Colorado is blessed with beautiful public lands and wide open spaces. Our natural environment — from Estes Park to Telluride — is synonymous with our identity as a state. It supports our booming tourism industry, attracts great jobs to our rapidly growing state, and fills us with a sense of a pride every time we go out to hike, ski, hunt or fish.
The reality is we have a moral responsibility to maintain a vision of a clean Colorado, so we can be good stewards and leave a proud legacy of clean air for our children and grandchildren. While the vast majority of Coloradans support that vision, we have seen unprecedented efforts by legislators to dismantle Colorado’s ability to combat air pollution — purely for scoring Washington-style political points.
This week, Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee voted on a party line to strip $8.5 million from the 2016-17 state budget that would go towards the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division (APCD) — an office that focuses on the protecting Coloradans by monitoring our air quality and removing asbestos.
Over this legislative session, we have debated a number of bills that would undermine Colorado’s ability to combat climate change, and would take us backwards in our progress on promoting our clean air. We saw every member of the Republican caucus vote against an amendment affirming the human cause on climate change. We have watched Washington-style political games being played to slam the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, when we should be moving forward to create our own state-specific carbon reduction plan.
This latest action, however, takes the cake. Here’s what $8.5 million allocated to APCD goes towards:
• Issuing industry emissions permits so companies can conduct business in Colorado;
• Monitoring air quality and advising the public if air is unhealthy for sensitive individuals, like those who suffer from asthma; and
• Overseeing the removal of asbestos from schools, hospitals, houses and other affected buildings.
None of this funding was meant for implementation for the Clean Power Plan. Rather, it is meant for public health and safety. In the short term, stripping this funding is an affront to public health and safety. In the long term, it will negatively impact the CDPHE’s ability to create a Colorado-specific plan to reduce carbon emissions, leaving us open to the EPA coming and applying a less flexible plan for Colorado.
This kind of Washington-style politics is completely irresponsible. It is dangerous for state senators to be putting Colorado’s economy and public safety in jeopardy by threatening to withhold millions of dollars intended for a core program designed for a cleaner state. At the end of the day, hindering our ability to keep our air clean only benefits corporate polluters, not regular Coloradans.
Republicans should be doing their jobs for the people of Colorado, and not playing Washington-style political games with our clean air. That’s not the Colorado way.
Democratic state Sen. Matt Jones represents Longmont, Lafayette, Louisville and part of Erie.
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