Horse trainer Jennifer Brooke died later in a hospital. Brooke's friend was seriously injured and a neighbor was injured less seriously.

Prosecutors are seeking to hold dog owners Jacqueline McCuen, 32, and William Gladney, 46, criminally responsible for the attacks.

But it's Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights that's responsible for the tardy response to the 911 call from the horse barn where the attacks occurred, Jim Zelenski, senior fiscal policy analyst for the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, told Alliance members from around the state March 12.

"This is happening in Colorado in every (form) of public service, and it's only just begun," Zelenski said.

Jim Zelenski

TABOR also is the device that critics say already has "ratcheted down" government in Colorado to dangerous levels.

Besides ratcheting down public safety, in Colorado, the state also withdrew money from county health departments and rural libraries as a result of TABOR, Zelenski said..

"Folks who see what government does are saying, 'This is unsustainable," he told Alliance members at a membership meeting in Madison.

Zelenski offered the following suggestions on how to make a Wisconsin version of TABOR more kid-friendly and less pit-bull-friendly:

See the Rocky Mountain News story about the tardy response to the pit bull attacks here.

For a Power Point presentation that details how TABOR has pinched government in Colorado, look here.

Rep. Gregg Underheim

Rep. Gregg Underheim 'Wisconsin Is in Decline' Several groups of legislators are working independently to draft a Wisconsin version of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), and in some cases even their colleagues are not being told what they're up to, Rep. Gregg Underheim (R-Oshkosh) told the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities March 12. Like poker players in a high-stakes game, lawmakers involved in rewriting AJR 55 are keeping their cards close to their vests, Underheim told city leaders from across the state. Underheim said the reasons Republican lawmakers are embracing a TABOR amendment are three-fold:

    Wisconsin is in a state of decline, with manufacturing jobs shrinking to less than half the percentage of the state workforce they once commanded;
    Wisconsin remains a high-tax state; and
    If some version of TABOR is put on the ballot, it is almost guaranteed to pass.

"Cities are walking into this poker game with virtually no chips," Underheim said. "Politically, you guys have not played this game particularly well."

Even the folks who have anted up for the poker game, Underheim added, are making little progress in finding answers to the following questions:

   Whether to put TABOR into effect with an expiration date so people can vote on it again once they see what it's doing;
  Whether to use the consumer price index or personal income minus some percentage as a revenue cap.
   How to avoid rewarding fiscally irresponsible communities that have spent to their heart's content and punishing the frugal ones when TABOR takes effect.
   How to recognize the transition costs of doing government differently under TABOR.

Mayor Tim Hanna of Appleton replied that it's the Legislature that has repeatedly said "no" to the Alliance's innovative and cost-saving suggestions.

"We've adopted legislative agendas, and at the end of the day, we don't get any yes's either," Mayor Hanna said. "We're two or three steps ahead of the things the Legislature is talking about."

Lasee's Latest
TABOR Will Be Amended, Sponsor Says

Rep. Frank Lasee (R-Bellevue), TABOR's chief sponsor in Wisconsin, wasn't invited to the meeting. However, he said he couldn't attend anyway because he was meeting with TABOR supporters.  He did issue a statement that was distributed at the meeting.

Lasee said that a one-paragraph amendment he has drafted to the lengthy AJR 55 would solve at least two of the problems that critics have cited.The amendment would exclude from TABOR requirements the following: cash-flow borrowing, economic development (tax incremental financing) bonds and borrowing whose debt service does not exceed spending limits.

Jim Zelenski, senior fiscal policy analyst for the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, said the amendment would help reduce TABOR's negative impacts.

Lasee also said spending limits for cities, villagers, towns and counties under AJR 55 would be "more generous" than the limits of the expenditure restraint program, under which all qualifying Alliance members have operated for years. He rejected the notion that AJR 55 could be applied only to state government.

If that happens, "we will further withdraw aids from the local governments, create more mandates that are unfunded and give you additional means to raise taxes," Lasee said. "And we'll blame you for it."

Lasee criticized the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities for providing the public   with "only negative information concerning Wisconsin's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, instead of being fair and unbiased.

"Shame on you, Wisconsin Alliance of Cities, for only providing one side of the issue," Lasee said. (For a copy of his statement, in Adobe Acrobat format, please click here.)

Alliance Responds

In an attempt to provide balance to the biased and factually deficient information on AJR 55 being distributed by supporters of the measure, the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities has provided its members and the public with extensive data on the negative effects of Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights.

There is no Wisconsin Taxpayers Bill of Rights, so its effects cannot be measured, and to our knowledge, with two exceptions limited to school aids and university funding, there have been no studies of the effects AJR 55 would have had on state and local government had it been adopted in the  past. See Zelenski's fifth bullet point above. [For news reports on the studies, see the links below.]

Comments by TABOR supporters attributing Colorado's economic boom of the 1990s to TABOR, but failing to attribute Colorado's economic debacle since then to the same cause, were such an egregiously selective use of facts that the Alliance of Cities responded with the following:

• in January we ordered Google news alerts on "TABOR and Colorado." We can categorically state that there have been no stories or editorials in daily newspapers in Colorado that have been favorable with respect to the effects of TABOR there. We'll put a sample of the coverage on this web site soon.

• We studied the findings of two nonpartisan Colorado think tanks with impeccable credentials: The Bell Policy Center and the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute. To our knowledge, there are no groups with their reputation in Colorado that think TABOR is a good thing. Certainly we have seen none that have been quoted in the media.

• We asked Wade Buchanan, president of the Bell Policy Center, to 'Wisconsinize' a column he wrote for newspapers in California cautioning "Voters, beware" if a TABOR amendment reaches the ballot here. The guest column is here.

• We reported on the appearance by Carol Hedges of the Bell Policy Center before the Wisconsin Counties Association, which included some advice to TABOR drafters that mirrored Zelenski's advice above. See that report here.

• We submitted guest columns to Wisconsin newspapers that detail the Alliance's 4 R's program to reform government. Example here.

• And we distributed editorial comment from Wisconsin newspapers skeptical of the claim by TABOR supporters that the amendment would pave the way to prosperity and happiness in Wisconsin. Example here.

In an attempt to provide continued balance on the TABOR issue, the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities pledges to measure whatever TABOR looks like when it is reintroduced against the recommendations by Zelenski, above, and Hedges, here. And it pledges to hold legislative sponsors of TABOR and other measures responsible for their choices.

TABOR Tidbits

TABOR Gets First Wisconsin Study: Not surprisingly, members of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents are less than enthusiastic about dismantling the UW System. But that's what would have happened under a Wisconsin version of TABOR, a study showed.

UW System President Katharine Lyall told regents  that had a TABOR amendment been adopted in Wisconsin in 1992, it would have forced cuts in every one of the state's top budget items: school aids, medical assistance, shared revenues, corrections, and the UW.

The UW System, she said, would have been "effectively privatized by 1997" or earlier. Story here.

TABOR Gets Second Wisconsin Study: Had Wisconsin followed Colorado's lead more than a decade ago and been under a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, school funding here would be about $2.3 billion below the current $4.8 billion, according to a state Department of Administration report.

Under that scenario, Wisconsin would rank 47th nationally in spending per student instead of 11th, the report says.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story here.

Colorado's Higher Education Takes it on the Chin: Under TABOR, Colorado's tax support for higher education has decreased almost 25% while the state's public colleges and universities have absorbed a 16.2% increase in in-state students, Harry L. Peterson, a Wisconsinite who is a former Colorado university president, writes in a guest column in the Wisconsin State Journal. If the trend continues, public higher education for all practical purposes will seek to exist by 2009, he wrote.

TABOR, he wrote, is a radical idea that is simple but wrong.

"TABOR is not conservative or fiscally responsible; it is radical and it should be rejected," Peterson concluded..

Guest column here.

Meanwhile, University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman says it's vital to win Colorado's university system "enterprise" status to prevent further budget cuts. She told the Colorado Daily she's heard legislative leaders talking about higher education budget cuts that could exceed $170 million this year.

"That kind of environment could lose us our best faculty, and we'd never recover," Hoffman said.

Story here.

In Colorado, legislative budget writers got hit with more bad news when their chief economist told them Colorado is now facing a $610 million deficit over the next three years. Economist Mike Mauer said the deficit, originally expected to total $450 million, now has grown even higher than last December's projections.

"The culprit is lower-than-expected inflation," the Rocky Mountain News reported.

When inflation dropped below expectations, the revenue the state realized had to be returned to taxpayers rather than be applied to the deficit, as TABOR dictates.

"So if you have lower inflation, then even if you collect the exact same amount of revenues, under TABOR you have to refund more," Maurer said.

Story here.