Governor Ritter's veto of 1170
| By Bobby - May 20th, 2009 at 8:37 am EDT |
His statement is below. Check out the conversation on Pols. What do you think?
GOV. RITTER VETO MESSAGE ON HOUSE BILL 09-1170
May 19, 2009
Honorable Colorado House of Representatives
67th General Assembly
First Regular Session
State Capitol
Denver, CO 80203
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am filing with the Secretary of State House Bill 09-1170, "Concerning unemployment insurance benefits for locked-out employees." I vetoed this bill as of 4:55 p.m. today, and this letter sets forth my reasons for doing so.
There are currently ongoing contract negotiations between the United Food and Commercial Workers No. 7 and several grocery stores, including King Soopers, Safeway, Albertsons, and City Market. The parties to these negotiations have been working hard for several months to try to reach an agreement. I believe it is ill-advised and counterproductive to enact legislation that materially impacts the relative bargaining position of parties in the midst of ongoing negotiations. In these troubled economic times, I am deeply concerned about the effect a strike or lockout of employees would have on grocery store workers and consumers across the state, and I am concerned that signing this bill into law will make a negotiated resolution of the grocery store contract more difficult, not less.
Therefore, under these circumstances, the state should not interject itself into these contract negotiations by enacting House Bill 09-1170 into law.
The merits of this bill, however, are worthy of future discussion and perhaps future legislation. In 1999, the statutory provision that House Bill 09-1170 would repeal and reenact was substantially amended for the first time in twenty-four years, upsetting the longstanding balance governing when locked-out and striking workers were eligible for unemployment benefits. The issue of how best to restore this balance is a debate that we should have. But the debate should be had and legislation crafted outside of the shadow of a major contract negotiation that has the imminent threat of a strike or lockout.
Accordingly, I have vetoed this bill.
Sincerely,
Bill Ritter, Jr.
Governor
Comments are closed for this post.
I don't like this decision on Gov. Ritter's part, and it is not the only one he has made that I don't like, but I do give him more credit, and cut him more slack, than many of my fellow Democrats seem inclined to do. Though our governor disappoints me at times, he impresses me at others, and I think that he is both earnest in his commitment to serve the state well, and as much of a Democrat as the state was, and perhaps is, ready to have as its governor. He is no Penry, or Shultheis, or Renfroe, or Bruce; Pols and others are wrong to speak as though he is a Democrat in name only, and we have no reason to continue to back him.
I think it is important not to demand ideological orthodoxy from our party: Democrats are sometimes wrong en masse, just as Republicans are more often so. What we want are reasonable people of good will who do their best to move us toward the goals that reasonable people of good will identify as the goals toward which we should be moving. Sometimes, that doesn't match Democratic orthodoxy, and sometimes those who anger our rank and file do so as a result of their own error. But sometimes they do so as a result of their own virtue, and the error of the rest of us.
I think that this veto was Gov. Ritter's error, and not the error of the overwhelming majority of Democrats who resent it. But I think it's the kind of error we can and must tolerate, even as we strive mightily to rectify its consequences.