February 28, 2010 07:50 PM UTC

Cory Gardner Shafts Rural Voters--Again?

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Last Tuesday, we recapped some drama on the floor of the Colorado House the prior week, related to CD-4 candidate Cory Gardner and a vote to cut the state Agriculture Department. To briefly summarize, Republicans proposed a series of large cuts to most state departments instead of the specific priority-based cuts proposed by Democrats. All of their amendments failed, but not before the cut to the Agriculture Department became a political landmine, ultimately prevented only by a key vote from House Minority Leader Mike May to preserve the department’s funding.

There are allegations that Democrats “set up” Gardner to cast this vote against the Agriculture Department, which would logically be used against him later as a vote against the eastern plains farmers he’d like to represent in Congress–but after watching Minority Leader May (above) basically implore fellow Republicans to change their votes so as not to subject the Ag Department to a by-then singular cut, you can’t say Gardner wasn’t warned. Despite everything short of May walking over to Gardner and saying ‘change your vote, you tonedeaf moron,’ Gardner stuck to his vote to cut the Ag Department–responding to criticism by saying rather lamely “I believe we need to cut spending, even if it means starting in your back yard.”

So that didn’t go really well for Cory Gardner on the whole, but another vote by Gardner recently we think might have been even worse. There’s a large construction project in Aurora at the intersection of E-470 and I-70, and the developers were able to arrange preferential inclusion of agricultural land into an “urban renewal authority” with the city of Aurora: this was reportedly a deal whereby the developers would build a school for Aurora in exchange for this inclusion, estimated to be worth $60 million or more in tax savings.

Got that? A $60 million property tax break by artificially declaring farmland on the outskirts of Aurora an “urban renewal” area–in exchange for a school that will have to be subsidized by the rest of the state’s property taxes to operate. In essence, rural school districts would end up paying for this new Aurora school by backfilling the property tax revenue that would otherwise have. One of those who testified against letting this happen was former state Sen. Steve Johnson (R), now a Larimer County commissioner. A bad and abusive deal that, in particular, rural Colorado representatives would not hesitate to oppose, right?

Wrong. Cory Gardner not only voted against the bill (HB10-1107) that would have prevented this kind of fudging, he even voted against the “safety clause” that would have put the law into effect in time to affect this development in Aurora. We’ve not heard the explanation from Gardner yet for this vote, but we hope he comes up with something better for his rural constituents than “Aurora needed the money more than you do.”

Bottom line? We expected Cory Gardner to be a little smarter about putting himself into politically difficult situations this session than he has been. As a candidate for Congress, Gardner should have realized that his votes in the Colorado House would be subjected to more scrutiny than they have been in the past. Unfortunately for Gardner, he’s chugging ahead with the Republican Study Committee playbook he’s always used, making symbolic, politically counterproductive votes with seemingly little regard for the consequences for his congressional campaign. It’s odd because normally, one tries to do the opposite in that situation.

Democrats, meanwhile, are taking detailed notes.