October 01, 2010 04:40 AM UTC

It's Easy to Trip Up Tipton

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• by: Colorado Pols

Funny stuff, from the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby:

During this year’s legislative session, Rep. Ed Vigil, D-Alamosa, carried a bill to change the state designation for Mineral County. That desigation, which only the Legislature can set, determines, among other things, the pay scale for elected officials…

Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, was one of those who not only opposed the measure, he spoke out against it.

Thing is, though, Tipton had done the same thing for Montezuma County a year earlier.

When asked about it by The Daily Senitinel for a story last week on reversals many of the candidates for various state and federal offices have made, Tipton said he carried his bill to allow the county to increase the number of people on its police force.

But in numerous stories in the Durango Herald during the 2009 session, Capitol reporter Joe Hanel wrote that the bill was designed to increase salaries for county commissioners and other elected officials in Montezuma County.

And, of course, the biggest reason for Scott Tipton to oppose something so very similar to what he’d yourself sponsored a year earlier–you guessed it! Running for Congress. If this seems awfully similar to Nancy Spence bemoaning cuts to the homestead exemption, after she voted to do the same thing when Republicans were in charge…well, yeah. It pretty much is.

In other CD-3 news, Rep. John Salazar’s campaign has spent the last day and a half pushing back on a Sentinel editorial taking him to task for an ad running against Tipton. The ad makes a couple of claims that are a little complicated to back up, like associating Tipton’s time on the board of Vectra Bank with bailout money the bank received after Tipton left the board. Fair enough, says the Salazar campaign, but Tipton should stop claiming on the campaign trail that Salazar voted for TARP bailouts at all–he didn’t. What’s more, weren’t decisions made in the happy-go-lucky early 2000s, when Tipton was on that bank’s board, why these banks needed to be bailed out?

You be the judge on that one. We think the Sentinel does a good job calling the plays overall, but if they’re going to get this picky, they really ought to ask Tipton about karate-chopping the federal government “in half,” or maybe not, or maybe so after all–talk about “campaign nonsense.”