Colorado House Speaker Mark Ferrandino was special guest for a Colorado Independent event wrapping up this year’s legislative session last week. He spoke for an hour and a half with Columnist Mike Littwin and audience members at the Denver Open Media studios.
Ferrandino, a Democrat from Denver, has served three terms in the House. He is a wonk about numbers and a proud past member of the General Assembly’s Joint Budget Committee. He was elected House Speaker in 2012. He was the first openly gay man elected to the legislature and the first openly gay Speaker of the House.
The Independent event was live streamed at the Denver Open Media site and broadcast live on Denver Channel 56. Video is below. Some highlights:
Local control and drilling
Ferrandino said the question of whether or not Gov. John Hickenlooper will convene a special legislative session to pass a compromise bill is complicated, especially in an election year.
“Everyone in the state is a stakeholder in this,” he said. “There are 5 million stakeholders when it comes to this issue.”
He said negotiations at the capitol over a bill introduced in the last week to provide more control over drilling to local officials came “close” to landing a compromise.
“We were close… oil-and-gas representatives, for example, were okay on one level with more local control. They were okay with it in Weld County, but not so much in Boulder County.”
He said the setback question was thorny.
“With a 2,000-foot setback limit from structures, there would be no place in the state they could drill,” he said.
Note: The initiatives seeking setbacks have been clear about the rules applying only to inhabited structures.
Ferrandino guessed there was a 50 percent chance Hickenlooper would call a special legislative session.
Gay rights
He marveled at the movement over the last decade in Colorado on the topic. It was once a political “wedge issue” used as by anti-gay rights Republicans to generate passion and votes, he said, culminating in the 2006 state amendment that banned same-sex marriage. But now it’s an issue used by pro-gay rights Democrats to generate passion and votes.
Why the change?
“More people are coming out, so more people know people who are gay and so they support equal rights. They think ‘These are my friends and my relatives.’”
He said it makes a big difference that more people in public life are gay.
“Look at the statehouse,” he said. “[Former Denver Senator] Jennifer Veiga was the first out lawmaker. Now half a decade later we’re at eight, the highest number in the country. That’s a huge change.
He said gay marriage is coming to Colorado.
“I think we’ll have it nationwide by the end of the decade. The [federal] Tenth Circuit court is weighing the issue right now and two cases have been filed in Colorado… We’ll either have it here through the courts or by ballot initiative in 2016.”
He said he was in San Francisco after California’s Proposition 8 passed and barred gay residents from marriage.
“People were really depressed, but the old timers, people who had been fighting for decades for equal rights, none of them at the time thought marriage equality was even possible. This is a seismic shift.”
Cory Gardner
“I like Cory. We worked at the capitol for years. He’s a very nice guy. But he’s a political person. He blows wherever the political winds blow. We saw that on [the anti-abortion] personhood issue. Do I believe he has moved his position on personhood? No, I don’t. I believe he just moved his public stance on the issue.”
Money in politics
“[The problem] is not the checks, they don’t matter in the way people think. There’s not that kind of quid pro quo… It’s that you’re spending all this time on Wall Street. You’re around people with different concerns. You’re not spending time with your constituents so your perspective is off.”
The Republican primary for governor
“Ha! Give me some dice and a craps table. That’s as good a way as any of guessing who’s going to win."
This article originally appeared in The Colorado Independent and is reprinted with permission.
