Face The State Staff Editorial
Forget Roe v. Wade. Bush v. Gore is an ancient memory. Granholm v. Heald was nice - now we can buy wine by mail across state lines.
If the nine black robes on the U.S. Supreme Court rule the roost, it's not for a lack of competition from right here in Colorado. The court cases that have the most lasting impact on our families, communities and businesses are made by seven lawyers in Denver. For the second time in as many weeks, the state high court has ruled in favor of greater power for government and well-heeled special interests to the detriment of hard-working Coloradans.
First came the court's endorsement of labor unions paying staff to organize candidate campaign activities, a practice voters intended to ban when they approved Amendment 27, the nation's toughest campaign finance restrictions. Voters thought they were prohibiting union contributions to candidates, with the Colorado Constitution defining a contribution as "anything of value given, directly or indirectly, to a candidate for the purpose of promoting the candidate’s...election."
But voters were wrong, at least according to the Colorado Supreme Court. And a double-spaced court order allows plenty of room to read between the lines. The same state Constitution that permits unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to the benefit of candidates also promulgates strict limits on the contributions of individuals and small businesses.
Even when state law is enacted to limit government power, the court's liberal majority works diligently to find a way to ensure a favorable outcome for its most favored litigant. The beneficiary of the Court's latest good deed is the Town of Telluride, eager to condemn land on the "Valley Floor," a picturesque plot along the highway nearby. The problem is, the land is not within town limits, and the town's authority over the land is therefore limited.
Government attorneys argue the town's status as a "home-rule" municipality grants it authority to condemn the land, which lies in unincorporated San Miguel County, even though it lacks the power to annex it first. State lawmakers, led by Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, championed a law earlier this decade dubbed the "Telluride Amendment" that limited the so-called extraterritorial condemnations executed for open-space acquisitions.
Six of the Court's seven justices found that Mitchell and his fellow state lawmakers, acting to protect property rights (and not the land-hungry Town of Telluride) were guilty of violating the constitution. According to Monday's ruling, home rule cities cannot be limited in their exercise of eminent domain, even beyond their borders.
As previously reported by Face The State, leaders in the Town of Parker were eagerly awaiting the decision in the Telluride case, seeking the green light for a similar condemnation for parks land.
Roads, schools and police stations are all necessary pieces of public infrastructure that unfortunately sometimes require the taking of private land. For such a serious degradation of property rights to be pursued in the name of "open space" shows just how far Colorado's Supreme Court is willing to apply its flair for judicial activism.