Hours after the Ritter administration filed a last-minute protest against a federal plan to tap vast natural gas reserves under Colorado's Roan Plateau, the governor drew a stinging rebuke from Republicans who have championed the site's development.

"With gas at $4 a gallon, our economy struggling, and tens of thousands of Colorado homes about to have their lights turned off because they can't afford their utility bills, the governor's decision to protest drilling Colorado's largest untapped natural gas reserve is just irresponsible," said Grand Junction Republican Sen. Josh Penry.

"We need leadership and tough choices to get us out of this energy debacle," Penry said.  "(Gov.) Bill Ritter's decision to take his marbles and go back to the Governor's Mansion because the federal government didn't do everything he asked is not leadership."

Penry and several other Senate and House GOP members have been calling on the governor as well as Colorado's congressional Democrats to stop trying to block the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's plan for energy exploration on the Roan. The Bureau's plan has been years in the making, the Republicans point out, and already has incorporated wide-ranging input from Colorado's state government and other stakeholders on environmental and other considerations.

Underwhelming Colorado Student Assessment Program scores released today reaffirm the need to move forward with bipartisan education reforms enacted this year and to adopt yet other new policies, say some prominent Republican lawmakers at the Capitol.

Assistant Senate Republican leader Nancy Spence--who earlier this year co-sponsored Democrat Senate President Peter Groff's groundbreaking effort to give schools greater autonomy in meeting students' needs--said that bill as well as other policy changes are needed to help Colorado's kids turn the corner.

Spence, a veteran voice for education reform at the Capitol, also denounced repeated attempts by some legislative Democrats to gut the hotly debated CSAP testing program.
"They don't like getting bad news. Well, neither do I," she said. "Just because kids aren't making significant gains on the test doesn't mean you throw it out. You don't shoot the messenger, you fix the problem."

The new CSAP results are getting at best mixed reviews. A headline in Denver's Rocky Mountain News referred to the scores as "largely flat." One of the few bright spots showing improvements, Spence noted, was in Denver Public Schools, where the administration has implemented aggressive reforms.

Two of Colorado's Republican state senators rallied alongside other elected and community leaders in the nation's capital this week to protest federal energy policies that critics say squeeze the poor and increase the country's risky reliance on foreign oil.

The GOP's Sen. Mike Kopp, of Littleton, and Sen. Bill Cadman, of Colorado Springs, were among the featured speakers at the "Stop the War on the Poor" rally, organized by a coalition of minority-advocacy and other organizations. The more than two dozen leaders from the African-American, civil-rights, agricultural and consumer-rights communities joined forces to contend that federal policies raising the cost of energy disproportionately hurt the poor because low-income families must devote a larger portion of their income to energy costs than do others.

Federal policies that restrict domestic energy development also hold the country hostage to foreign sources, said Kopp, a board member of Colorado Veterans for Energy Security who served as an Army Ranger.

"For centuries now, America has committed her troops to fight and die on foreign fields of battle to secure a more, not less certain, future for all Americans," Kopp said after the rally.  "Today, that means securing an energy future by accelerating the production of all of the natural resources in our own backyard."

A leading GOP lawmaker on health-care issues wants a top-to-bottom review of the state's Medicaid agency, which has come under fire for trying to conceal accounting errors that resulted in its owing the federal government millions of dollars.

Sen. Shawn Mitchell--a Broomfield Republican who his party's ranking member on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee--says the irregularities reported at Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing may reflect 

A leading GOP lawmaker on health-care issues wants a top-to-bottom review of the state's Medicaid agency, which has come under fire for trying to conceal accounting errors that resulted in its owing the federal government millions of dollars.

Sen. Shawn Mitchell--a Broomfield Republican who is his party's ranking member on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee--said Tuesday the irregularities reported at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing may reflect an underlying pattern at the agency.

"Anytime the state bureaucracy winds up owing the feds millions of dollars due to its own errors, you have to dig deeper," Mitchell said. "Such a major miscalculation points to practices that may be widespread throughout the agency. State and federal taxpayers--and let's remember, we're both--deserve better accountability."

Mitchell also chided the administration of Gov. Bill Ritter for "attempting to soft-pedal" the controversy in a memo to audit committee members. The memo, from the governor's deputy chief of staff, denies any cover-up at the agency.

"Especially given such serious allegations, it is premature to clear the agency before it even has been thoroughly investigated," he said.

The Ritter administration's release last week of its touted government-efficiency study has left Senate Republican leadership underwhelmed--and asking why the governor spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on a subject that has been "studied to death."

Senate GOP chief Andy McElhany noted how even the governor acknowledged in a commentary in today's Denver Post that the past three governors all carried out similar efficiency reviews.

McElhany said the savings promised by the study's various recommendations are mostly "speculative and long-term." Even if realized, he said, any savings "will pale" next to the cost to taxpayers of the governor's decision last year to let labor unions collectively bargain for state government employees' wages and benefits.   

"This governor seems to prefer studying problems to solving them," McElhany said. "If the governor really wanted to streamline state government, he would start by repealing his executive order caving in to organized labor last fall."

That order will allow unions to do as they have in other states--demand higher pay on behalf of state workers, pushing up payroll costs and inflating the budget, he said. McElhany noted that has been the experience in Washington state after it granted unions collective-bargaining power only a few years.