It took a few extra days, but Colorado budget writers have a spending plan, and the debate over it will be lengthy.

And while lawmakers are in overdrive with a little over a month left in the session, one county has said enough to all the state statutes and is pushing to do something that no other Colorado County has done in a while.

There's also pushback from local election officials amidst proposed changes to how we all vote.

Coloradans are engaged, as are the four behind me.

So let's get started with this week's Colorado Inside Out.

Hi everyone.

I'm Kyle Dyer.

Let me get right to introducing you to this week's insider panel.

We have Patti Calhoun, founder and editor of Westword, Eric Schneiderman, columnist for Color of Politics and the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazette, Alton Dillard, principal consultant at the Dillard Group and senior advisor to the firm of Rockford Gray.

And Adam Berg, Senior Policy Advisor at Foster Graham Law Firm.

There are about 40 days left ish in the legislative session, and next week, the state Senate will start looking at the budget.

Took some extra time to be drawn up this year because of its complexity.

Controversial gun measures also move through the legislature this week and the Douglas County sheriff was one of the many who testified against one of the bills, saying it's in violation of our Second Amendment rights.

And this week, his county announced that its desire to move to home rule status so that it can make its own decisions and not have to follow state statutes.

Patty, it's been a big week Well, let's say the budget did make one good investment.

The Senate so far that we just got the Sundance Film Festival going to Boulder.

We have the legislature did vote for subsidies that made it more attractive than, say, Cincinnati, because you know how stars love going to Cincinnati.

we will have the Sundance Film Festival in Colorado.

That's a win for the legislature this year.

The gun bill, which we are already hearing is going to be challenged in court.

If Polis signs it, which he is, it's assumed he will.

I'm not sure.

Will Douglas County be a loss or a win?

This is like when we had all the counties of Colorado up north, Weld County and some of the others that wanted to secede.

Douglas County kind of wants to be its own little fiefdom right now.

They don't want to obey the state rules.

They don't have their own charter like Weld County.

So they're going to have to pass their own charter in order to get out from under the state's thumb.

A couple of years ago, their own county attorney recommended against it, said it was against the law, but they're going forward anyway.

They're going to write a new charter.

They're going to take it to the voters in November.

Who knows?

We could have our own little kingdom of Douglas County.

There's a whole lot to unpack here, Kyle.

There's the budget, there's the gun debate on the budget front.

I mean, they're looking to cut 1.2 or nearly $1.3 billion of money.

That is real coin in a state like Colorado.

I don't know how they're going to do it.

Obviously, they thought they ought to go ahead and do this subsidy to Sundance.

And I suspect that may have one degree less enthusiasm than Patty, There is the bait or a discussion at least to be had.

I don't really see being had sufficiently about how Colorado did get into this financial predicament.

Yes, there's some national trends.

Yes, there's an economic slowdown, but there needs to be some dissection also of how much of this is self-inflicted, how much of it was growth of state government growth of state bureaucracy, how much of it was Corbett dollars And just one last note.

The notion I'm no fan of can do grab for a legislator from Colorado Springs, but the notion that he can't have a Second Amendment sticker on his computer.

Give me a break.

I mean, the notion that that is offensive.

So what if it's offensive?

Offensive does not preclude the First Amendment.

I want to talk about the home rule bill a piece because I worked for a home rule, city and county.

So just to try to put sort of a, you know, human face on this, it does give a local government power to sort of, you know, dictate their own set up.

So here's a couple of examples.

In Denver, we did not have an elected clerk and recorder until 2007 because of Denver's home rule charter.

They actually had an election commission that was two elected commissioners and an appointed clerk and recorder.

Another example of how home rule can make someone different is in Denver.

The sheriffs do not have arrest power.

The Denver Police Department does, but the sheriffs do not, their custodial transport, etc.. And so people ask why does Denver's city and county have both a police department and a sheriff's department and have a sheriff's department with no arrest power?

So that's sort of an example of how you can tailor your local government's needs using home rule authority.

Okay.

All right.

And Adam.

I think the budget this year is fascinating.

You know, that $1.2 billion shortfall.

I want be clear, this is not the COVID shortfall that we saw.

You know, it's almost a quarter of that, but it's still a big deal.

And they're talking about cutting various serious things like cutting free meals for schoolchildren.

That's a decision that lawmakers are going to have to make.

Interesting thing about the budget, though, it is the one constitutional obligation lawmakers have is to pass a balanced budget.

So the other 500 plus pieces of legislation are extracurricular in some ways.

Some of them are programmatic and making changes to existing programs.

Some of them are new.

But we're going to get a lot more bills coming into next year.

The one thing I constantly worry about is unfunded mandates, whether it is on institutions of higher education or local governments, where lawmakers say, Hey, we want you to implement X, Y or Z and we're not going to give you funding.

And much like the state, local governments and institutions are hurting right now and they're worried about what's happening at the federal level.

So I would caution lawmakers when they're thinking about the budget, you know, what are the things we need to have and whether it's things we want to have and trying to differentiate the two.

Let's talk about the use of messaging apps and private group chats to convene government business world of Trump administration officials using the messaging app signal to discuss a military operation came out just days after the report that here in Denver, the Johnson administration had been using signal as well to discuss the handling of illegal immigrants coming into the city.

So I'm going to start with you, Eric.

We'll get to the local piece.

But on the national level, you don't know where to laugh or cry or some version of both.

I mean, obviously this news has taken the country and in some respects the world by storm.

The irresponsibility of it is stunning.

And it's almost like the juvenile immaturity of it to read some of these texts.

And let's say, yes, it was on signal, but basically it was a text exchange.

And you know, this early in an administration, this becomes definitional.

on the local level.

I don't think there was the degree of malice and nor certainly the degree of responsibility in terms of what Mike Johnston and his team were doing around migrant issues.

That doesn't mean it wasn't still wrong.

It's not a violation of open records laws.

Government needs to be conducted in the public.

The public has a right to know.

Transparency has value, and hopefully Johnston and his team have learned their lesson.

My suspicion is they have.

Often, yes.

And at the federal level, as a communications guy, I find how they're handling that to be fascinating watching how everyone has doubled down to Eric's point on the defense of this or, you know, it's a mistake.

But then, of course, you also have the people now on the other side of the aisle calling for resignations of people who were not going anywhere.

So everyone needs to get over themselves.

They're localizing it to the Johnston thing.

I found their messaging to be a little interesting also because they were saying, well, we had to kind of take this discussion off line because of the current environment and the threats by Trump, etc., etc.

And I'm like, why weren't we just a few months ago talking about meeting at the city limits and throwing hands?

So you're either going to be in the resistance or you're not.

You can't have it both ways.

And then as I also mentioned in the run up to this show, this has been an issue at the state house.

So to echo Eric, government needs to take place in the sunshine and this is just yet another example of that sunshine being removed.

I think there's a lot of viewers who are hearing about signals for the first time.

I had never heard of it.

You know, and I think it's a lot of people the reality is it was it's, you know, over ten years old now, 2014, 70 million users worldwide, having worked for several local governments, some other entities, I can tell you they're using signal.

It's becoming increasingly common practice.

I think there's a lot of concern both at the local and national level around this because there's questions about even this exchange at the federal level violating things like the Espionage Act and disclosing information that should probably the general public should not be privy to.

And whether or not that's responsible.

I think if I'm as a constituent, it is concerning that these decisions that some of these conversations are happening behind closed doors.

There's other scenarios where signal has been used in the Ukraine conflict to keep information privy from Russians and Russian spies who may be trying to track information.

So there's times where it could be something useful.

The question is, is it government's responsibility to use apps like this, especially at the federal level when they have secure technology that they can use that's more secure than signal private networks, those sorts of things.

And instead they go and choose to do something like this.

Senator Bennett and Congressman Crow were very outspoken in those hearings this week about all this padding.

The thing is, if you're going to be sneaky and not be transparent, you should at least be competent.

So the fact that the feds you put on an editor of The Atlantic, the editor of The Atlantic, we're not talking about some fly by night blog.

We're not talking about something that doesn't understand journalism and ethics.

I mean, they could have blown it right away as soon as they found out about the war.

You know, the plan that clearly was an aggressive, aggressive on our part.

They kept quiet until it was over.

They realized this was indeed true.

And you've got to imagine what it was like for Goldberg.

Like, I am now on a top secret signal incompetence sneakiness by the government.

So what the Atlantic did was right.

I think that they are now sharing what was out there is right.

They are not causing problems with our national security.

The fact that the Trump administration is now spanking journalists for their incompetence is really horrifying.

Good for Bennett, good for crow.

They are really going out there on this.

All right.

President Trump signed this week an executive order to overhaul the way we vote in this country.

And Doege has been told to review how states are maintaining their data regarding who is signed up to vote.

The administration is determined to keep non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

Alton, you with the city and county of Denver's election department for, I don't know, 15, 16 years when you heard this news and Denver has done so much to make voting accessible to all.

What are you anticipating?

What are you thinking?

Well, I'm thinking a few things.

One, elections are not federalized.

So the president has very limited jurisdiction in this.

So that's the first thing that came to mind.

And then the other part is this boogeyman of non-citizens voting and voter fraud.

No one is saying that it doesn't occur from time to time, but it is fair that out and prosecuted.

That's the part of the narrative that keeps getting lost.

Back to the federal piece.

Remember, this Election Assistance Commission was one of the things that came out of the Help America Vote Act, which grew out of Florida 2000.

And so elections are a 50 state patchwork.

And here in Colorado and a lot of other states, there's actually protect the views of United States Postal Service data in order to try to keep your voter rolls clean.

The other thing I'm concerned about is the effect on our military voters.

Military voters have an eight day window post election to be able to get their ballots back to their election office.

So if we somehow change that, where all ballots have to be in the door by Election Day, that's going to disenfranchize the people fighting for this very right that we are trying to protect.

Good point, Adam.

I think it it's hilarious when you hear republicans or president trump talk about this, you would think people are lined up out the door wanting to vote.

You know, I don't know if he's seen our our election numbers is pretty abysmal.

Our turnout numbers across the United States.

And I think we have to keep that in mind.

As Alton said, you know, the Constitution does not give any explicit authority to the president around these issues.

This is really something that comes at the end of data federalism and making allowing states to make decisions about what is best for their constituencies.

But we have seen in recent years the Supreme Court, who is increasingly punting these decisions to the state, dwindling down things like the Voting Rights Act and other things, and we have seen states in response create make it more difficult for residents to vote.

I will tell you what this would not do, even though I think it's illegal, it would not prevent this broad, you know, idea that that illegal people are voting, but it would disenfranchize millions of people who have a right to vote in this country.

All right, Patty.

It's ironic that back, what 2016 Donald Trump said Colorado was rigged.

2020.

We have the election deniers come out after the 2020 election.

All the investigation that was done, all the checking, I mean, all and probably knows the numbers, but how very, very few violations there were and probably fewer than other elections going forward.

Now, we have this administration having won the 2024 election and we still are having this boogeyman.

The fact that he may not be constitutionally able to go throw a wrench in voting isn't going to stop Donald Trump and it isn't going to stop Elon Musk.

We will hope the courts stop it.

I would really hate to see Elon Musk walk into the Colorado secretary of state's office someday and take on Janet Griswald.

That will be a good fight.

But in general, this is not a problem we've seen over and over that it is not a problem.

And they have to remember, the Republicans won this last election.

Where are the deniers now?

there's essentially no one out there who wants non-citizens voting or wants people voting multiple times or fraudulently or whatever.

But we have a system, as AlterNet very well pointed out, of local control in this country.

Elections are not federalized in that sense.

There are 50 election processes in 50 states.

We need to respect that the Republic can party used to be at the forefront of advocating for local control.

Somehow in this MAGA world that has gone out the window because now everything that needs to be centralized under our great and Dear leader, the notion of voter I.D.

at some point, I don't think it's necessary.

I'm not going to die on that particular cross.

I'm getting on an airplane and a couple of hours after we tape here, I'm going to have to show I.D.

at the airport.

I'm not necessarily opposed to notion of voter I.D., but it needs to address a specific problem and it needs to be multiple forms of I.D.

conveniently accessed, not just passports or whatever, particularly in an era where passport offices are closing and everything else that's going on at the federal level.

As many as 15 people have died outside in Denver this month.

Let's pray that number does not go up in the coming days before we finish March.

Many test results are still out there, but many of these are assumed to be overdose.

Our city has a problem.

The city government is pulling together some money to grant organizations, some resources so that they can help those who to prevent overdoses or to help people going through mental health issues.

And I'm going to start with you on this one.

Yeah, I'd love to sort of frame this issue for for viewers.

So in 2023, approximately 48.5 million Americans, age 12 years or older, experienced a substance use disorder in the past year.

That's about 17% of the population.

I would estimate it's likely higher of people who are either unwilling or unable to disclose that.

Colorado specific the overdose rate increase from 16.1 per 100,000 residents in 2011 to 31.4 per 100,000 residents in 2021, almost double.

A 2019 study ranked Colorado ninth in the U.S. for substance abuse rates and first for the percent of individuals needing but not receiving treatment.

Wow.

Why?

I think all this is important is April is actually Alcohol Awareness Month.

Coming up, something we'll be talking about at some point, I'm sure.

And when we talk about these issues, we often criminalize the person as opposed to criminalizing the substance.

Addiction, for many is not a choice.

I myself am in recovery.

Coming up on three years in May, and I know how difficult it can be to get sober.

And I had every resource available to me, you know, loving parents, good job, great employer.

So I cannot imagine someone who is who is on the street and when their only option or the only thing they feel they have in their life is a substance, they're going to turn to it.

And sadly, fentanyl has become more and more prominent.

And I think that's what we're seeing here in Denver.

And what's what's really alarming is we're seeing it.

This is not downtown, just downtown.

This is not that stereotypical.

Someone in the corner at a store overdosing.

If you look at the map of where these deaths are, they are all over Denver.

So people who need help, who need to go somewhere and find someone who can help them are just dying where they are.

So that's one of the things we have to remember.

You cannot assume everyone's going to fit a stereotype.

The other thing we have to remember is we're about to see big federal cuts, hundred and 30 million in money, some of which would have gone to programs that are helping people with substance abuse.

So Denver's going to find some money.

I'm assuming Colorado will have to figure out where to get some of this money to make sure there's help out there.

But it's going to get tougher.

Adam is such a good and important voice on this subject.

You framed the question, Kyle, as our city has problems.

Indeed, it does have problems.

I know our mayor and others are running around talking about a vibrant Denver, and we can only hope that is purely aspirational.

That is not a word that describes the Denver that most of us live in these days.

Just yesterday, I happened to stop by a Walgreens store to pick up a couple of items in packing for a trip.

Everything shave cream is behind lock and key.

The sales clerk on the floor doesn't have the key.

They have to go get a manager.

And finally I get frustrated with the whole thing.

Walk out to find four Denver police cars in the parking lot surrounding another vehicle.

They're clearly going through it for drugs.

The two people in that vehicle are both on the ground cuffed.

I mean, this is life in Denver these days.

It is a bad scene out there.

Every one of these deaths is a tragedy.

We cannot normalize outdoor deaths.

when you have people dying outside and then you've got the DPD, they say, you know, outdoor death investigation, they will update if it becomes a homicide of all the ones that you mentioned, none of those have been updated that way.

But there's also a lag cause in how long it takes to get toxicology back.

So the people who I do know who operate in the harm reduction space, I'm sure would say there's either a bad batch or something circulating, a stronger batch or something.

Certainly leading a more dangerous batch or something circulating.

And the communications hat that I put on, I just shout it out.

The Denver Police Department for their transparency and their willingness to engage with the do better Denver account.

But after we got the outdoor death, about 13 or 14, they quit responding.

And I was like, and I asked this on myself.

It's like, are they bunkering down because we've now hit double digits for the month.

So something's got to be done.

But we have to start calling a spade a spade when it comes to some of these issues.

It's awful.

It's awful.

All right.

Thank you all for sharing.

Now let's go down the line and talk about some of the highs and the lows we have seen this week.

We'll start on a low note and with Pattie.

Where has Donald Trump been for the last five years that all of a sudden he discovered there is a portrait in the state capital that doesn't make him look great.

So his fit this week over this, allegedly because it was Jared Polis, this who wasn't even involved in this.

Republicans paid for that portrait that was put up in 2019.

Trump would have been better off getting his staff off signal and not worrying about his portrait in Colorado.

Okay.

All right, Eric, well said.

I'm all for the right of assembly, the right to protest the First Amendment, all of the above.

But when teachers, whether it's in Denver or in multiple districts up and down the front range, take a day off of work and shut down classes, when you can do do your protesting on your own time, not on the public's time and mainly not on the children's time.

The notion that is so often repeated of it's all about the kids.

We're only in it for the kids.

It's hypocritical that demonstrated that hypocrisy often.

And of course mine is the fact that the clock struck midnight for Cinderella CSU because Derek Queen, who they say is an NBA prospect, is well groomed for the NBA because he traveled.

here we go.

Derek traveled.

You do not get a gather step.

And three more steps.

That is a travel.

I understand, not wanting to have a whistle dictate the outcome of a game, but that was a traveling violation and it was just rough to see CSU's Cinderella run.

And that way it was to my team, which I'm noting.

You're wearing our school color.

You're wearing Maryland red today.

We'll talk later.

We'll talk.

You to You brought it up to.

You.

All right, Adam.

I'm going to go back to the Capitals.

Okay.

So for the first time in a very long time, Medicaid and health care expenses are more expensive than education, K-12 education, hospitals.

Who were the heroes of the pandemic are once again the punching bags for lawmakers in the midst of likely a lot of federal cuts coming down.

There are several pieces of legislation that are going to have a serious impact on our hospital network, largely our rural hospital network.

So I would encourage people to keep an eye on those issues.

Okay.

Thank you, Patty.

Something good?

Well, it's unfortunate that our something good is for people we've lost in Denver, but it's been a bad run lately.

And we lost Brian Vogt, who was most recently the head of the Denver Botanic Gardens.

But he'd been a big a really good leader before that.

He worked for the South Metro Chamber of Commerce.

Three different cabinet positions for Owens, including Office of Economic Development, where he really kind of save the Colorado Council on the Arts by moving it under economic development.

And then for an amazing last chapter 17 years at the Denver Botanic Gardens, where he really blossomed, he took this aging institution and made it young and indeed vibrant.

So it's a real loss to Denver.

It sure is.

I'm going to go with both sad news and happy news on the sad side.

Patty, hit it with Brian Vogt.

I think somebody else here will talk about Tom Clark, the longtime head of economic development for the Denver Chamber, both supremely accomplished people, but more importantly than their accomplishments, just fundamentally good human beings.

And they will both be missed on the happy new side.

Also wonderful.

My son Clark is getting married this weekend and that will be fabulous.

You are smiling ear to ear when you walked in today.

All right.

And mine's kind of a low, high, low for the world of media, but high for these two people.

Charles Ashby, who recently retired from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, and Carol McKinley, who I got a chance to work with for years.

She was with KOAT.

She is also with Fox National and most recently with the Gazette.

As a public information officer.

We had just the best relationship because she understood that I worked in government and so there would be times I'd have to run down my elected official or a department manager or a subject matter expert to be able to get her the answer that she needed.

And she always understood that I was never stalling her and she would give me the time to be able to get her good information for reporting.

So wishing both of them the best in their well-earned retirement.

That's wonderful.

Thanks for mentioning.

And Adam.

As Eric, you know, we lost Tom Clark the other week.

And, you know, Tom was my mentors mentor.

There's a reason we call him the godfather of regionalism in economic development.

As a former chamber employee, he's someone I always looked up to.

I remember meeting Tom and he told me governments are about power and economies are about collaboration, and it is something that has stuck with me.

You know, we lost him at a very young age, 75.

He had a progressive form of dementia by his footprints.

Both he and Brian is something that will not soon be forgotten here in Denver and beyond.

My high this week is this panel.

And you mentioned the word collaboration.

Adam, before we get together every week to hash things out, there is a very busy conversation going daily amongst everyone who sits here at this table, everyone suggesting ideas for the conversation or updates the stories that we're following.

I am so very grateful for their awareness to what is going on around us and for the time they take to prepare for this show.

When news stories are flying at us at warp speed and many of them are really divisive, I am so grateful for our group of insiders who just don't run with the headlines, but they really do kind of peel away to get the perspectives and the meaning and the impact for people here in Colorado.

So thank you.

These last many weeks have been a lot in March.

So thank you very much.

And thank you for watching.

We so appreciate or listening to our podcast on Spotify and Apple.

I am Kyle Darrah, I will see you next week here on PBS 12.

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