Fact check: Claims don’t always match Coloradans’ memories
Former Gov. John Hickenlooper’s pitch to Democrats at Thursday night’s debate in Miami — that they should pick him to challenge President Donald Trump because of his accomplishments in Colorado — came as a surprise to some Colorado viewers.
“I’m a small-business owner who brought that same scrappy spirit to big Colorado, one of the most progressive states in America,” Hickenlooper said in his closing statement. “We’ve expanded reproductive health to reduce teenage abortion by 64 percent. We were the first state to legalize marijuana, and we transformed our justice system in the process. We passed universal background checks in a purple state. We got to near-universal health care coverage. We attack climate change with the toughest methane regulations in the country. And for the last three years, we’ve been the No. 1 economy in America.”
Coloradans such as Sam Kamin, a professor who teaches cannabis law at the University of Denver, seemed befuddled to hear Hickenlooper trumpeting issues he wasn’t directly involved with or even opposed.
“I know Hick didn’t just take credit for legalizing marijuana in Colorado,” Kamin tweeted.
But other activists say the former governor deserves to take a victory lap for keeping going successful programs such as the one that cut the state’s abortion rate.
“Colorado is known for many great things — marijuana should not be one of them,” Hickenlooper said two months before the November 2012 election. “Amendment 64 has the potential to increase the number of children using drugs and would detract from efforts to make Colorado the healthiest state in the nation. It sends the wrong message to kids that drugs are OK.”
But the former governor — like many other Colorado politicians — had a change of heart in the years since.
In an April 2019 interview with The Denver Post, Hickenlooper said he was cautiously optimistic on election night 2012 that Colorado could find a way to make legalization work, and he’s proud now to say that it has and would sign a bill as president to decriminalize cannabis nationwide.
“The things that we were most worried about didn’t happen,” he said.
Hickenlooper got it right when he said during the debate that the number of Colorado teens seeking abortions dropped by 64 percent after the state started providing free and low-cost IUD contraceptive devices as well as training providers on how to offer them.
He celebrated these statistics as governor in 2014, but the program began back in 2008, when he was still mayor of Denver and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment received $27 million from the Susan Buffett Foundation to launch its Colorado Family Planning Initiative.
“Once the program took hold after the initial five-year pilot, Hick and his administration were big advocates and helped push for its inclusion in the 2016 state budget and maintaining steady funding,” NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado spokeswoman Laura Chapin said. “Hickenlooper has definitely been a strong advocate for reproductive rights in Colorado. … And to his credit, it wasn’t an issue he was familiar with when he took office, but he was willing to learn and his administration took it seriously.”
Hickenlooper took a swipe Thursday at South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg for the way he has handled a recent officerinvolved shooting in his city.
“We had a shooting when I first became mayor 10 years before Ferguson, and the community came together and we created an Office of the Independent Monitor — civilian oversight commission. We diversified the police force in two years. We actually did de-escalation training,” Hickenlooper said. “I think the real question that America should be asking is why five years after Ferguson every city doesn’t have this level of police accountability?”
Hickenlooper was referring to the 2003 shooting of Paul Childs, a 15-year-old developmentally disabled boy who was shot to death by Denver police in his mother’s Park Hill home.
Roshan Bliss, co-founder of the Denver Justice Project, isn’t sure what Hickenlooper meant by diversifying Denver’s police force, but he called the independent monitor’s office a “national model for how people should do police oversight.”
However, he added, the city still has a lot of room for improvement in the way it handles officerinvolved shootings.
Colorado passed a universal background check law along with other gun control measures in the wake of the Aurora theater and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Hickenlooper initially sidestepped calls for gun control in the summer and fall of 2012, but he opened the door to the idea during his 2013 State of the State address.
“We shouldn’t be restrained from discussing any of these issues,” he said during that speech. “Our democracy demands this type of debate. Let me prime the pump: Why not have universal background checks for all gun sales?”
Democrats listened, and Hickenlooper signed the universal background check bill into law in March 2013. A few weeks later, though, Hickenlooper made headlines when it appeared he was backpedaling on his support for the new law. He told Colorado’s sheriffs that he didn’t know they wanted to meet with him about the law and regretted not having all the facts when he signed it.
The theme of Hickenlooper’s campaign is that compromise rather than radical change is the best way forward, and Colorado’s regulations to limit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, are the 67year-old Democrat’s shining example of how compromise works.
He talked about how Colorado became the first state to require oil and gas companies to reduce their methane emissions at his campaign launch, his CNN town hall and Thursday’s debate.
But environmentalists say the former petroleum geologist is missing the big picture because methane represents a tiny percentage of Colorado’s overall emissions. And they point out Hickenlooper opposed two different ballot initiatives that would have increased the distance between oil and gas wells and the places people live, work and play.