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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
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Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
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Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
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(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
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(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
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CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
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CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
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(R) Jeff Crank*
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CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
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CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
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State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
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State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
February 02, 2010 09:29 AM UTC
18 Comments
The struggles of the working poor extend far beyond not having money.
That is the reason to return to court. Don’t be surprised at injunctive relief.
This really does stink. I’m glad to live in a community that has several food drives going most of the time and St. George’s Community Meal Program.
not one bit.
CBMS was near-universally loathed when it was introduced; the people who used it every day weren’t shy about saying it didn’t do what they needed it to do.
Easily one of the worst decisions from the Owens era.
I should know more about this. I was under the impression that the state doesn’t deal with food stamps, the counties do. How does the state oversee? foodstamps?
or legislative?
I mean who was running the store when CO bought whatever crappy system we bought.
Ritter continued down the same road (different people/consultants, same approach).
Establishing eligiblity?
Seems like any major retailer with gift cards could do the debit card part.
There was a description of the system’s problem out there after one audit that listed some pretty idiotic problems that cost a lot of time and effort.
Extra, unnecessary screens.
Not remembering information from screen to screen.
Slowness.
I’ve also heard complaints that it couldn’t track the information many counties actually used to help their customers.
CBMS (Colorado Benefits Management System) was mandated by the state, replacing a lot of local systems and hand calculations. The counties still do the processing and distribution of claims, but they do it using the state-mandated system.
my mother has worked for DHHS for several years and I remember when Owens teamed up with Ross Perot to buy this statewide system. My mother told me about how everyone with two functioning hemispheres could tell you that it was patently wasteful. I hear reports from her about how there are furloughs, layoffs, customer service phone lines that have never had any intention of having a live human being or even an answering machine on the other side. All of this in addition to an overpriced, clunky and eternally dysfunctional CBMS system. It’s pathetic. When I asked her about why they would do this, she said she thought Owens and Perot had nice deal to get Perot some tax dollars.
The free market doesn’t seem to work when Republicans are in charge. Hmm…
It’s incredible that when the financial system collapsed the banks were handed over hundreds of billions of dollars in a matter of days after filling out a one page application.
David, I remember the state computer system was in a disarray when Ritter got into office with a multitude of dysfunctional and overlapping systems. Ritter appointed some type of IT czar to get the thing cleaned up. Being an IT guy yourself, what was the result or progress (if any) of that effort?
The IT team Ritter brought in combined arrogance and ineptitude. They’re not morons but from what I’ve seen they know one way to approach IT and they stick with that.
To put it another way, aside from consolidation, have they brought about any substantive change? I don’t think they have.
I don’t know the specifics in here, just what’s reported in the news. So I’m making some assumptions here. But here’s my take.
1) Just as Robert Gates has fired incompetent generals, the top IT people should be let go. Incompetence here is costing the state hundreds of millions, people are going hungry, and after 3 years they still don’t have it working.
2) I would put out a challenge like this http://www.coloradopols.com/di… I know of three different companies here in Colorado (can’t speak to how good they are) that not only would do this, but who have tried to offer this to OIT – and OIT refused to even look at their proposals.
I do know that continuing the present course just means more hundreds of millions down the rathole and people continuing to go hungry.
but the Trails Project had what should have been a large advantage, if nearly everything else hadn’t been handled poorly. Trails started with case management software that had been developed for another state – New Hampshire, I believe. Because federal funding was used to cover part of the cost of these projects (the feds wanted every state to more fully automate child welfare practice so that the feds could get more complete and uniform data from around the country), the software was not proprietary and was available to any state that wanted to modify it for their use.
The devil was in the details, of course – New Hampshire is not only a small state but its social/human services organizational structure was not similar, and child welfare practice was also quite different. So the endless battles to a great extent played out this way: The private vendor wanted to make as few changes to the software as possible, to minimize their costs; and the state wanted to extensively redesign the software to better support casework in Colorado. The rest was a bloody (almost) battle over a period of years, to try to bring those two goals as close together as possible.
The moral to that part of the story is, both sides needed to do a much better job upfront, determing their needs and their bottom lines.
Arrogance, ineptitude, and tunnel vision.
Sounds like a page out of the Bush administration’s record, ala Katrina and not one but two incompetantly prosecuted wars.
about the tremendous waste of public dollars on a series of state (executive branch) software development projects. I worked on the Colorado Trails Project from late 1997 until I retired from the state in 2002 – that’s the child welfare/youth corrections case management software program that had tremendous cost overruns and delays. Many of us on the Trails Project saw so much of what went wrong from the beginning – multiple failures to hold the private company accountable to system specs, inadequate or failed testing, etc, etc.
Here’s an interesting CBMS system development anecdote (Colo Benefits Management System – an automated application and approval system for the assistance payments side of human services – food assistance, Medicaid and TANF – Temporary Aid to Needy Families): At the time it was being developed and subsequently rolled out, there was a technology commission of high-level state folks who met periodically to review the status of such projects. The minutes of the commission’s meeting right before the CBMS rollout basically stated the testing had gone fine, and it was ready for statewide implementation. And that was how many years ago – 7? 8?
I am not a technical person (was a child welfare subject matter expert on the Trails Project) but I can follow the software development process pretty well after my years of experience. A successful software project begins with a successful system specs development process, AND begins with a knowledgable management team that knows when to say yes to the vendor, and when to say no.
Revenue just “successfully” rolled out the second phase of their new program. I think success is defined as turning the on/off mode switch to the on position. Just one example of what this wonderful machine does: In the billing system if you have more than one outstanding notice with the state the billing system is incapable of properly routing your payment. If you want to pay bill 2 it will apply your payment to bill 1 even if bill 1 is being protested and is so marked. Here’s the fun part. You think you have paid off bill 2. In 30 days you receive a Notice of Final Determination that says if you want to dispute this now you have to go to court. The AG is wasting a lot of time dealing with these bogus court cases. But there is no problem here, move along.