The Denver Gazette reports that Gov. Jared Polis has rolled out a new public-private council aimed at improving Colorado’s affordability and economic competitiveness. The council is supposed to study the state’s business climate, benchmark Colorado against competitors, and recommend policy, regulatory, and legislative changes. Very serious people will gather around very serious tables and produce, one assumes, a very serious PDF.
The timing is not exactly subtle. Colorado has fallen out of CNBC’s top 10 states for business, business leaders are increasingly pessimistic, and employers are struggling with rising costs, complicated regulations, and a cost of living that makes hiring harder. In other words, the smoke alarm has been screaming for years, and the political class has finally announced a committee to investigate the smell.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Colorado’s economic health is slipping, with the state losing ground in national business rankings. Apparently gravity needed a blue-ribbon panel.
- Business leaders cite rising costs, regulatory complexity, and the high cost of living as major problems. Normal Coloradans call this “Tuesday.”
- Polis says the new council will bring government and business together to develop a shared vision. That is bureaucratic for “we broke it collectively, so now we will workshop the consequences.”
- The council plans to use data to identify Colorado’s competitive advantages and recommend policy changes. Here is a free data point: treating every employer, worker, renter, homeowner, energy user, and taxpayer like an ATM with hiking trails is not a competitive advantage.
- Business leaders welcomed the effort and praised its focus on collaboration and action. Fine. But Colorado does not suffer from a shortage of collaboration. It suffers from a surplus of people collaborating on new ways to make everything more expensive.
My Bottom Line
This is classic Colorado ruling-class arson management.
For years, the Front Range political machine has piled regulation onto regulation, fee onto fee, mandate onto mandate, then acted surprised when businesses started looking at Colorado like it smells funny. Housing became painfully expensive. Energy costs climbed. Regulatory processes grew more tangled. Employers had trouble hiring because workers could no longer afford to live near the jobs. None of this was hidden. Nobody needed a council to discover it. People have been paying the bill in real time.
Now Polis gets to put on the pragmatic-businessman costume and announce a public-private partnership to strengthen competitiveness. Convenient. The same political ecosystem that helped create the affordability and competitiveness problem now wants applause for noticing it. This is the fire department arriving with a press release after spending a decade handing out matches.
Colorado government loves this move. Break something. Convene stakeholders. Commission a study. Invent a dashboard. Schedule follow-up meetings. Then congratulate everyone for making progress because the conference room had name placards.
The real test is not whether this council produces recommendations. Colorado already has enough recommendations to insulate the Capitol. The test is whether the people in charge are willing to stop treating economic growth as something to regulate, tax, mandate, permit, study, and slowly suffocate. Competitiveness is not complicated. Make it easier to build, hire, invest, produce energy, buy a home, and keep more of what you earn. Until then, this council is not a solution. It is a very polished acknowledgment that the people running Colorado finally noticed the damage.
Source: The Denver Gazette
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