Governor Hickenlooper, after months of his notorious hedging, has finally come out in support of the billion dollar tax increase tentatively known as Initiative 22.
But, in typical Hickenlooper fashion, he didn’t have the guts to just come out and say it. Instead he whispered it to a room of CEOs, forcing KDVR’s Eli Stokols to confirm the position of Colorado’s chief executive on the state’s bottom line via text message.
On Wednesday morning, speaking to a breakfast meeting of the Colorado Forum, a group of business leaders, Hickenlooper did what he’s been unable or unwilling to do when pressed by reporters on the looming ballot initiative that will ask voters to approve a two-tiered income tax hike this fall to generate $950 million for Colorado schools.
He came out with a clear position — in support of Initiative 22, which was just announced last month.
“The governor has been talking to business leaders about how transformative the new school finance law will be for Colorado kids,” said Alan Salazar, Hickenlooper’s chief strategist, in a text message to FOX31 confirming accounts from other sources who heard Hickenlooper’s remarks Wednesday.
Salazar called Hickenlooper’s support for the proposal, however tacit, “probably the worst kept secret in town.”
Worst kept secret? Why then was the president of the largest teachers union in the state, which has donated $250,000 already to the initiative, on Twitter asking where Hickenlooper was on the issue?
Of course, Hickenlooper was going to be forced to come out for the tax hike at some point, as he signed the bill that spent the money the tax hike will raise. Even for a contortionist like Hickenlooper, it would be too hard a sell to oppose money he’s already agreed to spend.
What’s notable here isn’t Hickenlooper’s support of the tax hike, which is politically tone deaf in its own right, but how his support became public.
It is likely to only feed the narrative that Hickenlooper isn’t capable of making tough decisions. But unlike Dunlap, Hickenlooper doesn’t get to grant himself a reprieve from leadership.
UPDATE: The AP’s Kristen Wyatt weighs in on Team Hick’s defense of his private announcement of supporting a billion dollar tax increase on the public:
Hick supporter to DP: “This is not just saying privately, ‘I like this’ …” Um, no. THAT LITERALLY IS JUST SAYING IT PRIVATELY.
— Kristen Wyatt (@APkristenwyatt) July 10, 2013
UPDATE 2: Revealing Politics has a video, of sorts, of Hickenlooper announcing his support for the billion dollar tax increase:
I support implementing consistent standards of evaluation in education. There is nothing in the video or your response to suggest that adopting common standards of evauation should be expensive — it seems kind of obvious that each state developing and using different standards multiplies the costs of doing so and makes it impossible to properly assess all students' performace. If there is some dark design or pitfall in Common Core Standards, the video fails to give any hint of what it might be, and your assumption that they represent some fantastic expense seems entirely counterintuitive.
It's the adoption of Common Core and the push throughout the state and nation. Hick knows our doesn't have the funds to implement it. Please watch a 3 min video on common core…http://vimeo.com/51933492
The problem with the ballot measure to fund schools is that despite Colorado's inarguably inadequate support for education, public secondary education in Colorado (and elsewhere) has no integrity, and too many Coloradans know it. When perhaps half of all high school diplomas are awarded to unqualified students, the system is on the verge of collapse; the proof lies in the gradual transformation of many State colleges into remediation centers. The desire to be inclusive and retain students who are failing to master academic skills has progressively eroded academic standards and debased the value of a public education to a catastrophic extent. The solution may lie in creating new institutions of socialization and vocational training that complement academic courses of instruction — now, the main alternative to traditional schools are juvenile detention centers and jails. A system offering academic, vocational, and public service work as more-or-less co-equal institutions that permits students the maximum opportunity to participate and move between all three is desperately needed.
A lack of competence in the administration of our schools (as opposed to instruction) and a determination to keep on doing what demonstrably is not working likely will doom the ballot measure. The public dialog about education is fixated on the wrong issues entirely — teachers are qualified, but their representatives are generally in bed with those maladministering education. The rhetoric coming from the ranks mostly consists of broad-brush indictments of standardized testing. While the chaos in the administration of our educational system has resulted in too much testing, the main onus on it is that it reveals the appalling failure of the system. Teachers have by and large meekly accepted the mistaken imposition of compensation based on the performance of their charges, despite the fact that most teachers are already qualified or highly qualified to teach their subjects, and this exacerbates teachers' hostility towards testing. As long as the educational establishment keeps emphasizing the retention of students and graduation from failing programs, prospects for restoring academic integrity to secondary education are essentially nil, and pushing for more funding of a broken system may well fail statewide, even if Denver just signed away $500,000,000 it doesn't have in commitments to the present administration of its own egregiously failing schools. People who support public education need to start singing a different tune, or this and future ballot measures to fund education will go down to the same ignominious defeat that Rollie Heath's Proposition 103 did two years ago.
Go east, old Lib.
Hick…Go back to Pennsylvania.. YOU, or your kind, are not wanted here!