May 10, 2013 11:50 AM UTC

Lazy Lobbyist's Cutting and Pasting Goes Awry

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• by: Colorado Pols

An example of the kind of mistake that well-paid legislative lobbyists should always avoid making, supplied in a veto request, dated this past Wednesday, that we were forwarded from the Colorado Municipal League to Gov. John Hickenlooper regarding the firefighter collective bargaining bill Senate Bill 13-025.

The CML's five-page letter recites the same boilerplate objections to this bill heard in testimony. Take note of the fact that Senate Bill 13-025 is an updated version of a similar firefighter collective bargaining bill from 2009, Senate Bill 09-180, which was vetoed by then-Gov. Bill Ritter. Proponents this year believe they have made enough changes to settle the objections Hickenlooper's office originally had to the bill.

Opponents, however, apparently haven't updated their talking points a bit.
On page 4 of the CML's veto request, dated May 8th of this year, the letter's "author" misses several references to 2009's Senate Bill 180. This means, of course, that the CML copied and pasted their 2009 veto request, then started "editing" to update it. We would assume, among other things, that the members of the CML are paying salaries in 2013 for 2013 work product, not a botched rehashing of four-year-old talking points. At least they remembered to change the Governor's name from "Ritter" to "Hickenlooper."

On the other hand, maybe the staff at CML work cheap.