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The Denver Post

Sunday, May 22, 2005
By Gail Schoettler, Denver Post Columnist

Colorado Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald should be taking a long nap. She just finished guiding a usually combative legislature through a host of divisive issues and still wrested the most important compromise of the last six years out of it. Working closely with the governor and legislative Republicans, she crafted a compromise five-year "fix" of the worn-out TABOR amendment, something the state desperately needs.

Last year, Fitz-Gerald was the feisty minority leader of the Senate. Her job then was to stick up for the principles of her own party in a bitterly divided state Senate that seemed to have lost any sense of collegiality. After engineering the Democrats' narrow takeover of the Senate, she showed the kind of leadership Colorado has long needed. As president of the Senate, she knew her job was to be a leader for both parties, someone who took on negotiation and compromise rather than harsh partisan rhetoric.

She did just that during this recent session of the legislature. The result, despite plenty of partisan rancor over controversial issues, was a bipartisan agreement on mending the state's budget that will go before voters in November. Without her focus on problem-solving and bringing warring parties together, that couldn't have happened. Then, we all would have been losers.

Contrast Fitz-Gerald's behavior with that of her immediate predecessor as president of the Senate, former Sen. John Andrews. The budget was a mess on his watch also, but rather than trying to solve a problem that severely damaged Colorado, he put all his effort into trying to pass a series of radically ideological issues and, finally, an unconstitutional redistricting of Colorado's congressional districts, aided by that paragon of unethical behavior, Texas Congressman Tom DeLay.

Now that his more thoughtful successor has been a leader in solving the state's budget problem, working in conjunction with our Republican governor, Andrews is busily trying to undo their work. He is demanding that all Republican gubernatorial candidates pledge to fight the ballot referenda that will ease our fiscal woes. Now, how is that for far-sighted leadership?

Let's take a look at how important positive leadership on fixing the budget is to Colorado. With severe budget cuts over the last several years, we have been unable to repair roads and bridges that we all use. We have severely reduced higher education funding, costing our kids more in tuition and making college inaccessible for many students. We have told poor women we couldn't afford to provide them prenatal care, even as we have told them their fetuses are more important than they are.

When we talk about government services, we are talking about the men and women who risk their lives to guide us out of a burning building or extract us from a wrecked car or search our darkened neighborhood for a prowler. We are talking about removing snow from mountain highways so we can enjoy that fresh powder and fixing the potholes that could swallow our cars. We are talking about providing safe school buildings for our kids and a higher education system that enables our children to be competitive in a harsh global economy.

So, when Andrews tries to wreck a carefully crafted compromise on fixing the state's dire budget crisis, he is saying to all of us that public schools aren't important, that dangerous highways shouldn't bother us, and that poor babies don't deserve even minimal health care. In my book, that is not leadership.

Back then to Fitz-Gerald. This year, she showed us what bipartisan leadership should be and what it can mean for Coloradans. We need that kind of leadership among politicians, leadership that puts the interests of Coloradans above personal politics.

So, I hope she is enjoying that nap. There's a lot of work ahead to prove to voters that the compromise she worked so hard to put on the ballot is, indeed, important to them. She'll be at the forefront of leading that bipartisan effort, too.

Gail Schoettler (gailschoettler@email.msn.com) is a former U.S. ambassador, Colorado lieutenant governor and treasurer, Democratic nominee for governor and Douglas County school board member.