“I offer my congratulations tonight to President-Elect Donald Trump. A hard-fought election is over, and I echo the President-Elect’s call for us to come together as one united people to move our nation forward.”
— Statement by Colorado’s U.S. Senator Cory Gardner, following the apparent election of Donald J. Trump on November 8, 2016
Elections. They can be an ugly, even a hateful method for bringing about governmental change — or for maintaining bureaucratic stagnation, as the case may be. I suspect, however, that we all prefer a messy election to a violent civil war.
As I reminded my friend Greg Giehl yesterday, you can’t win ’em all. But you can win occasionally.
Here in peaceful Archuleta County, the local election of 2016 was reasonably low key and mellow, without any big-ticket tax increases on the ballot — the types of spending proposals that have caused fierce community friction in the recent past. As we might expect in this conservative retirement village, the two Republican candidates for the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) won the two vacant seats on that board:
County Commissioner District 1 (unofficial results):
Steve Wadley, 3442 (48%)
Morgan Murri, 2107 (30%)
Rod Proffitt, 1551 (22%)
County Commissioner District 2 (unofficial results):
Ronnie Maez, 4046 (56%)
Natalie Carpenter, 1646 (23%)
Ray Finney, 1492 (21%)
In the only other Archuleta County issue, the Upper San Juan Health Service District (AKA Pagosa Springs Medical Center) narrowly won the right to avoid paying TABOR refunds to its taxpayers for the next ten years.
TABOR refund exemption for USJHSD:
YES, 3314 (51%)
NO, 3231 (49%)
In other Colorado races:
Incumbent U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, beat out his Republican challenger Darryl Glenn by 49% to 46%. Incumbent Republican Congressman Scott Tipton appears to have handily defeated his Democrat challenger Gail Schwartz by 54% to 41%. The race between J. Paul Brown and Barbara MacLachlan for State House is currently too close to call.
80% of the voters rejected Amendment 69, a constitutional amendment that would have created a tax-funded single-payer healthcare system in Colorado.
Amendment 70, a measure to gradually increase the minimum wages in Colorado over the next 3 years, won approval with 54% of the vote. Similar measures were approved in Arizona, Washington and Maine — the four states with minimum wages measures on their ballots. As in Colorado, Arizona and Maine will increase the minimum wage to $12 per hour. Washington State voters approved an increase to $13.50.
57% of Colorado voters wanted to see the process of amending the Colorado constitution become more difficult by requiring any proposed amendment to the state constitution be signed off on by voters in each of the state’s 35 Senate districts.
Colorado voters also restored primary elections for Presidential candidates by a 2-to-1 margin — and also voted, by a much more narrow margin, to allow unaffiliated voters to participate in those primary elections.
An attempt to impose a much higher Colorado tax on cigarettes and tobacco was snuffed out and left in the ashtray, with a 54% ‘NO’ vote.
The above are unofficial results, based on information available at 5am this morning.
The question that may be on many minds this morning: ‘Can we really come together, as a united people, to move our nation forward?’
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.