Republican state Rep. Justin Everett handily won a straw poll conducted Monday night after a bipartisan forum for state treasurer candidates at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood. The three-term lawmaker from Littleton, nicknamed “Justin Neverett” and “Dr. No” for his penchant to vote against legislation, led the 10 candidates on the ballot with 34.9 percent of the vote.

In all, six Republicans and four Democrats are running for the office held by term-limited Walker Stapleton, a Republican candidate for governor. Six of them participated in the forum, which was sponsored by the school’s conservative-leaning Centennial Institute.

Real estate CEO Brian Watson, a Republican, came in second in the straw poll with 22.6 percent of the vote, followed by state Rep. Polly Lawrence, R-Roxoborough Park, with 19.8 percent. State Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, was in fourth place with 10.4 percent; Democrat Bernard Douthit was next with 7.5 percent, and Democrat Charles Scheibe, the state’s chief financial officer, had 1.9 percent.

The rest of the field in the CCU straw poll was occupied by candidates who didn’t attend the forum: Routt County Treasurer Brita Horn, with 1.9 percent; Brett Barkey, the district attorney of Grand, Moffat and Routt counties, with 0.9 percent; with Democratic state Reps. Dave Young of Greeley and Steve Lebsock of Thornton, who didn’t receive any votes, bringing up the rear.

Most of the discussion at the 90-minute forum was devoted to the treasurer’s role as a member of the 15-member board governing the state’s troubled $45 billion public pension fund, the Public Employees’ Retirement Association, or PERA. More than 560,000 current and former government employees are covered under the program.

All of the candidates present agreed that PERA will need to raise its retirement age, restructure its board to include more financial experts and bring more transparency to the pension fund’s operations. By a show of hands, everyone but Scheibe and Watson agreed that cost-of-living increases will have to be frozen at some point, and everyone but Everett and Lundberg agreed that the plan will have to lower expectations for its rate of return on investments.

“I may be the only person who’ll say this: We may have to cut benefits,” Everett said, adding, “We have to see what the actual numbers are before we propose solutions.”

Lawrence, noting she’s dealt with union pensions for three decades as part of her work running the family construction business, said it’s time to raise the retirement age for PERA members and “flatten the benefit package” in order to grapple with unfunded liabilities that could be around $50 billion.

“The retirement age has to increase,” she said. “You can’t mathematically collect retirement longer than you have worked in the system.”

Douthit, the lone self-described progressive on the panel – “You can call me Bernie,” he quipped – said it’s important to keep in mind that the state has been under-paying teachers by about $11,000 a year and instead promises lavish retirement benefits, but he agreed that PERA’s governing board needs a different mix.

States whose pension plans are considered fully funded, Douthit maintained, have a minority of plan members on their boards. “Democrats haven’t stood up to say, ‘Hey, this board isn’t doing such a great job.'”

Lundberg, the longest-serving Republican in the Legislature in his 16th year, emphasized that the state treasurer “has a front-row seat” on the PERA board but can’t impose fixes by fiat and will have to rely on lawmakers to enact necessary solutions.

“It amounts to, as some people say, haircuts in a lot of places,” he said. “It’s a tough job. It’s going to take leadership that insists on getting the job done. In a sense, it’s simple math, but in another sense it’s a political question – who can exert the leadership to get us across the finish line.”

In addition to holding a seat on the PERA board, the state treasurer is responsible for managing roughly $6.5 billion annually in more than 750 state funds and runs state’s Unclaimed Property Division, which reunites people and businesses with property and cash through the Great Colorado Payback program.

Watson won a straw poll for the Republican candidates conducted Saturday in Grand Junction following a forum sponsored by the Mesa County GOP. He had 15 votes, followed by Lawrence with 9, Everett with 5, Barkey with 4, Horn with 2 and Lundberg with a single vote.

On the GOP side, Watson and Lawrence are gathering signatures for a spot on the June 26 ballot. They have until March 20 to turn in their petitions. The other four Republicans are going through the assembly process, which kicks off March 6 at precinct caucuses, culminating in the state assembly on April 14.

Lebsock is the only Democrat petitioning onto the ballot.