September 02, 2009 06:39 PM UTC

Al White Delivers Straight Budget Talk To Constituents

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• by: Colorado Pols

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen examples of how to misuse the debate over Colorado’s deterioriating budget situation for all kinds of purposes–from opportunistic hypocrisy to old-school partisan grandstanding. There’s gubernatorial candidate (who occasionally styles himself “Senator”) Josh “Reject the Stimulus” Penry bemoaning cuts that affect his local district, while offering no suggestions for how to avoid them. We’ve seen Sen. Greg Brophy making widely panned, unserious proposals for the budget while Twittering red-meat obstructionist nonsense out of the other side of his mouth. As we’ve said a couple of times there’s an election around the corner, and some people see more advantage in being a problem than solving one. We get it.

For an example of a Republican who’s not playing cheap partisan games with this very real crisis, we turn, as we have before, to state Sen. Al White. As the Craig Daily Press reports today:

Colorado Sen. Al White, R-Hayden, said the best way to describe the state budget’s freefall is to compare it to a Shakespearean tragedy in three acts.

White ap pear ed at the Mof fat County Com mission meeting Tuesday to address local officials and residents.

The state government first cut about $800 million from the 2008-09 budget – which White called Act I.

Now that the state is in what White termed the second act of this tragedy, government officials have cut about $720 million from the 2009-10 budget and may cut more if the Sept. 21 revenue forecast predicts more dire days ahead.

That’s not the worst of it, though, White said.

Act III is when Hamlet “gets it in the gizzard,” he said, and the coming 2010-11 fiscal year is the state’s third act…

Budget cuts for the next fiscal year in 2010-11 will be equally painful, if not more so, White said.

He listed conservation easement tax credits for agricultural land, enterprise zone tax credits for businesses and school district funding as pots of money that could be sacrificed to balance the state budget.

All of those items are important to his constituents, White said, but he and other legislators may have no choice.

“I can’t just say I’m going to work on a budget that doesn’t hurt my district,” he said. “There’s pain, and it has to be shared equally.” [Pols emphasis]

We’ve said it countless times: if there was more of this kind of candor about the issues and less simple-minded obstruction and dogmatic grandstanding from Republicans, Colorado would elect a lot more Republicans. Unfortunately, Sen. White’s candor is, for too many of his colleagues (see first paragraph), what irritates them the most.