Fifty-Five Years Ago This Week: Speaking to concerned farmers, ranchers and campaign supporters in the City of Limon, Conrad McBride, Democratic candidate for Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, said that there was “an obvious price squeeze between static farm prices and inflated land prices today,” and added that – short of perfect cooperation – would require government intervention.

McBride, a political scientist from the University of Colorado, pointed out that while many farmers regularly made substantial investments affecting their operating costs, they had little chance of seeing a fair return on those investments.

“The free market – the supply and demand market – will not work in today’s world,” McBride argued, “because it allows the processors of farm produce to control the distribution and farm market prices, as well as the flow of operating capital for agriculture.”

Instead, McBride advocated for a system that would separate investment capital and operating capital so that small farm operators could stay in business.

“The American farmer, like the American consumer,” McBride said, “should be protected against the type of vertical integration that enables monopolies to operate even if such protection requires the government to assume the role of market and production regulator.”

To his Limon supporters McBride stated that the best way to handle the issues facing farmers would be to form a private co-operative, keeping out both monopolies and government.

“But it requires perfect cooperation or else it will fail as co-operatives in the past have failed,” McBride said.

At another meeting at CU Boulder McBride told the assembled crowd that government growth and centralization was both “reasonable and unavoidable.”

“It is a matter of indisputable fact that some of the problems in our modern society have grown beyond the scope of state government and state boundaries.”

Thirty-Five Years Ago: After a sharply-worded complaint from Senate President Ted Strickland, R-Westminster, that stemmed from incidents the previous legislative session, House Speaker Carl Bledsoe, R-Hugo, Strickland and nearly 200 of the state’s 520 professional lobbyists gathered for a briefing by General Assembly officials.

Bledsoe and Strickland were keen that lobbyists be made aware that some lobbyists had overstepped the mark and meddled in the selection process for legislative officials. General Assembly staff made lobbyists aware of the problems and breaches of protocol by the “third house of the legislature.”

Douglas Brown, director of the Legislative Drafting Office, whose staff of 30-40 lawyers and clerks drafts and reviews all bills submitted to the General Assembly, spoke at the briefing.

“There is a delicate balance,” Brown said, “between legislators, lobbyists and the legislative staff. The legislature is your boss, yet due to lack of legislative staff, the pressures of time and the growing complexity of legislation, at times we are working more with lobbyists than legislators.”

Brown said lines became particularly hazy when “legislators communicate with us through lobbyists…”

Several heads of departments outlined “horrible but not typical” examples, one which a lobbyists told a senior LDO attorney not to bother showing a legislator a revised bill because “The legislator will do whatever I tell him to do.”

But it was Vicki Lindsey, a staff member from Secretary of State Natalie Meyer’s office, who drew barks of laughter when she mentioned “nightgowns” in listing examples of gifts to legislators.

When asked by a Colorado Statesman reporter to confirm whether lobbyists had truly listed nightgowns among their gifts to legislators, she said they had.

“In the past when they used to itemize everything. They don’t have to itemize hardly anything anymore,” Lindsey said. “And they give hardly any gifts anymore.”

At the close of the briefing, Meyer told the assembled, chastened lobbyists, “You are an honorable profession, just as legislators are.”

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.