When:
Saturday, March 1st
10:30-noon

Where:
Susan M Duncan YMCA
6350 Eldrige St, Arvada

Sponsor:
Representative Sara Gagliardi, HD 27

What:
Community members are invited to join Rep. Gagliardi for a panel discussion on foreclosure counseling and prevention, the foreclosure process, and how local officials and real estate professionals can help. Foreclosure counselors will be present for those seeking assistance.

Panel discussion:
What can be done about the high foreclosure rate?

Brothers Redevelopment, Inc.
Colorado Division of Housing
Colorado Housing and Finance Authority
State Housing Board
Department of Regulatory Agencies

Who’s Invited:
Homeowners, borrowers facing foreclosure, real estate professionals, and anyone seeking information on the foreclosure process and foreclosure prevention.

For more foreclosure information: www.coloradoforeclosurehotline.org

Let me begin by congratulating our newest members, Representatives Mark Ferrandino and Christine Scanlan. We look forward to serving with each of you.

I would also like you to welcome my mother to the chamber.

Thank you for allowing me to share some thoughts with you on this occasion. This is the fifth year I’ve had the privilege – it’s also the last.

Representatives Borodkin, Garcia, Hodge, Jahn, Madden, Marshall, Stafford, White and I came in together – and we’re going out together. Congratulations to each of you.

Today I want to tell you a story. It’s not a story with a lot of characters in it. We’re going to have plenty of those stories in the months ahead. We’ll be talking about the 12,000 students who drop out of Colorado’s high schools each year, the 107,000 Coloradans who don’t have jobs, the 792,000 who don’t have health insurance.

This morning I want to focus on just one person. A child, to be specific. A baby.

Some 70,000 babies will be born in Colorado in 2008 – enough to populate a House district.

This little fellow was one of the first to arrive. His name is Wyatt James Sheets. He was born on New Year’s Day, at Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs. He weighed in at 6 pounds and measured 18½ inches long.

Wyatt showed up four weeks ahead of schedule. His parents live in Colorado Springs, but they spent the holidays on the Western Slope. Wyatt’s mother began having contractions during a New Year’s Day service at the Rocky Mountain Baptist Church in Rifle, where her father-in-law is a pastor. I think Wyatt was just in a hurry to make good on his father’s wish – that he become a NASCAR driver (His dad wanted to name him Dale, as in Earnhardt, but he lost that argument.)

Wyatt’s father, James, is an Army mechanic at Fort Carson. He served two tours of duty in Iraq, where he drove a tank with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Wyatt’s mother, Alicea, directed an after-school program and takes care of their three daughters. Wyatt’s sisters helped decorate his room and pick out his crib. His oldest sister, Ashley, even said she thought it was “cool to have a little brother.”

James and Alicea want what all parents want – a better quality of life for their children. They want Wyatt to get the best education in the world. They want a doctor or a nurse to care for him when he gets sick and to help make sure that he stays healthy. They want Wyatt to live a happy and rewarding life.

James and Alicea have high expectations for their son – and for the state in which they plan to raise him. But for Wyatt to fulfill his potential, we have to fulfill ours.

Wyatt’s well-being will depend on the decisions that James and Alicea make in the months and years ahead. In the long run, his success will hinge on the decisions that he makes for himself.

But the quality of Wyatt’s life will also rest on the decisions that we make here, in this chamber, this year. We’re not his parents; nobody can take their place. But we can make it easier for James and Alicea to prosper and for Wyatt to thrive. That’s what I want to talk about this morning.

Let’s fast forward a few years. It’s 2011 or 2012, and Wyatt is old enough to start preschool. Whether he does is a choice his parents will have to make. But right now, you and I have a choice to make as well. Let’s make the right choice. Let’s say yes to high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten.

Early childhood education is one of the single most effective investments we can make. Let’s help more parents like James and Alicea give their children a smart start on school.

By 2014, Wyatt will be old enough to start first grade. Most of the teachers he’ll have then have already been hired or are being recruited right now.
We need to do a better job of training, retaining and rewarding high-skilled teachers, especially those who agree to work in the schools, with the students, and in the subjects that present the greatest challenges.

Let’s equip our teachers with the tools they need – the time, the training, the technology – to give Wyatt a world-class education. Let’s put a top-flight teacher in his classroom, and in every classroom.

Of course, even the best teacher in the world will find it tough to teach in a school that’s falling down. Wyatt deserves a learning environment that is safe and healthy and educationally enriching – not a building where the roof is caving in or the floorboards are so rotten that they can’t even hold up his desk. Yet students are going to back to school this week in buildings just like that, especially in rural Colorado – in the San Luis Valley and the Arkansas Valley and the Eastern Plains.

That is fundamentally unacceptable in a state as affluent as ours. Dozens of factors will affect Wyatt’s ability to get a good education, but his zip code shouldn’t be one of them.

It’s time for the BEST plan – to Build Excellent Schools Today, schools designed not for the 19th century or the 20th century but for Wyatt’s century, the 21st century. This plan will allow us to meet our schools’ most critical health and safety needs. I want to thank Treasurer Kennedy for helping us identify nearly $1 billion in state and local resources. This will be the most significant investment in school construction since statehood.

It’s a little too soon to ask Wyatt what he wants to be when he grows up. But here’s one thing we do know: What he earns will depend on what he learns.

The workforce Wyatt enters 20 or 25 years from now will face stiff competition not just from other states but from other countries, too. We should prepare Wyatt to meet the demands of a global economy. He’ll need more than a high-school diploma. He’ll need some form of higher education – whether that means vocational training or an advanced degree.
Let’s keep the cost of college within his reach. Wyatt and his classmates should be able to get a good education even if their parents aren’t very well off. In our country, where you come from shouldn’t dictate where you end up.

Wyatt may be a long way from joining the workforce, but there are some steps we can take right now to strengthen the economy that awaits him. First, we should continue to invest in our infrastructure. Wyatt shouldn’t have to spend all of his money fixing the roads and bridges that you and I neglected.

Second, we should support homegrown industries like aerospace, bioscience and renewable energy – industries in which Colorado is already gaining a competitive edge.
We should make sure there are plenty of good jobs for Wyatt to choose from – whether he farms wind or wheat, pilots a jet or peers into a microscope.

Third, we should simplify our tax code, so that Wyatt’s employer doesn’t have to hire an army of accountants just to do business here. And as for our smallest employers – the 45,000 entrepreneurs who form the backbone of Colorado’s economy – we should spare them the burden of the business personal property tax once and for all.

There’s one other step we should take to shore up Wyatt’s financial future – and that is to save for a downturn. Even in a state as sunny as Colorado, a rainy-day fund makes good sense.

We’ve talked about helping Wyatt get a smart start, a top-flight teacher, and a safe place to go to school. We’ve talked about his prospects for college and for work. But more than anything else, what will enable Wyatt to live a long and productive life – the top priority of every parent – is his health.

If Wyatt had been born in 1908, he would have been lucky to live past the age of 50. That was the average life expectancy in America a hundred years ago. Babies born in the United States today can expect to live 78 years or more. Wyatt’s parents hope that he’ll live to see the 22nd century.

Wyatt is lucky to have been born in the most prosperous nation on the face of the earth. America’s medical facilities and services are among the finest in the world. What we need to figure out, as a state and as a nation, is how to make those services available to Wyatt and his parents, at a price they can afford – and how to help them stay healthy enough to avoid having to go to a hospital in the first place.

Those are some of the questions we’re going to answer over the next four months. But there are several steps we should take right now.

First, we should cut the cost of health care. Administrative expenses eat up as much as a quarter of every health-care dollar.
We can get a much bigger bang for our buck. We can save more than $100 million just by standardizing ID cards and claim forms, streamlining the processes we use to verify eligibility and credential providers, and simplifying procedures for prior authorization and appeals.

When Wyatt was born, his condition, his progress and his test results were all recorded on paper. Valley View Hospital is still developing an electronic information system. We can save money and reduce the risk of medical errors – without compromising Wyatt’s privacy – by bringing more of our hospitals into the 21st century.

Second, we should reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Wyatt’s family has health insurance. But one out of every six people in this state doesn’t. The average family in Colorado will spend $1,000 this year treating the uninsured.

Here’s one point I hope we can agree on – every child should have health coverage. Children without insurance are 10 times more likely to miss out on the immunizations and check-ups they need to stay healthy. Uninsured children are more likely to get sick. They are more likely to stay sick. And they are more likely to die. Let’s end this debate and cover our kids.

Third, we should put a premium on prevention. The emergency room ought to be a last resort, not a primary source of care. We should give Wyatt and his parents every incentive to stay healthy – and to exercise personal responsibility. Let’s reduce their premiums if they curb their cholesterol, lower their blood pressure, or quit smoking. Let’s minimize their co-payments for preventive care and chronic-care management. Let’s encourage them to take advantage of health and wellness programs.

The last – and in some ways, the most important – step we can take to improve Wyatt’s health is to protect his environment. The more we contaminate Colorado – the more we foul our air and pollute our water – the more we diminish Wyatt’s quality of life.
We can do better. We can restore the health of our forests and replenish our rivers. We can help our ranchers and farmers hold on to their lands for future generations. And – this is key – we can find new and more efficient ways to heat our homes, fuel our cars, and power our economy.

Greenhouse gases pose the most serious threat to Wyatt’s environment. If we don’t acknowledge and attack the causes of global warming – if we don’t become, in Governor Ritter’s words, more “stubborn stewards” of this fragile planet – we will jeopardize Wyatt’s chances of surviving on it.

Now some folks will try to trick James and Alicea into believing that they have to choose between a high standard of living for themselves or for their son. That’s a false choice. When it comes to energy, James and Alicea do have choices to make – and so do we. But these choices won’t enslave Wyatt’s family or bankrupt their budget. In fact, our new energy economy is already creating thousands of new jobs.

We don’t have to savage the economy in order to salvage the environment. Quite the opposite: we can sustain both.

For James and Alicea, that means conserving more energy. It may even mean generating their own.

For us, it means providing rebates, loans and credit for those who produce renewable energy, and removing the barriers that stand in their way.

For Wyatt, it will mean a cleaner, greener place to call home.

In the end, what James and Alicea want – what Wyatt deserves – is a shot at the American Dream: the chance to enjoy a solid education, a steady job, a safe and healthy place to live and grow up. That’s not too much for them to expect, and it’s not too much for us to deliver.

There may be some distant corner of the earth where it is considered acceptable for children to languish without those opportunities. There have certainly been such times in our nation’s history. But not here, not now, not in the 21st century.

By the time Wyatt reaches the ripe old age of 42, this century will be half-over, or half-begun. Colorado will be home to nine million people – four-and-a-half times as many as there were when I was born, 42 years ago.

What will become of Wyatt, of James and Alicea, and of all the people lucky enough to live here in the year 2050? That’s mostly up to them. But for the next 120 days, it’s also up to us. Let’s get started.

Below is the full text of President Groff’s opening day remarks.

Please stand and join me in observing a moment of silence to honor the men and women who have given their lives defending our country – including Major Andrew Olmstead of Colorado Springs who was killed last week in Iraq – and to the active duty members and veterans of the United States Armed Forces and their families. Thank you.

Let us also take a moment to acknowledge Colonel Steve Ward from Senate District 26 and Lt. Colonel Joe Rice from House District 38, the two sitting members of the Colorado General Assembly who are currently serving us on active duty in Iraq. We will keep the light burning until Sen. Ward returns home.

Mister Majority Leader, Mister Minority Leader, Senate colleagues, distinguished guests, friends and my family. Let me begin by thanking the Senate for my election as the 47th President of this great body. I thank both sides of the aisle for your support and I pledge to continue to work collaboratively with all of you to build and invest in a better Colorado.

Let us welcome our newest members, Senators Bill Cadman of Colorado Springs and Dan Gibbs of Silverthorn. Welcome to the Senate. It will take a little while for us to break you of all those bad habits you picked up over in the House of Representatives, but rest assured, we will make Senators out of you yet.

We should also take a minute to say thanks to former President Joan Fitz-Gerald for her leadership in this chamber and bid her well in her pursuit of further public service.

Let us acknowledge the members of our body who are beginning their last session. Senators, please stand as I call your name:

Majority Leader Ken Gordon of Denver, Minority Leader Andy McElhany of Colorado Springs,
Senator Bob Hagedorn of Aurora, Senator Stephanie Takis of Aurora, Senator Jack Taylor of Steamboat Springs, Senator Ron Tupa of Boulder, and Senator Sue Windels of Arvada.

You have each added indelible marks to the history of the Senate and your contributions to Colorado’s greater good will serve you well as you look back on your distinguished legislative careers. Congratulations.

My friends, we are told all our lives to be mindful of history. And today, I am particularly mindful of the history you all made in electing Sen. Abel Tapia as our President Pro Tem and me as your president.

I understand that is not just my hand that takes the gavel today; I understand that it is the hands of my relatives who toiled under the overseers whip on the red clay of Georgia that take this gavel today on the red carpet of the Colorado Senate.

I understand that it is the hands of my relatives who wore the obscene shackles of slavery at the foot of the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, that take this gavel today at the foot of the mighty and majestic Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Those magnificent Rocky Mountains just outside our door can serve as a barrier or a challenge.

Like Colorado’s pioneers and generations of my family before me, I recognize that challenges, though mountainous in nature, can offer tremendous opportunities if we are willing to climb; as Robert Kennedy once said, “…if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.” For the next 120 days I say let us climb the mountains of challenges that face Colorado, let us climb above the forest of partisan politics and to ascend above the timberline, to the summit, to a place from which we can see the long view and the pathway to a greater Colorado.

To create that pathway it will be important for us to come together from both sides of the aisle, in both chambers and throughout this historic building – to put the welfare of all Coloradans before the well-being of any political party, to put our personal principles before short-term political gain and to commit ourselves to rise above pandering to the whims of the moment to seek the wisdom of long-term solutions for the future of our state.

Let us not stand at the foot of the mountains of challenges, look up and wonder “what if…?”

Let us climb to the summit and begin to create a pathway in Colorado that makes the Centennial state the place where all Coloradans have affordable, accessible and reliable healthcare.

Every day in our state 200,000 children go to sleep without health insurance and 600,000 Colorado adults wake up without health insurance. When those individuals get sick and end up in the emergency room or when they end up in the hospital, we all pay the bill. That hidden tax is reflected in your premiums and mine.

It is not just the poor and unemployed who don’t have insurance, but middle-class working families who constitute 80% of Colorado’s uninsured.

At the end of this month we will receive the much anticipated recommendations and proposals of the 208 Commission on Health Care Reform. Let us be respectful of their inclusive process and the work of the commission and not approach the report with our preconceived ideological and political blindness. But let us approach this challenge by understanding that our journey up this mountain will take more than 120 days, but in the end our goal must be to reduce the number of uninsured in Colorado.

We can begin that journey this session by covering all children. It is the morally right and responsible thing to do. While adults can make decisions about whether they accept coverage, our most precious and vulnerable resource cannot make those decisions. An investment in their health is an investment in our future and puts us on the pathway to a greater Colorado.

Healthier children deserve better schools.

Let us not stand at the foot of the mountainous challenges in education, look up and wonder “what if…?

Let us climb to the summit and see the pathway that makes Colorado a place where all children are educated to the fullness of their God given talent and are academically readied to thrive in a global economy.

While the global marketplace stretches and expands, our children seem to be slipping further behind their global competition. According to recent studies American student’s rank 35th out 57 countries in the world on average in mathematics scores – behind Lithuania, Iceland and Azerbaijan. In the area of science we’re slightly better. We place 29th out of 57 – behind Latvia, Liechtenstein and Austria.

Other studies also show that for every 100 ninth graders only 68 graduate on time, of those only 40 enroll in college directly, only 27 of those are still enrolled the following year and of those only 18 earn an associate’s degree within 3 years or a BA within 6 years. 18…out of 100.

In Colorado only half of all 8th graders scored proficient on the Colorado CSAP last year and nearly 20,000 kids gave up on the one thing that can make the biggest difference in their lives and our future: their education.

Those numbers and so many others indicate an educational crisis that we need to respond to – not by laying blame and trying to score political points but asking the question on every single education bill we debate “is this in the best educational interest of the child?”

It is the long term educational interest of which we need to be morally mindful and the P-20 Education Council has issued a preliminary set of recommendations that will begin to place us on the path to the creation of a 21st century education system that should have no rival and no peer in preparing all our students for global competition, strengthening and ensuring multiple avenues of public educational delivery from which parents can choose, fixing unsafe buildings, better valuing our teachers, creating statewide standards and requirements and finding new ways to fund our woefully underfunded higher education system.

However, some of our students can’t wait. They urgently need innovation and substantive reform now. Over the next 120 days let us put aside the paralyzing ideological political chits we owe that often pinches the dramatic need for educational revitalization and let us embrace originality, innovation and meaningful change.

Without swift urgency, those students who are caught in the achievement gap, the readiness gap and in our political bickering will continue to circle the drain with little hope for the future, so let us throw off the shackles of convention and caution and act as Rev. Martin Luther King said “with the fierce urgency of now.”

Healthier, better educated kids deserve better jobs and a better economy. Properly prepared students create a homegrown employment base that will help sustain the businesses of our state which are the economic engines of Colorado.

Let us climb to the summit and continue to move Colorado forward as an economic, energy and bioscience powerhouse in this nation and find a pathway to assist our businesses.

In Colorado, according to the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, there are nearly 100,000 firms with 100 employees or less and those small businesses employ nearly 800,000 Coloradans – about a quarter of our workforce. We must stand ready to relive some of the burdens weighing down those small businesses and all businesses in our state. Cutting red tape, slicing state bureaucracy and the business personal property tax, aren’t ideas that belong to Democrats or Republicans, they are ideas that are just good government that will spur the economy and our businesses and allow more investment in the future of the state.

Scaling the mountainous challenges of education, health care and economic development, standing at their respective summits and seeing the pathway to a better Colorado will mean nothing if don’t ascend the tallest mountain in our legislative range and that is the reformation of the constitution of Colorado.

The time has come for a substantive legislative discourse about fixing our foundational document. A constitution should be the moral guidepost by which a state’s progress and journey are measured. A constitution should be a thoughtful list of principals and obligations of citizens and government. However, Colorado’s has become a laundry list of detached and contradictory provisions offered by special interest groups who wanted to add their special twist to the constitution.

The United States constitution has only been amended 27 times in 221 years. Colorado’s however, has been amended 52 times in the last 27 years. In fact since 1990 we have added more than 21,000 words to what is suppose to be our foundational mission statement.

Our constituents expect us to climb above the partisan forest that so often slows our ascent to a better Colorado and with future legislatures expecting us to have the political courage to tackle the toughest issues of our moment; let us not squander the opportunity to help our successors and serve our constituents. Let us begin creating a blueprint for a better constitution.

With that in mind, today I create a Senate Select Committee to begin a substantive legislative discussion about constitutional reform.

Because this is not about democratic solutions or republican answers I will require the committee to work with respected former legislators who have a unique understanding of our constitutional quagmire, Former Senator and CU President Hank Brown, former Senate President Stan Matsunaka, former Senate Majority Leader Norma Anderson and former Senator and JBC member Penfield Tate have all agreed to serve as senior advisors to this committee.

The committee will have a time certain in which to meet, so that if recommendations or potential legislation comes from their work the General Assembly will have time to vet the plans through our regular legislative process.

I will also ask the committee to thoroughly review the recent constitutional study and 12 recommendations that came from the University of Denver’s constitutional panel. That report could certainly be a piton to help us climb this mountainous challenge. But the report isn’t the only assistance we need to ascend this mountain. The other piton is our political courage and political will — our successors need it, the people of Colorado deserve it and our future demands it.

In closing, let me share with you my favorite scripture which comes from the book of Isaiah. In Isaiah 58:12 it says “you shall be called the repairer of the breach and the restorer of pathways to dwell.”

My friends we know what the breaches are in Colorado. We know about the breaches in Education, Health Care, Transportation, Economic Development and constitutional reform.

Our constituents are depending on us to close those breaches and restore the pathways in which all Coloradans can dwell. Our state, our citizens and our future cannot afford for us to be left wondering in 120 days “what if we had restored those pathways…?”

“What if we had given 3,000 more children the opportunity to go to preschool and we were truly innovative in K-12 education? What if we had fixed the roofs, boilers and broken down infrastructures of 200 schools? What if we had given 30,000 businesses much needed tax exemptions and clarity? What if we had provided healthcare to our most vulnerable and most precious citizens? What if we had worked together?”

We can not stand at the foot of the most mountainous challenge of our moment and wonder “What if?”

Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate the mountain tops, especially those in this great state, contain wonderful and breathtaking views and are a great source of inspiration. So let us look to those hills from which cometh our inspiration, our vision and our opportunity. My friends join me in a journey to the summit of our challenges so that we can in 120 days marvel at we’ve accomplished – together – not as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives but as Coloradans and chosen public servants. And together we shall look down from the mountain top and see a better Colorado, but better yet that God will look down and say well done my good and faithful servants.

Thank you for this tremendous honor, God bless you, God bless this great and august chamber and God bless the great state of Colorado.