August 22, 2009 04:37 PM UTC

Greg Brophy Isn't Helping

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• by: Colorado Pols

Want to see what an elected official who doesn’t take their job seriously looks like? As the Denver Post reported yesterday:

A Republican state senator suggested Thursday that money now used for public schools could pump nearly $4 billion into highway construction in the future.

The proposal, from Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, came during a meeting of the Long-Term Fiscal Stability Commission, a special panel looking into lasting solutions for Colorado’s budget woes…

Amendment 23, passed by voters in 2000, requires that state funding for public schools increase every year by the rate of inflation plus 1 percent. After 2011, the 1 percent requirement falls off, and the amendment requires only inflationary increases each year.

“If you dedicate all of that money (the 1 percent portion) for the next 10 years,” transportation would see $3.8 billion by 2021, he said…

Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, said it was wrong to talk about redirecting Amendment 23 money because the commission had not yet discussed how education should be funded.

So here’s the first problem: Greg Brophy’s numbers are fiction. From what we understand, 1% of education funding over 10 years would amount to something a little north of half a billion, not “$3.8 billion.” Compare that to the state’s estimated additional transportation funding need of $2 billion per year, and even by Brophy’s orders-of-magnitude bogus numbers his ‘solution’ amounts to scarcely a drop in the bucket. It might gratify conservatives to propose turning Amendment 23’s hated mandate for education funding increases into a mandate for roads, but it’s not a real solution.

And then there’s the second problem. For those of us who follow the political underpinnings of this stuff, it’s the real problem. Reading this Denver Post article, you might reasonably get the impression that Brophy was, you know, participating in the Fiscal Stability Commission in a meaningful, good-faith effort. We might find his proposal technically or factually wanting, but we’d have to at least give Brophy credit for showing up to work on a solution. After all, this is the biggest crisis our state has faced in decades.

But then we checked Brophy’s Twitter feed–here’s what he was really interested in talking about Thursday morning:

Senator Morse wants create the Santa Claus wish list for state government first and then talk about how to fund it. #redco

Sen Morse rejects the notion that the Fisc Stab Comm should discuss the core functions of government. #redco

WSJ – appliance makers are waiting for a cash for coffee makers program. Cash for couches coming too? #tcot

my word, John Morse is a real collectivist. The Fiscal Stability Commission is meeting again in 0112 at the Cap. #redco

The conservatives own the conversation on the Fisc Stab Comm. We have forced the left to talk about the core functions of government #redco

Gov Ritter’s budget guy never once mentioned the need for a rainy day fund #redco

Gov’s budget guy: solution to long term fiscal stability is – get rid of TABOR #redco

So, ah, does that read like somebody making an honest attempt at engagement…to you? Because to us it reads like a disingenuous jerk feeding partisan belligerence to his Twitter followers while making unserious, self-serving “proposals” to the Fiscal Stability Commission–yet somehow getting his day reported in the news as a “good-faith effort.”

Much like Cory Gardner’s underreported “birther” buffoonery, there’s a media-enabled gap between image and distasteful reality with some of these people that, in our opinion, needs closing.