wilderness in central Colorado and establish a 20,000-acre national monument along the Browns Canyon stretch of the Arkansas River.

He called on the public to help him craft a pair of public-lands bills.

In the first — the Central Mountains Outdoor Heritage Act — the Democratic senator wants to consider 32 pockets in Eagle, Pitkin and Summit counties for wilderness protection, many of them additions to Holy Cross, Eagles Nest and Maroon Bells-Snowmass areas. Udall said he envisions a bill that would foster “a world-class destination for outdoor recreation while protecting pre-existing uses,” such as the Colorado National Guard’s high-altitude helicopter training area.

Draft maps for the proposal are largely based off of Eagle and Summit County wilderness plans that U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colorado, submitted to the House two years ago, along with input regarding Pitkin County from Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop. The three counties comprise a veritable paradise for skiers, hikers, cyclists, mountain bikers, snowmobilers, hunters and fishermen.

“Many of these areas have been exhaustively vetted and debated,” Udall said.

Sen. Mark Udall in Frisco on Sunday. (Photo by Troy Hooper)

The second bill — the Arkansas River Canyon National Monument and Browns Canyon Wilderness – borrows from former U.S. Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colorado, in identifying wilderness on both sides of the iconic river between Salida and Buena Vista in south-central Colorado. Hefley introduced a similar bill in 2006 but the legislation didn’t get very far. Hefley’s successor, Rep. Doug Lamborn, abandoned the plan.

“A national monument designation would put a star on the map, drawing more visitors to the area’s world-class river rafting and outdoor recreating activities and support our local tourism economy,” Udall said against a backdrop of blue skies and snow-covered mountains.

As he spoke, cross-country skiers snaked around a meadow in the distance. Giggling children raced inner tubes down a nearby hill. And snowboarders in SUVs passed by on their way to Breckenridge.

“The outdoors is an important part of our quality of life here in Colorado,” Udall continued. “For many outfitters and small business owners the preservation of our state’s majestic mountains and valleys is vital for their livelihoods.” He called for “a collaborative community driven process.”

Eagle County Commissioner Jon Stavney, Summit County Commissioner Dan Gibbs and Breckenridge Mayor Dr. John Warner also spoke in favor of protecting more of Colorado’s rugged landscape, and they emphasized how it serves as the backbone of their economies.

“Future generations will … judge our wisdom by the places we protect,” Stavney said.

As a member of the Senate’s Subcommittee on National Parks and co-chairman of the Outdoor Recreation Caucus, Udall plans to leverage his leadership “to take this [proposal] to the next level.”

Browns Canyon (Image: Friends of Browns Canyon)

Getting Colorado’s conservative congressmen on board could prove difficult. Not only did Lamborn fail to see Hefley’s vision through, he and U.S. Reps. Scott Tipton, Cory Gardner and Mike Coffman have a history of voting against public land protections and for allowing GOP-friendly industrialists to mine minerals and harvest forests.

Udall does have the assistance of Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, who revived a plan to better protect public land in the San Juan Mountains with Udall in September. That bill, which would declare roughly 61,000 acres of southwestern Colorado as federal wilderness or special management areas, had died in the 111th Congress.

Whether the 112th Congress is any better for wilderness remains to be seen.

Another ally for Udall is Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colorado.

“Coloradans want to preserve their quality of life and their opportunities,” said DeGette, who has spearheaded similar measures. “With efforts in the U.S. House and now the U.S. Senate, our state’s precious lands are that much closer to being protected. I look forward to working with Senator Udall to set forth a balanced approach to protecting some of the last remaining wild places in Colorado.”

The Department of Interior also supports several aspects of Udall’s plan.

Udall said it could take several months, or longer, before legislation is introduced in the Senate.

“I don’t have a deadline. Of course if we’re standing here 10 years from now, we’ve fallen short.”

The Colorado Independent

An atheists group in Boulder, seeking to stir conversation and encourage Coloradans to support strong safeguards against mixing Church doctrine and public policy, has launched a provocative billboard campaign that takes a cutting, Bill Maher-style approach to the question of faith. “God is an imaginary friend. Choose reality, it will be better for all of us,” will read signs in Denver and off I-25 in Colorado Springs.

Boulder Atheists co-founder Marvin Straus told the Daily Camera the group didn’t mean to insult anyone and that sparking dialogue was the main goal.

Public messages promoting an atheist worldview, offering support for budding atheists or refuge for falling-away believers tend to spur strong reaction. A similar campaign launched in 2008 in Colorado saw TV news people reporting the signs as “divisive” even before they went up.

An atheist ad campaign targeted at city bus riders in Des Moines, Iowa, generated an avalanche of complaints, saw Democratic Governor Chet Culvert refer to it as “disturbing” and the Des Moines transit system shut down the campaign after just three days.

A 7News report from 2008:

Christian billboard campaigns are a routine part of the Colorado landscape, as they are throughout rural parts of the country. This one, for example, broadcast its “Christ the Healer” message with LED-enhanced blazing letters all night in Security, Colorado, to the chagrin of nearby residents.

By contrast with church groups, atheists don’t enjoy much organizational financial support, and they are right in believing the atheist movement, such as it is, could use a boost.

According to a 2009 Pew Research study roughly 5 percent of U.S. adults say they don’t believe in God but only about a quarter of those adults call themselves “atheists.”

A 2006 University of Minnesota survey found that atheists are “America’s most distrusted minority.”

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The Colorado Independent

On-shore oil drilling in the United States is at its highest level since the Reagan administration in 1987, according to the Baker Hughes Rig Count – an industry tracking service. That same national boom is also occurring in Colorado, according to state officials, who point to a flurry of new drilling permits and active wells in Weld County.

Nationally, Baker Hughes late last week reported the number of active oil rigs in the United States surged to 1,080 – the highest number since at least 1987. The boom is due mostly to unconventional oil fields in Colorado, North Dakota, Texas and other states, where hydraulic fracturing has opened up previously untapped oil reserves.

The Niobrara Shale Formation beneath Colorado’s northern Front Range is yielding more and more lucrative oil as opposed to natural gas, sparking a boom that has Colorado’s most-drilled county on pace to break its old record of 2,340 drilling permits issued in 2008. As of Sept. 9, 508 of those permits were for oil drilling.

“This year we’re on a record rate,” Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) director David Neslin said, according to the Windsor Beacon. “We’re on track to match or exceed the record.”

And companies are utilizing all those permits.

“There are more active wells in Weld County than in any other county in the United States,” Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway told the Beacon. “The tax revenues we’ve seen from the industry have been a real boon to our residents, businesses, special taxation districts and the state of Colorado.”

While Weld County has kept its property taxes low, it has an above-average poverty level and unemployment rate. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, 14.8 percent of Weld County residents were at or below national poverty levels in 2009, compared to 12.6 percent of all of Colorado. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put Weld County’s unemployment rate at 10.2 percent in 2010, compared to 8.9 in Colorado overall.

According to the Greeley Tribune, Weld County’s unemployment rate earlier this year was the third highest among the state’s seven metropolitan areas, and the poverty rates for children in Greeley doubled in the previous decade to the second highest level among the state’s largest cities and counties.

The U.S. congressman who represents Weld County, Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, has been a relentless champion of increasing domestic oil and gas production, introducing several bills aimed at rolling back federal regulations many GOP members claim have curtailed domestic drilling and cost American jobs.

But with oil and gas drilling at an all-time high around the country, many conservation groups are questioning the wisdom of rolling back environmental regulations.

Meanwhile, local officials in northern Colorado – from Routt to Weld County — continue to seek more regulatory authority to better deal with the latest boom.

The Colorado Independent

Just under the wire, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., got her official comments in on the controversial Colorado Roadless Rule Thursday, sending them to the U.S. Forest Service in a letter copied to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and U.S. Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell.

Rep. Diana DeGette

“The Forest Service is considering a state-specific rule to manage inventoried roadless areas on national forest lands in Colorado, rather than complying with the national rule,” a DeGette press release stated on Friday. “Despite having slightly stronger protections than an earlier state-specific version, the proposed rule falls short of the standard existing under the national rule and lacks critical safeguards for Colorado’s national forests.”

The Colorado Roadless Rule process, which began during the administration of Republican Gov. Bill Owens and the presidential administration of George Bush, has taken nearly six years. It’s meant as a state-specific alternative to the 2001 Clinton administration national roadless rule, which Bush set aside soon after taking office. The national rule has been tied up in various federal courts ever since.

The Colorado Roadless Rules dictates the management of approximately 4.2 million acres of inventoried roadless areas of federal land throughout Colorado. The latest draft, released in April, was immediately blasted by conservation groups for still containing too many road building exemptions for oil and gas drilling, coal mining, logging and ski area expansion. The 90-day comment window on the latest draft (pdf) is now closing.

The Colorado Deserves More campaign studied the latest draft and found that only 13 percent of Colorado’s roadless areas would receive “top-tier” protection compared to 30 percent in Idaho, the only other state to engage in the Bush administration’s state-specific roadless rule process for its federal lands.

Here’s DeGette’s entire comment letter:

July 14, 2011

Colorado Roadless Area Review Team

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service

Re: Submission of Comments on Proposed Colorado Roadless Rule and Revised Draft

Dear Colorado Roadless Area Review Team:

As a Member of the Colorado Congressional delegation with a particular interest in natural resources, I write to submit my comments on the proposed Colorado Roadless Rule. The Rule would impact 4.2 million acres of roadless national forest land in Colorado. These are our last remaining undeveloped forest lands which we depend on for critical wildlife habitat, clean air and recreational opportunities. Wildlife viewing and hunting and fishing are vital for Colorado’s tourism, one of our strongest economic engines.

As has consistently been my position, I do not believe Colorado needs a separate state-specific roadless rule since the 2001 Roadless Rule received unprecedented public comment and great support, here in Colorado and across the country. Since these are federal lands, they should be managed as other federal lands, with a consistency that gives certainty to all who use and enjoy them. Our Colorado forest lands also deserve the same level of protection as those across the country. Additionally, since there are local protections and flexibility built into the 2001 Roadless Rule, the Colorado plan is unnecessary.

The proposed alternative of the Colorado Roadless Rule falls short in several ways. It provides ‘upper tier’ protection to only 13% of Inventoried Roadless Areas even though over 65% of these areas are identified in the various alternatives for the ‘upper tier’ category. Also, the 13% of roadless lands in Alternative 2 are those that generally already enjoy the same protection under their current forest plan. It seems disingenuous to declare them ‘upper tier’ which does not add additional protection but only changes the administrative mechanism by which those protections can be changed. The ‘upper tier’ protections should be afforded to all the 2.8 million acres identified in the various alternatives.

In addition, it would allow oil and gas surface occupancy and linear construction zones even in the ‘upper tier’ lands. I urge you to prohibit both surface occupancy and linear construction zones in these critical areas. The majority of the Inventoried Roadless Areas (87%) face these threats as well as many other exceptions for special interests, such as oil and gas leasing and coal mining. These lands are vulnerable to development, road building and extraction.

Lastly, I am concerned about some of the proposed regulations that permit road building far from the nearest community for fuel reduction. We have limited dollars to deal with the threats of forest fire around these areas. Those limited dollars should be targeted to the areas closest to those communities rather than far into the backcountry.

I strongly urge you to provide Colorado roadless areas with the highest level of protection possible. Without strong rules to protect our fragile forest ecosystem it will be more vulnerable to threats such as climate change and insect and disease outbreaks. In 2010, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack pledged that the Colorado rule would be as protective or more protective than the 2001 Roadless Rule, the current proposal does not offer that level of protection.

Sincerely,

Diana DeGette

Member of Congress

Cc: USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack

USFS Chief Tom Tidwell

The Colorado Independent

The three Republican women in the Colorado state Senate this year have voted as a bloc in support of at least two big family-protection bills that their male Republican colleagues have opposed. Weeks ago, Sens Ellen Roberts, Nancy Spence and Jean White argued passionately from the right in favor of same-sex civil unions as a way to bolster families headed by gay couples. The senators argued again passionately this week in favor of legislation that would combat school bullying, which can sink child confidence with tragic results and tear up families.

HB 1254 (pdf) passed in the House in March and in the Senate on Thursday. It is now headed to the governor’s desk for a signature.

In voting for the bill Senator White from Hayden said the fact that thousands of bullied kids avoid attending classes in Colorado in 2011 is “ridiculous.” In casting her vote, she said her own children, like so many, were bullied for things they had no control over.

“I think that every single day children are bullied to the point of turning into hypochondriacs because they need an excuse to stay home from school,” she said. “They’re bullied for all kinds of reasons at all levels. They’re bullied for their sexual orientation, for being fat, for being too tall, for having pimples. Our children were bullied for being adopted. Our children were bullied for living in a big house. It’s ridiculous. Kids need to know that when they go to school they have a safe environment that they can learn in and they don’t have to feel like they need an excuse to stay home from school.”

Centennial Republican Nancy Spence said the move to put more responsibility on adult school faculty and staff to prevent bullying was long overdue.

“[W]e heard testimony in committee where teachers ignore instances of bullying, such as hitting and kicking and shoving and pushing,” she said. “That’s another reason this bill is important. There needs to be a message given to staff at our school that bullying is no longer acceptable, if it ever was…. This bill is going to protect children and get a message to teachers that bullying will not be tolerated.”

A bipartisan problem

The bipartisan bill was sponsored in the House by Reps Sue Schafer, D-Wheat Ridge, and Kevin Priola, R-Henderson, and in the Senate by Pat Steadman, D-Denver. Its authors introduced it in the wake of a spate of tragic news stories from around the country detailing the fact that bullying was an ongoing source of youth suicide coast to coast. Schafer and Priola told the press they wrote the bill in order to head off a “sensational suicide” in Colorado.

Sens Roberts, Spence and White were joined by all of the Senate Democrats and Republican Steve King in voting in favor of the bill. The Republican-controlled House passed the bill with 47 aye votes and 18 nays.

Colorado has led in the nation in working to limit bullying ever since the 1999 Columbine shootings. Among the programs put in place is a successful phone and texting hotline that encourages kids to anonymously report trouble.

Supporters of HB 1254, however, say putting much of the onus on kids to intervene isn’t good enough. The bill puts more responsibility on adults to directly work to solve the problem. It establishes school codes of conduct and reporting and it establishes an interim committee of lawmakers to study school bullying in the state. It also creates a board to award grants to promising anti-bullying programs and to evaluate those programs

According to a 2009 Healthy Kids Colorado survey (pdf), roughly 19 percent of all Colorado high school kids report being bullied. Roughly 30 percent say they have gotten into fights. Roughly 7 percent have been threatened with weapons. Last year more than 5 percent of all Colorado high schoolers stayed home from school for fear of bullying, which translates to 12,000 teen students. Among certain demographic groups, the percentages soar. Linda Kanan, director of the Department of Public Safety’s School Safety Resource Center, told the Independent that roughly 37 percent of gay and transgender kids avoid school for fear of bullying.

New-style conservative family values

Months ago voting in favor of same-sex civil unions, Ellen Roberts spoke for the women Republicans in the Senate when she said that the fact is gay people are having kids and that current state law does not protect them. There is no law providing for arrangements in the case of break ups. There are no child support and visitation laws that cover gay couples, she pointed out. She told the Colorado Independent she tried to talk about these reasons to support the bill among the Senate GOP caucus but to mostly no avail.

The men, she said “had different ideas.”

Forty-one women were sworn into the Colorado legislature this year, making up the largest percentage of women serving at any state capitol in the nation. There are 17 women in the 35-member Senate. There are 24 women serving in the 65-member House.

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The Colorado Independent

BlogTalkRadio show Independent Kentucky chairman Michael Lewis interviews independentvoting.org national director of development John Opdycke and Independent Voters for Colorado founder Joelle Riddle. Check it out! h/t to Michael Drucker from The Independent View

INDEPENDENT KENTUCKY

• In Touch with Independent Kentucky (The Independent View blog) Independent Kentucky Chairman Michael P.W. Lewis hosted a live show about the 2011 National Conference of Independents. The show hosted CUIP Director of Development John Opdycke and Independent Voters for Colorado Founder Joelle Riddle.

PROP 14

• California Appeals Court Says Candidate in Southern California Special Election May File Amicus in Field v Bowen (Ballot Access News)
• Minor party candidate challenges new ballot rules (Sac Bee Capitol Alert) Frederick, who ran against Gaines in November, collected and submitted 225 signatures during the seven-day truncated period for qualifying for the special election ballot. But he was told the 1,500 threshold — – more than twice the 713 Peace and Freedom Party voters registered in the district — would apply to all candidates under the Proposition 14-created top two system, which eliminates party primaries.
• Barnidge: Fixing California’s broken budget requires changes (By TOM BARNIDGE, Daily Democrat – Woodland CA) Also needed are elected officials who care more about constituents than political parties — representatives who support good policy rather than rigid ideology. Thornberg said that new redistricting procedures and open primaries offer hope for reduced partisanship. 
• Brown’s labor allies may get involved in GOP primaries (By Steven Harmon, Contra Costa Times) A top-two primary under district lines that produces a more competitive race could allow a more moderate alternative to emerge, analysts say. In a Republican district, Democrats and independents would have to combine with moderate Republicans to oust conservative incumbents, said Gale Kaufman, a Democratic political consultant who works closely with the powerful California Teachers Association. “Folks are looking at ways to elect more moderates,” Kaufman said. “The open primary and redistricting allows you to have a conversation we’ve never had before.”

REDISTRICTING

• Jones will push independent redistrict panel in House (By State House News Service, Boston Herald) House Republicans plan to call for the creation of an independent commission to recommend redistricting proposals for final signoff by the Legislature, House Minority Leader Brad Jones told the News Service Monday.

OBAMA

• Regulatory Change We Can Believe In (posted by ROBERT HAHN AND PETER PASSELL, Forbes) With the White House up for grabs in 2012, both parties are looking for ways to appeal to independent voters. And applying economic common sense to regulation fits nicely in this familiar process of pre-presidential election triangulation.

REPUBLICANS

• What independent voters want: Conservative policise [sic] (By: Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard in San Francisco Examiner) If the House were composed solely of independents, it would pass the same conservative legislation as Republicans on Obamacare, the individual mandate, purchasing health insurance across state lines, spending, offshore oil drilling, and Social Security reform. That’s the finding of Resurgent Republic, a Republican polling outfit that applied the views of independents to the House.

DEMOCRATS

• Charlotte expects boost from 2012 Dem convention (By MITCH WEISS, The Associated Press, Washington Post) In 2008, Obama became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win North Carolina in a presidential race, boosted by a large jump in black voter participation. A flood of new residents over the past decade and a rising crop of independent voters also have made the state, once solidly in the GOP column for presidential elections, far more competitive.

WYOMING

• ‘Citizen lobbyists’ learn how pros influence, persuade lawmakers (By RUFFIN PREVOST WyoFile.com, Billings Gazette) Simons, a part-time student at the University of Wyoming, ran unsuccessfully last year as the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, and has worked with a group promoting bills related to recognizing same-sex marriages and holding open primaries.

NEW YORK

• Unionspeak: Gain is loss (Bob McManus, NY Post) Regulars like Billy Easton — a shill for the state’s public-education lobby, who responded by proclaiming upcoming cataclysm for New York schoolkids.  Easton fronts a special-interest mail drop called the Alliance for Quality Education, which is instructive.
• Mayor Blasts Cuomo for Budget Cuts (By MICHAEL HOWARD SAUL and ANDREW GROSSMAN, Wall Street Journal) “Unfortunately, the budget does not treat New York City equitably,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement. “It eliminates 100% of New York City’s revenue-sharing aid—more than 0 million—while cutting other localities by just 2%. The residents of our five counties pay a disproportionate amount of state taxes, and they deserve the same level of support.”
• Koch sets March 1 deadline for state legislators to co-sponsor independent redistricting bill (By Robert Harding, Auburn Pub) Ed Koch, head of New York Uprising, wants the 138 legislators who signed the New York Uprising pledge leading up to last year’s elections to co-sponsor independent redistricting bill by March 1.

The Hankster

Conservation groups are girding for battle in what they claim is a coming assault on the Clean Air Act by U.S. House Republicans, including Colorado congressmen Cory Gardner, Mike Coffman and Doug Lamborn.

Environment Colorado today issued a release ahead of the State of the Union address urging President Barack Obama “to protect the nation’s public health against threats from dirty energy lobbyists and their allies in Congress.”

“While laws like the Clean Air Act have helped to reduce emissions of many of the most dangerous pollutants, the job is far from done,” Environment Colorado field organizer Scott Wozencraft said. “Air pollution continues to cut short the lives of thousands of Americans each year, trigger tens of thousands of asthma attacks, poison our waterways with mercury and other toxins, and fuel global warming.”

Monday, Fort Collins-based Clean Water Action launched a door-to-door campaign called “Clean Air, Healthy Colorado” aimed at tracking the policies and statements of Gardner and Democratic U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall.

Gardner, a former state representative who beat out Democrat Betsy Markey in November, has been assigned to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The chairman of that committee, U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., earlier this month co-authored an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal targeting the “unconstitutional power grab” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in attempting to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Gardner recently told the Fort Collins Coloradoan he will increase oversight in order to rein in regulators.

“Clearly, oversight is going to be a key feature, and that is not only limited to the energy side or the environment side, but the health-care side as well,” Gardner said. “And so oversight, and reining in what many members of the committee see as a rule-making, regulatory process that has gone unchecked.”

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act, and in 2009 the EPA release two findings allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.

“Using our door-to-door, phone, email, and mail outreach programs, Clean Water Action will give thousands of members in northern Colorado the opportunity to learn what their federal lawmakers are doing on key issues impacting clean air, clean water, and public health,” said Gary Wockner of Clean Water Action. “In addition, Coloradans need to know that the U.S. EPA is America’s front-line defender of the Clean Air Act, which supports clean energy that will create jobs and protect the economy.”

Last month the EPA announced its timeframe for setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions by power plants and refineries.

Colorado Independent

The U.S. Forest Service Friday released the results of new aerial mapping showing the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic raging since the mid 1990s has now consumed more than 4 million acres of pine trees in Colorado and southern Wyoming.

In Colorado alone, more than 400,000 acres of trees were killed last year, mostly in the Arapaho, White River, Roosevelt, Medicine Bow and Routt national forests.

In Boulder County – scene of the most devastating wildfire in state history last summer – USFS officials reported an additional 36,000 acres of mostly ponderosa pines were killed by the beetles in 2010 compared to 1,600 acres in 2009.

In Wyoming, forest officials say another 314,000 acres of trees were killed last year, bringing the total to 3.1 million acres since 1996, and the epidemic is also rapidly spreading into Black Hills of South Dakota.

Scientists say the beetles are a natural thinning mechanism for uniformly aging forests but that fire is the next step in the regeneration process. Some experts say beetle-killed forests are not necessarily that much more susceptible to wildfire, but firefighters say fires burn hotter and are less predictable in areas of mass beetle-kill devastation.

Most everyone agrees that this epidemic has been exacerbated by warmer temperatures that allow beetle larvae to thrive, and that the landscape of the West is being dramatically altered as a result. Former vice president Al Gore will keynote a forum next month in Aspen on how global climate change is impacting the national forests of the American West.

Colorado Independent