To Trista and Ryan
Look, this isn’t personal. NBC‘s “The Bachelorette” Trista Sutter and her husband Ryan Sutter, the firefighter from Vail, are probably lovely people. It’s just that the Colorado Office of Economic Development gave the producers of their TV show $200,000 in rebates, according to The Denver Post, from an already thin state budget.
In case you don’t know who Trista and Ryan Sutter are, let us take you back to the very beginning of “The Bachelor”. Trista was the runner up in the first season of “The Bachelor” and became the star of “The Bachelorette” the next season. She ended up marrying her husband, Ryan, on national TV. They might be the only couple from “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” that remain together. Actually, we have no idea.
Nonetheless, here we are with Trista and Ryan as they film their experience buying and renovating a home in Vail on a show called “Rocky Mountain Reno”. For the $200,000 that the OED approved, at least the commission asked that there be a prescribed mention of Colorado throughout the series, but otherwise, it doesn’t seem like we got much out of the deal.
“Rocky Mountain Reno” certainly is not be as bad as the movie “Dinonauts“. But, when the Governor is touring the state asking for end-runs on TABOR at the same time his administration is green-lighting this type of spending, it’s hard to take his budget complaints seriously.