Patience is wearing thin at the Capitol around the budget battle being waged over the state’s air quality division, which Republicans have targeted as the main office prepping the ground for implementation the Obama administration’s carbon-slashing Clean Power Plan.

Gov. John Hickenlooper has argued that the division’s work is vital to state businesses and he is adamant about wanting to keep it out of the line of fire tied to partisan clashing over the state budget and to the future of the energy sector in the era of climate change.

He has not been successful so far and the strain is showing.

As part of a national strategy, Republicans in Colorado have worked to slow implementation of the EPA-formulated plan with public relations campaigns, lawsuits and legislative proposals. Citing a stay on the plan issued by the U.S. Supreme Court until litigation wraps up, Republican leaders at the General Assembly have argued the state is wasting resources preparing to hit federal carbon-reduction targets that may never go into effect.

They have asked for a number. They want to know what the department of health and environment is spending on the Plan. In return, they have received a spectrum of numbers, a figure that keeps changing. They say it sure looks like the department is dodging. The department and Hickenlooper say that’s because the Republicans are asking the wrong question.

In a new conference Tuesday, Hickenlooper talked frankly and at length about the issue. His comments drew a brief barbed response from Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, one of the leaders in the Legislature of opposition to the Clean Power Plan.

The governor

At one point, as the conversation spooled out and questions kept coming, Hickenlooper said, in effect, that the lens through which Republican lawmakers are viewing the work of the air quality division has been fogged by the fossil fuel lobby with which they have aligned themselves.

“Obviously, Republicans have real issues with the Clean Power Plan,” he said. “They have a lot of funding from people who support burning more coal. They want to see more activity in that regard.”

But Hickenlooper said the state (and the planet) is inexorably moving away from coal as an energy source. That movement won’t be stopped by defunding the air quality division.

“Somehow they feel (cutting the budget) is going to help us burn more coal,” he said. “I’m not quite sure how that calculation works because, regardless of how that plays out with those one or two positions, we are going to move toward cleaner air. Cleaner air, at least in a present world, is a position that requires you to have more wind, more solar, more renewables, replace more coal with natural gas. We’re a mile high. We’re going to continue to move in that direction.”

The governor reiterated that the air quality division is doing vital work that Colorado business depends upon, and so cutting funding for even two or three staffers is misguided:

“The air quality division doesn’t just work with energy-sector companies, he said. “We’re talking dry cleaners, breweries, all manner of things, and to get that tied up in a partisan issue I think seems is ridiculous.

“What I’m saying is, it’s one or two people and we’re setting up more rigorous (clean air) standards than we’re going to achieve with a Clean Power Plan. It has nothing to do with the Clean Power Plan…

“My point is, fighting over one or two positions when you’re really talking about stationary-source air quality seems the height of ridiculousness in terms of partisan politics. What we want to be looking at is, how do we get to cleaner air? This is not just particulates, not just the Clean Power Plan. It’s ozone.

“This state, we’re a mile high,” Hickenlooper said. “The same level of pollution causes more troubles at this altitude. So, have I ever varied from that commitment that we’re going to move toward cleaner air?” he asked the reporters sitting around the table in his office. “Our full intention is to get to, and in many cases exceed, what the goals are in the Clean Power Plan… So, (however the budget debate settles out), the focus of (health and environment department) and this state is to get to cleaner air in real time.

“Cleaner air is like the North Star. Our North Star in this state, given our altitude, has to be cleaner air. So, we’re focusing on constantly moving toward clean air. Now, within that, this is a moment where we can get to cleaner air without spending more money. Our goal is to get to much cleaner standards and probably achieve or exceed what’s in the Clean Power Plan but do so at the most adding 1 percent or 2 percent — essentially at inflation or below inflation for ratepayers. In other words, our goal here is to get cleaner air without really any negative impact to the ratepayer’s pocketbooks.”

The thing that is frustrating Republican efforts to pinpoint an amount of funding pegged to work on the Clean Power Plan, according to Hickenlooper, is the fact the work and the staffers doing the work throughout divisions at the health and environment department is weaved together.

“The work is being done in several different divisions in several different ways,” he said. “There’s a whole raft of pathways through which you get to cleaner air. If someone is working in one place and someone’s working in another place, it doesn’t make a difference in terms of getting to cleaner air. Again, that’s the North Star. However we get there, we have to keep our focus on that goal.

“The (staffers) are working and they have a pretty comprehensive work progress plan laid out and they work in teams on different things. It’s almost impossible to measure which parts go to (the Clean Power Plan). If you’re moving toward cleaner air anyway, and the Clean Power Plan wants you to go —

“If you’re working on the Colorado Plan, it’s slightly different but very similar, some ways more rigorous, some ways a little less rigorous — although I’m not sure how much less rigorous… than the Clean Power Plan. “So if they’re working on that (Colorado plans) is that also working on the Clean Power Plan?

“I think that the whole thing is ridiculous, to be perfectly blunt,” he said. “It’s like a shell game of who’s doing which work. We’re working toward clean air! That’s what we’re doing! That’s what the people want us to do.

“You know, we can get into semantic battles over this but it’s pretty straight forward: cleaner air at no additional cost.

If Republicans make the cut — which at post time stands at $365,000 — no one will likely be laid off. There simply will be vacancies at the department of health and environment that won’t be filled, Hickenlooper said.

“So we’ll have less people working on cleaner air, which I don’t think is a great idea. This is like our own little mini-version of Washington, which the nice thing is, if this is as bad as it gets here, it’s really not that bad.

The senator

Sonnenberg made his view — the dominant view of the Senate Republican caucus — known in a written statement distributed during debate on the budget.

“It’s bewildering that the governor seems prepared to go to the mat with us over this completely reasonable request for a little regulatory and fiscal restraint, given all the alarmist rhetoric he’s been using about the state’s alleged budget crisis,” he wrote. “His refusal t be reasonable, and (his) Obama-like disregard for the rule of law and democratic process is forcing us to use the power of the purse to protect taxpayers and ratepayers from runaway state and federal regulators.”

Republicans were taken aback somewhat by the governor’s implication that they had introduced Washington-style partisan politics into the debate.

“President Obama made this a ‘partisan’ issue when he imposed this radical plan on unwilling states by administrative decree without bothering to get approval of Congress. And the governor continues to make it partisan by moving forward on a venture the U.S. Supreme Court put on hold (and) without bothering to get approval of the people or General Assembly.”

—john@coloradostatesman.com