The Colorado House state affairs committee voted 6-2 to approve the nomination of Donna Lynne for lieutenant governor on Wednesday.

The hearing went smoothly. Lynne was quick with thoughtful responses to questions. She told jokes that drew laughs. She was familiar with the concerns of committee members because she had met with them individually before Wednesday to have those conversations.

Lynne won support from the five Democratic members of the committee and from Republican Rep. Cole Wist from Centennial.

She failed to win over Republican Reps. Patrick Neville from Castle Rock and Tim Leonard from Evergreen, who didn’t offer explanations during the hearing for their dissenting votes.

Neville and Leonard later told The Colorado Statesman it was Lynne’s vision of government they found lacking — mainly how she approached the state’s singular regime of taxing and spending governed by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

Their opposition suggests Lynne’s road to confirmation may yet grow bumpy. Over the next two weeks, she has to win majority votes in the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate.

“I really like the governor’s idea of appointing a chief operating officer for the state, someone to make the government run more like a business — better, faster, cheaper,” said Leonard. “I just don’t think that Lynne is the person. She’s a very nice person. I met her and I like her. But she’s not a private-sector person. She spent 20 years in government and 20 years in health care, and I think health care is basically an arm of the government — it relies on funding and it’s not competitive. Her work (for the Kaiser Foundation) is nonprofit. That’s not the same as working for a private-sector company.”

A little more than a month ago, when Gov. John Hickenlooper announced Lynne as his choice to replace popular departing Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, he said she would act as Chief Operating Officer for the state. It would be Lynne’s job to implement Hickenlooper’s vision of government — to get into the works and make the state departments operate effective and lean. Hickenlooper touted her experience in the private and public sectors.

Lynne directs an $8 billion budget and oversees 16,000 employees as vice president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals. She also served in top positions in the administrations of Republican and Democratic mayors of New York City.

“It’s her health care focus, too. That concerned me,” said Leonard. “She supports the drive to expand Medicaid in Colorado, which is already breaking the state budget. That approach puts her at odds with what I think our goals should be.”

He also said he disagreed with Lynne’s approach to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. He said she didn’t seem to grasp the spirit of the 1992 constitutional amendment written by anti-tax crusader Doug Bruce.

“What TABOR is really about is limiting government,” Leonard said. “Like the governor, (Lynne) concedes it’s the law of the land, but she thinks it’s mainly about letting people vote on tax hikes. I think her approach is to get around TABOR. She wants to set a program for the state and then find ways to fund it — to work out ways or find schemes or some other ways to pay for it. But TABOR is about the people asking us to please prioritize spending within limited revenues — to expand government only according to the increase in population and inflation.”

Neville also took issue with what he sees as Lynne’s skewed view on TABOR, as evidenced by her support for the mostly Democratic drive at the Capitol to reclassify the state’s hospital provider fee as an enterprise fund — a plan that would make room in the general fund under the TABOR spending cap to free up additional hundreds of millions of dollars for lawmakers to spend on state programs.

He also said he thinks that some of the executive branch departments are running rough shod over the legislative branch and need to be reined in by the people in charge — and he didn’t see Lynne doing that work.

“I couldn’t get a clear answer on how she’s going to handle agencies that I think have clearly overstepped their authority, like CDPHE (the Colorado Department of Health and Environment),” Neville said. “I actually had that conversation with her before the hearing, so she had plenty of time to think about the response. I think a lot of people here will have similar concerns.”

Republicans earlier this session sought to strip CDPHE of funding because they said the department was unnecessarily advancing work on the Obama administration’s carbon-cutting Clean Power Plan, which was stayed by a federal court in February.

The battle over CDPHE funding stretched for weeks during budget negotiations. Republicans originally proposed stripping the entire $8.4 million budget of the department’s clean air division. In the end, lawmakers agreed to cut $112,000 — a rough department estimate of how much it would spend this year working on the federal plan.

Edit note: The last sentence of Rep. Leonard’s comments about TABOR has been redrafted in this updated version of the story for clarity.

–john@coloradostatesman.com