Joe Hanel, the very effective and prolific journalist from The Durango Herald is morphing his career. He wrapped up his run at the Herald with two articles about the 2014 session. First up, he reports that Four Corners legislators felt like the recent session accomplished much. Here’s an excerpt:
“I feel so much better than I did a year ago,” said Sen. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango. “Last year, I went home demoralized and wondering if it made any difference to be up here.”[…]
Fights over water rights returned to the stage this year, and Roberts was in the middle of most of them. She brought the Legislature a plan hatched by a Durango water engineer to limit the size of lawns in new suburban neighborhoods. It riled homebuilders and city governments, and eventually it was turned into a study – a common way for legislators to delay inconvenient legislation.
Roberts also pushed for the Legislature to have veto power over the Colorado Water Plan, which Gov. John Hickenlooper wants to have crafted by December. Legislators of both parties had complained Hickenlooper was bypassing them, and that the public at large knew very little of the water plan.
Although her bill was scaled back, it still requires hearings around the state in front of the Legislature’s water committee before the plan can be finished.
“We weren’t invited to the party,” Roberts said. “We had to crash the party, but we are now at the table.”[…]
Rep. Don Coram, R-Montrose, also noticed a change in tone from 2013, when pressure from party leaders led to a series of partisan votes.
“The lock-down mode wasn’t there this year, on either side,” Coram said…
Another bill, though, stands out as a statewide highlight of the 2014 session. It was a rural broadband bill that finally passed after four years of unsuccessful efforts. The bill converts part of the phone company’s subsidy for serving hard-to-reach customers into a grant fund to build high-speed Internet lines to unserved areas.
Last fall, Coram began crafting the bill with Club 20 and others on the Western Slope.
“The last couple years, that bill has failed because it was a top-down approach. This year, it was truly a grass-roots, bottom-up effort,” he said.
Here’s the link to Joe’s other final article. Here’s an excerpt:
Before this year, people around the Capitol knew Steve King as a rank-and-file Grand Junction Republican senator with perfect hair. This year, though, King stepped from his seat in the back row of the Senate to center stage with his single-minded advocacy of an aerial firefighting fleet. The passage of his bill to rent or buy firefighting aircraft ranks among the biggest achievements of the 2014 legislative session, which ended Wednesday…
The Legislature’s Democratic leaders entered the session in January without any of the flashy agenda items that characterized 2013, like gun safety, civil unions, elections reform or in-state tuition for kids without U.S. citizenship.
King stepped into that vacuum with his insistence that Colorado needed more airplanes and helicopters to fight wildfires. Gov. John Hickenlooper and legislative leaders had been lukewarm on the idea, citing the cost and questionable effectiveness of aerial firefighting.
Democratic Senate President Morgan Carroll praised King for his passion and signed on to his bill as a fellow sponsor.
“He has stuck with it and stuck with it and persuaded me it was the right thing to do,” Carroll said.
But everything really changed in March, when Hickenlooper’s top fire official, Paul Cooke, issued a report that recommended contracting for light air tankers and helicopters and buying spotter planes. King had wanted heavy tankers and helicopters, but he immediately embraced the report and changed his bill to follow its recommendations.
Hickenlooper was reluctant to cast King as the hero and said his administration started examining aerial firefighting in 2011.
“It wasn’t like we weren’t doing something. But Senator King definitely helped create a context where this was top of mind, where people were thinking about different alternative choices. In that sense, I think he was a valuable partner to have,” Hickenlooper said.
King, however, benefited from the same economic recovery that enabled the other big accomplishments of the 2014 session.
The $20 million cost of the aerial fleet is just a sliver of the big investments in education. An extra $110 million for K-12 schools begins to reverse about $1 billion in cuts since 2008. And the $100 million boost to colleges is a record, but it also does not restore deep cuts made during the recession.
I loved Joe’s adios on Twitter (Just the facts ma’am). I also thought that it was fitting that he used Twitter to let us all know about his new gig.
Today is Sine Die for #coleg, and also for my career in journalism. I'm going to be a writer at the Colorado Health Institute.
— Joe Hanel (@joehanel) May 7, 2014
Many thanks to the people of the @DurangoHerald, a little newspaper that roars so loud you can hear it across Colorado.
— Joe Hanel (@joehanel) May 7, 2014
It’s a bummer to see another Colorado water reporter move on. Good luck man!
Click here to browse through the Coyote Gulch posts attributed to The Durango Herald and Joe Hanel. Joe shows up on the older Coyote Gulch as well.