Hard to move in any direction

Hard to move in any direction

May 29, 2001

Capitol Report
By Senator Jim Isgar

Week 2:

My first few days as a state senator proved to have both highs and lows. An early high occurred when I was sworn into office by Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey, amid friends and colleagues. Not long after that, however, I learned how quickly people can become irritated when the vacations and leisure activities they have planned would have to be put on hold for a time. At the governor’s request, we returned to work on one of the most contentious issues of the entire legislative session — growth.

Before I had familiarized myself with the Senate Democrats’ growth bill, I had been quite concerned about the impacts, particularly adverse ones, any growth bill could have on rural people’s property rights. But as I got involved in the process (starting the week before I was sworn in), I began to see how a comprehensive growth bill could actually protect rural property rights and values. With this as my goal, I eagerly entered into the debate on the bill in the Senate. I was gratified to learn my fellow Senate Democrats were receptive to my concerns. I discussed growth issues with representatives of the cattlemen and other farm groups to make sure we were in agreement on the important points. I thought we made good progress, reaching consensus on most key issues. Due to its complexity, the transferable development rights (TDR) program, an important part of the comprehensive growth bill, deserves additional study to see how it could best be implemented. TDRs have the potential to be of considerable value to rural landowners.

After working with a number of people, I even drafted compromise language for amendments that would have protected agricultural interests while maintaining the integrity of Sen. Ed Perlmutter’s comprehensive growth bill. As you probably already know, the compromise effort died. My amendments might not have changed the outcome at this point, but might have given us a better starting point for next time.

Shortly after the Senate adjourned, I was asked to be one of the two senators who would inform the governor of that fact. My first thought was that this is probably appropriate. At one time or another over the past two weeks, I had managed to irritate a few environmentalists, realtors, homebuilders, developers, farm groups, the fine folks across the aisle, and even some of my fellow Democrats. Why should the governor be left out?

When I returned to my Senate office, I had over 100 phone messages and faxes. They were all urging me to vote against SB 01S-012. Interestingly enough, all the issues raised in these messages had been addressed and negotiated to what I thought was a pretty favorable outcome. Unfortunately, there had been no opportunity to inform the general public of that fact.

After all the discussions of last week were over, I found myself looking forward to returning to the ranch and getting the branding done. If you’ve followed all of the growth battles, I applaud your persistence! This is such an important and complex issue. I want to make sure that the agricultural perspective is clearly heard as growth efforts are discussed again in the future. I’m finding that in politics it’s hard to move in any direction without irritating someone — even when you think you have solved their problems with pending legislation. Aw shucks.