Forty-Five Years Ago This Week: “It’s sometimes like talking to a brick wall,” said Colorado Congressional District 3 U.S. Rep. Ray Kogovsek.

Kogovsek was frustrated at the lack of support from congressional representatives from the East Coast and the Midwest for funding the Payments in Lieu of Taxes Program (PILT), which was authored by former U.S. Rep. Frank Evans, CO-CD3, and enacted into law on October, 20, 1976. The program made payments to local governments based on the amount of federal land and population within their jurisdictional boundaries.

Kogovsek told The Colorado Statesman that he’d battled with other Democratic members of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee who wanted to wipe out PILT altogether and spend the money somewhere else.

It was only when Kogovsek, a Democrat, threatened to caucus with the Republicans, who’d planned to offer an amendment in committee to restore full funding at $108 million, that the Democrats agreed to $100 million for PILT nationwide.

But Rep. Sidney Yates, D-IL, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, managed to convince his committee that the program shouldn’t be funded at all.

“Talking to these congressmen from the Eat and Midwest, who have maybe one small national park in their district, is sometimes like talking to a brick wall,” Kogovsek said. “They have no concept of what a county like Hinsdale, with 667,163 acres of federal land within it, goes through. They have an extremely small tax base and yet they are asked to provide services for all of those people who come to the county for recreation on federal lands.”

Kogovsek said that while the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior’s decision stood for now, “the battle just ain’t over yet.” 

Twenty-Five Years Ago: “The failure of Senate Bill 00-63 means that more Colorado women will have to go with untreated breast and cervical cancer for another year,” said state Sen. Bob Hagedorn, D-Aurora. “If we cannot treat our citizens who have cancer, then what is the role of government?”

Senate Bill 00-63 would have allowed nonprofits and organizations like the Caring for Colorado Foundation to raise money for cancer treatment programs for women. It would have met the state’s obligation for 35% matching funds to the federal government’s 65%.

“Some of the women are so poor that when they feel a lump, they don’t get screened because they know they can’t get treatment,” said Vicki Tosher, Colorado field coordinator for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. “They don’t want to be a burden on their families. I think what ends up happening is that these women don’t get treated and they die.”

The American Cancer Society and other breast cancer groups lobbied legislators over several weeks, but SB 63 died in the Appropriations Committee without a second hearing, even though the bill would not have used state funds.

“I think the restrictions of the TABOR amendment had something to do with it,” said Tosher. “But why should money from the feds not be coming to women in our state? One thing I heard was that there was concern on the part of House members that the federal government might stop providing funds and the state would have to fund it in its entirety — sounds a little like paranoia to me.”

Hagedorn said he had not given up and already turned in the bill title for the 2001 session, in hopes that the governor would place it on his call list in the fall during a special session on redistricting.

“It’s a tragedy that members of the House Appropriations Committee did not have the wisdom to pass the bill and forced us to pursue this option,” Hagedorn said. “The bill will be back.”

Rachael Wright is the author of several novels, including The Twins of Strathnaver, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing columnist to Colorado Politics, the Colorado Springs Gazette, and the Denver Gazette.