Live from rural Colorado!

In next week’s print edition (and online Oct. 2), Colorado Politics will take a good look at how rural Coloradans view the upcoming election and the issues that are important to them. (Note to the statewide candidates: There will be surprises. The issues they’re raising aren’t necessarily at the top of your agendas.)

But Capitol M, who put almost 2,000 miles on the Trusty Toyota traveling the front and back roads of Colorado, wants to share a couple of observations that won’t make it into the story.

First: It’s harvest time. (Doh!) A dump truck in Denver usually means dirt. A dump truck in the Lower Arkansas River valley means onions, among other things, with trucks so full that you’d better keep a safe distance behind.

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Capitol M narrowly missed getting an onion-shaped dent on the Trusty Toyota along U.S. 50 outside of Manzanola. (Note: I wasn’t tailgating. Onions are like Bumbles. They bounce! Or at least that’s how it looked when it fell off the truck from about 15 feet up).

In the San Luis Valley, it’s potatoes, with the same warning: Keep your distance lest you want a potato-shaped dent on your car hood.

Second, and it’s not that Capitol M wasn’t aware of this before, but … some of these House and Senate districts are HUGE. When you’ve been driving for two hours and are still in House District 62, for example (Rep. Don Valdez’ district in the San Luis Valley) or three hours and you’re still in House District 57 (Rep. Bob Rankin’s district in northwest Colorado), that’s a lot of ground to cover. And then there are the senators who represent rural Colorado, whose districts are twice that size, easily.

Third: Lots of “vote for” signs are popping up everywhere for the election. And they’re almost always for county commissioner, sheriff, assessor, etc. Capitol M could probably count on one hand (or maybe one and a half) the combined total number of signs for governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer and legislature seen during the week spent running around the state.

Except in one place: House District 62 in the San Luis Valley. The district is solidly blue and hasn’t elected a Republican to the legislature in years. However, signs backing Republican Scott Honeycutt of Alamosa are plentiful throughout the valley, as are signs for the incumbent Valdez, who lives in La Jara.

Now one Democratic operative told me, “sign’s don’t vote” (true dat) but the large signs for both candidates really stood out and were everywhere, from Antonito (Conejos County, on the New Mexico border) to Center, Colorado, located 55 miles north in Saguache County near the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

If you want to know why, here’s one possibility. Makes you think there might be a race in that district.

Word to the wise on credit reports

Friday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers stood out front of the state Capitol to spotlight a new federal law that allows consumers to freeze (and thaw) credit reports, for free. The new federal law wipes out the costs for freezing credit reports to protect consumers from identity theft, so long as the freeze is done through the “Big Three” credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion).

The noon event was sponsored by CoPIRG, the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, and drew both Republican lawmakers (not exactly who you’d expect to see in the “friends of CoPIRG” group) as well as Democrats. Bipartisan lawmakers sponsored bills in the 2018 session to help consumers with credit protection.

If you’re interested in how to do a credit freeze or thaw, CoPIRG has set up a webpage (and it’s free, too) with easy-to-follow steps on how to freeze your reports and protect yourself and your credit from identity thieves.

During the last session, Republican Rep. Cole Wist of Centennial, who sponsored some of that legislation, recounted his own story of identity theft. It “can happen to anyone at any time. I know. It happened to me. It is important to be able to act quickly and proactively. I am pleased Congress has made this tool more widely available to consumers,” Wist said Friday.

Fellow Republican Rep. Polly Lawrence of Roxborough Park, who also worked on credit protection legislation in 2018, pointed out that “children and the developmentally disabled community are especially susceptible as identity theft may not be discovered for years.”