Colorado Politics presents eight contributed essays offering guidance to Colorado’s next chief executive from some of the state’s best political minds. CLICK HERE for more.

Take a shot at doing the impossible.

You have only four or perhaps eight years to do it, but if you do nothing else, make it your mission to drill it into our collective heads and hearts that there is a future beyond next week and beyond the next election cycle. You have the bully pulpit; use it to insist that we fulfill a moral obligation to look beyond just ourselves and beyond just today.

You, me, and most of today’s age-eligible voters will be taking dirt naps under the daisies in just a few decades. But our children and grandkids won’t. They will be here and will live with what we have done, or have not done, for or to the Colorado in which they will live.

We have, thanks to the good lord and concerned leaders who went before us, beautiful natural resources, schools, roads, hospitals, a strong economy, jobs, an educated and talented citizenry.

We also have interstates that now often function as parking lots; we have bottom-barrel rankings in K-12 support and higher-education funding, and shortages in mental health and care for the elderly and disabled. We’re sending our college grads out with large student loan burdens. Half of our K-12 schools, rural schools especially, are on four-day schedules due in large measure to a paucity of funding. We need $9 billion in transportation repair and expansion.

It need not be this way. Colorado is a wealthy state with a low tax burden – low compared to other states, low compared to our own past. Our state taxes are low to a point of embarrassment. The needs are huge, the resources are there.

Anyone who pays even a little attention to contemporary Colorado government and politics knows this: We live with contradictory constitutional policies and an impending fiscal train wreck. Our election cycles often feature a blizzard of complicated ballot measures with a host of special interests pushing for more spending or less spending or no spending. Longer ballots, bigger constitution, more complication. Then there is the army of anti-government forces, both within and outside our state, prepared to do battle against any and all attempts to match funding with needs. It can be tempting to just give up.

As governor, you can’t manufacture a fix in four or eight years. But you can provide leadership in pushing Coloradans to look honestly at our needs, look realistically at our resources, look ahead to what might be done over time, look to a future beyond elections, beyond party, beyond region, beyond just the state itself. This will have to include major policy change, most importantly by moving fiscal authority from election-day crowds to our General Assembly, where it belongs.

There’s help available. Colorado is rich in talent – talent in business, talent in local government, talent in religious and civic organizations, talent in nonprofits.

There is no Pollyanna path to untangling the knot spawned by decades of multiple ballot measures, contradictory fiscal policies, demands for more of everything, an anti-government industry whose punch line is “no more spending, no more taxes, no, no and no again,” with little regard for the consequences. Indeed, there may be no path at all.

But there is no excuse for not demanding that we wrestle honestly with this question: shall we continue to muddle through year after year, or will we set a long-term vision for our state – for our kids – and begin the journey?