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Lamar constituents hear about TABOR and hemp at Crowder, Lewis town hall

By JOEY BUNCH 08/21/2017 | updated 8 years ago

Sen. Larry Crowder and Kimmi Lewis were all aboard on hemp last session and had no qualms about selling out the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, because the price was right.

The Lamar Ledger this weekend provided a thorough accounting of a town hall meeting with the two southern Colorado Republicans last Thursday night at Lamar Community College.

The confab covered a lot of legislative ground, from landfills to opioids and the gas tax to a national park at Camp Amache.

Two points in a gumbo of a story stood out, especially the bipartisan Senate Bill 267. The bipartisan omnibus spending bill reclassified the state’s hospital provider free to get it out from under TABOR’s constitutional spending cap. TABOR, Republicans usually crow, limits the growth of government. With the state’s rural hospitals and roads in need, however, Democrats offered Republicans a deal they couldn’t refuse.

The specter of rural hospitals closing changed their thinking on the fee and TABOR, while negotiating a deal to lower the state spending cap and raise co-pays on Medicaid. In politics everything, including partisan principles, are negotiable.

Lewis said she had received complaints about her vote saying she’s “not very conservative” for supporting the TABOR broadside.

“They just don’t realize how rural rural is,” she says in the Ledger article.

Crowder has long said rural Colorado needed the help moving that reclassifying the fee would create.

“The threat of hospitals closing was too great for me to turn my back on it,” he told the Lamar crowd.

While conservatives were slow to get on the pot bandwagon, Republicans were all aboard on broadening the market for hemp this year.

Four break-through pieces of hemp legislation passed this year’s session:

Lewis told the audience her son grows hemp in Fowler.

“I have supported hemp all the way through,” she in the Lamar Ledger article, which noted.

Lewis also commented that about “every fourth bill is about marijuana,” but hemp is a different topic altogether, and the support for it is very small.

It is? All four hemp bills passed with, collectively, five no votes. At least in the statehouse, support is very, very large.

Lewis, a freshman in the House this past session, told the crowd she’s a legislative hardliner.

Point out that a bill has flaws – as Colorado Politics did with Rep. Dave Williams’ bill to arrest public officials for violent crimes committed by undocumented residents in sanctuary cities – and its prime sponsor is apt to say what Williams said, “No bill is perfect.” It’s the easy way out when you’re backed into a legislative corner.

But those bills won’t get Lewis’ vote, according to the Ledger.

Representative Lewis said in her opening remarks she often votes no on bills and believes in getting the bills correct, especially if a word is not right in the bill. She further noted that if a bill presenter cannot answer her questions concerning the bill, such as what the cost was the previous year, she will vote no.

Sen. Larry Crowder, Voices of Rural Colorado, club 20, action 22 Pro 15
JOEY BUNCH

Reporter

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