Thirty Years Ago This Week: In a surprise move, state Senate Minority Leader Larry Trujillo, D-Pueblo, announced to his Senate colleagues that he would resign from his District 3 seat before the end of the legislative session and asked his party to elect a new minority leader within two weeks.

Both Trujillo and Senate Assistant Minority Leader Jana Mendez, D-Boulder, said they expected Sen. Sam Cassidy, D-Pagosa Springs, would be elected at the party’s regularly scheduled caucus meeting the following week. No other senators had announced their intention to run, and Mendez said that she’d decided throw her support behind Cassidy.

“This seemed like a time when I didn’t want to spend that much time on politics,” Mendez said. “There’s a time for everyone, and this is his time.”

Cassidy, an attorney, was serving his first term, but had been in office nearly three years. He told The Colorado Statesman that he would have liked to have more experience behind him, but said that he seemed to be the one that party leadership wanted for the role.

“We’re going to need a minority leader, and I’m about as moderate as any Democrat in the Senate,” Cassidy said.

This moderation in political outlook was vital, Cassidy said, to helping hammer out consensus among a group of politicians who were apt to get very attached to their own proposals.

“Different individuals push different solutions,” Cassidy said. “To an outsider this can look divisive, but it’s really part of the process of reaching the best solution possible. That’s one of the most positive contributions a caucus system can make.”

Trujillo agreed with Cassidy and also highlighted the important work minority leaders do within the legislature.

“A minority leader plays a lot of behind-the-scenes roles, working with the majority party to address problems with some pieces of legislation,” Trujillo said, though he admitted the work wasn’t easy. “Thank god the Democrats have the executive branch. Having that possibility of a veto really makes the majority party more willing to compromise.”

Trujillo also addressed confusion as to his shock resignation and assured The Statesman that he had “lost the fire in the belly for the fight up there.”

Gov. Roy Romer had appointed Trujillo to serve as vice-chair of the Colorado Parole Board which he would join in July.

“I’m kind of happy to get back into the criminal justice area, which is what I like to do the most, and where I really feel I can make the biggest contribution,” Trujillo said.

In other news, the introduction of the state budget – or long bill – had inadvertently caused the postponement of Sen. Regis Groff’s, D-Denver, SCR-2, a resolution that would send a referendum to Colorado voters to repeal Amendment 2.

Amendment 2 had been passed a year earlier in 1992 and prevented municipalities from enacting anti-discrimination laws protecting members of the LGBTQ community.

Groff, the sole black Senator, said that he introduced SCR-2 chiefly because of his own “moral responsibility” with little hope that it would succeed. The path the resolution would need to follow to passage would be a long, arduous one, needing a majority vote from the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee and a two-thirds vote from both the Senate and the House.

Amendment 2 was “on hold” until the State Supreme Court could rule on its constitutionality and because the amendment was in flux, prominent members of the LGBTQ community had not commented on repeal efforts.

Rep. Sam Williams, D-Breckenridge, had said publicly early in the legislative session that he too was considering a repeal measure but had yet to introduce anything in the House.

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.