Beauprez Loves Him Some Feet

by: Colorado Pols

Wed Feb 11, 2009 at 10:23:33 AM MST

...BEAUPREZ: And then in our 9 o'clock hour we're gonna be joined by Senator Mike Kopp, who is fightin' the demons at the state legislature -- the demons bein' the governor's office and the Democrat leadership, who's scramblin' around trying to find the dough to fill the budget deficit hole, and guess what -- they're raiding workmen's compensation funds again. [Pols emphasis]

...BEAUPREZ: I was a little taken aback, maybe more than a little taken aback, by some headlines recently that gave the governor credit for finding 600-plus million of cuts. And when I read the article, I pretty well understood that two out of three dollars that he was gettin' credit for cutting was really just by raiding some other funds within the state. Senator Kopp is tryin' to address one of those problems.

...BEAUPREZ: And we almost got there twice in recent history, as I understand it.

KOPP: Well, we were just literally a few months away in the last downturn from those funds bein' actuarially sound, and --

BEAUPREZ: Back in '02 right?

KOPP: Yeah, right. And actually, it would have -- we wouldn't have had to put any more money into it. The employers in the state of Colorado would have had a pretty significant tax cut at that point. But they were cleaned out. They were raided. The polite way of putting it is, those funds were transferred. But they were raided.

...BEAUPREZ: And to be fair, Bill Owens was governor then, and he found himself between a rock and a hard place, and as I recall, he took an enormous amount of heat and expended considerable political capital [Pols emphasis] from the business community for doin' just that. But we had no reserves, no rainy day funds, no place to go, did we?

Yikes! That was a close call, wasn't it? Fortunately for "Both Ways Bob"...oh, we appear to have let our punchline slip prematurely.