Thirty-Five Years Ago This Week: Gov. Roy Romer convened the first meeting of the Colorado Campaign Finance Reform Commission, which was led by Dr. Gene Nichols, dean of the University of Colorado Law School.

The Campaign Finance Commission was made up of seven Democrats and seven Republicans, including Dick Freese and Bruce Benson. Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice Luis Rovira had appointed Nichols.

The Commission would examine five areas of reform, specifically: spending limits for state and local campaigns; a limit on the amount of money each person could donate to a campaign; whether campaigns should be stopped from taking money from corporations and PACs; whether state and local campaigns should file more detailed reports; and should the Commission make any other changes to improve the integrity of Colorado’s political process.

The Commission’s recommendations would be sent to the Romer in mid-December for possible inclusion on the 1991 legislative agenda.

Campaign finance reform had been a priority for Colorado Common Cause for over six years, said the organization’s chairman, Jean Ackerman.

“Individuals are playing a smaller role in picking their representatives,” Ackerman said. “Political Action Committees now dominate the electoral process. Disclosure requirements fail to provide sufficient information about who gives what to whom.”

Mort Marks, co-chairman of the Colorado Black and Jewish Coalition, argued vociferously in a Colorado Statesman editorial that the current system of government had “created a class of politicians who are too hard to turn out of office, because of the large amounts of money they receive from many different and diverse interest groups.”

“Of course, Amendment 5 will not cure all of our ills, but it certainly will inject some new medicine into a sick system and might just be the thing to promote the healing process,” Marks wrote.

Twenty-Five Years Ago: A gun debate hosted by the Arapahoe County Republican Party’s Men’s Club became a heated back-and-forth between Safe Colorado’s John Head and Citizens for Responsible Law Making’s Russel Scott.

Head and Scott both agreed that there should be background checks at gun shows, but could not agree on Amendment 22, nor what its implications would be. Amendment 22 would require background checks at gun shows and would also require licensed gun dealers to keep records of purchases.

Head said that Safe Colorado was formed to give “middle of the road voters” a voice and that Amendment 22 was so popular because it was “such a reasonable measure.”

Scott, meanwhile, said that Citizens for Responsible Law Making supported background checks at gun shows, but that the problem was “non-public events are not exempted. A gun show can be a spontaneous events with three people — it is too easily violated.”

Head argued that Amendment 22 was “drafted to cover gun shows, not gun sales involving neighbors over a back fence, garage sales, a couple of hunters of newspaper ads.”

State Rep. Joe Stengel, R-Littleton, asked if Safe Colorado wanted garage sales to be covered by the proposal, as he’d read correspondence between Safe Colorado and the Legislative Council debating the idea.

“No, there is no public support for that,” Head said. “We are not anti-gun.”

In closing, Head reiterated that the measure was solely focused on public gun shows and that there was widespread support for the measure and that enforcement would utilize existing procedures at CBI. It would require only additional personnel and computers.

Scott, meanwhile, urged the 72 Republicans present to vote no, as he believed the measure’s definitions were too broad and enforcement would siphon money away from other public safety programs.

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.