Thirty-Five Years Ago This Week: An Adams County District Court judge ruled that Republican state Rep. Faye Fleming’s decision to switch from the Democratic Party a year earlier in 1986 – a mere three months after being elected to office – had been neither fraudulent nor illegal, dismissing a lawsuit claiming both.

The United Steelworkers Union had brought the lawsuit against the Thornton lawmaker, requesting that their contribution to Fleming’s campaign be returned on the basis that her run for office as a Democrat had been fraudulent.

Fleming told The Colorado Statesman that her legislative agenda and stance on issues hadn’t changed “one bit since officially switching parties.”

“I am still voting just as I said I would, I’ve just changed the side of the aisle I sit on,” Fleming said. “The switch hasn’t been easy … it cost me some dear friends.”

While Fleming said she mourned those losses, she thought it had been much easier to get things done in the legislature as a member of the majority party.

Dean Prigelmeier, the chair of the Adams County Democratic Party had already begun a recall effort. He told The Colorado Statesman that he had half of the 4,200 signatures necessary to force a recall election.

Prigelmeier said that as the signatures were coming in, workers at county headquarters were verifying them before turning them over to the secretary of state’s office.

Several Democrats had expressed an interest in running if the recall effort was successful, including Chuck Rose and Ron Gallegos.

Prigelmeier said Gallegos had trouble with residency requirements and said coquettishly, “We may have more than one candidate.”

The year-long delay in the recall effort, Prigelmeier said, was because it was “an off year” and he himself had started a new job at Proactive Technologies Inc.

“The time has come,” Prigelmeier said, “to get this darn thing over with.

In other news, Colorado Taxpayers for Choice hired a new campaign manager, Kirk Mitchell, to spearhead their 1988 election year effort to repeal Amendment 3, which mandated that no public monies be used for abortions.

Mitchell was originally from Colorado but had spent the previous few years managing judicial and statehouse races in California. Ruth Steel, chairman of CTC, deemed Mitchell “the perfect person” to guide the campaign.

CTC had the daunting task of collecting the 50,668 signatures necessary to place a ballot issue before Coloradans that, if passed, would restoring public funding for abortions and, in CTC’s view “reflect the opinion and the will of the majority of Coloradans.”

According to Mitchell, “Amendment 3 had returned Colorado to a discriminatory, two-tiered system of health care, whereby poor women are left without a viable choice to unwanted or medically non-viable pregnancies.”

CTC counted prominent figures from both political parties as supporters and had recently decided to relocate its offices to a more central location to better facilitate meetings.

Twenty-Five Years Ago: Republican U.S. Rep. Dan Schaefer, CD-6, unveiled a new portion of his website where constituents could send his staff their horror stories about the Internal Revenue Service.

“The scariest things this Halloween are not witches, ghouls or goblins,” Schaefer said. “Rather everyone should be frightened by the over-intrusiveness of the IRS that haunts the American people. For years I have been horrified by the stories my constituents have brought to my attention.”

Schaefer said these stories were what prompted him to fight for fundamental tax reform and to introduce the National Retail Sales Tax Act of 1997 which would have completely replaced income tax with a flat, 15% sales tax.

“The only way to solve the problems we have with the current income tax and the IRS is to end the nightmare once and for all,” Schaefer said. “Replacing the income tax with a tax on consumption is more fair to everyone – and it will prevent us from having to collect horror stories from Americans.”

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.