Forty Years Ago This Week: To the vexation of reporters and political gadflies alike, Rep. Steve Durham, R-Colorado Springs, was remaining entirely opaque as to the nature of his two-week long trip to Washington D.C. where he had met with several people whom he outright refused to name.

“Oh, I was just kind of around,” Durham said when a Colorado Statesman reporter pressed him for details. “Washington is really nice in the summer.”

It was well known that Durham was being vetted as regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, but few knew when or if his appointment would come through. Durham said that he wasn’t “at liberty to say anything” about his meetings and wouldn’t even if he could.

It did come out that Durham had stayed at the D.C. residence of Colorado U.S. Rep. Ken Kramer, CD5, for a couple of nights while there, a little detail thrown in for the gadflies.

“I’m as itchy as anything to find out about the job myself,” Durham added.

Meanwhile Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Wirth, CD2, had a few carefully-chosen words for the Reagan administration about a “golden opportunity to weaken OPEC’s stranglehold on world oil markets and hold world oil prices down throughout the 1980s.”

Wirth told the American Petroleum Refiners Association in Durango at a speaking engagement in front of the group that for the first time since 1973, OPEC had lost control of the world’s oil market.

“The cartel has made the mistake of raising oil prices so rapidly over the past two years,” Wirth said, “that U.S. oil imports have dropped by nearly 20%, creating the current world oil glut.”

“Unless the United States, Europe and Japan move quickly to consolidate those gains,” Wirth continued, “declining world oil prices will stimulate increases in imports, the glut will be eaten up and OPEC will regain control of the market between now and 1982.”

Wirth argued that for the first time in the United States’ long struggle with OPEC, the country had gained the upper hand but was in the process of sacrificing it.”

Twenty Years Ago: Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, alongside his wife Wilma, announced that a U.S. Senate race was “not in our plans for 2002.”

Webb said that his priority was, and remained, running the city of Denver.

In other news, Democrat Colorado Board of Education Director Jared Polis, owner of dot-com company ProFlowers, joined with Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, to work on an issue paper for the conservative think tank.

“I’m doing a project on the privatization of the postal service,” Polis said in explanation. “I’ve always felt strongly that with the changing competitive environment and new technologies emerging, the postal service is ripe for some competition.”

Polis argued that rising postal rates would only be more likely under the current system and if private companies were allowed to compete, consumers would be better off.

Polis and Caldara had sparred over Amendment 23 during the previous election, which sought to increase funding for education in Colorado by at least the rate of inflation plus one percentage point.

Polis said that while he and Caldara still disagreed on public funding for education, the Independence Institute addressed many subjects that remained of vital importance to Coloradans like self-responsibility, free trade and minimizing government interference in the economy.

“Stay tuned,” Caldara said to The Colorado Statesman. “Things could get interesting.”

Meanwhile, death row inmate L.R. Moore in Cañon City wrote to The Colorado Statesman, arguing for his right to be granted death by lethal injection. Domestic Terrorist Timothy McVeigh had already had his own request for lethal injection granted, but had been sentenced to death and had dropped all his appeals to expedite the death penalty. Moore had been sentenced to life in prison.

“Why does he have a right to a more humane death than I?” Moore wrote. “We were in the same court. Why cannot any lifer, or any prisoner, who sincerely and freely requests lethal injection not be granted in Colorado? Why is starvation the only means of self deliverance accepted by Colorado Department of Corrections?”

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.