Station:      KFKA, 1310 AM

Show:        AM Colorado

Guests:      Carlson

Link:          http://www.1310kfka.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=42&Itemid=60

Date:         August 31, 2012

Topics:      House District 50, HD-50, FASTER, fees, taxes, fundraiser, Evans, Greeley, Garden City, LaSalle, Redistribution, Isaac, Commission on Children and Youth, Governor Love, Governor Lamm, Policy Holders’ Advisory Group to the division of Workmen’s Comp, Judicial Review Committee, Greeley Stampede, 9HealthFair, Ida, Zach’s Legacy Foundation, Seniors, Fixed Income, Social Security, House Bill 12-92, Dave Young, Air Quality, Inefficiencies, Balanced Budget Amendment, Raising Taxes, Constitution, Represent, Frank McNulty, Ryan Call, Colorado Republican Party, Water Rights

Click Here for Audio

HOST TOM LUCERO:  Coming up in the next segment, Skip Carlson – State House candidate will be joining us.  And we’re able to come to you, every single day, bring you great interviews like the one we’re about ready to have with Skip because of our sponsors.

[plug for diamond merchant “Weiss Jewelers”]

LUCERO:  As promised, State house candidate, Skip Carlson, joining us in studio to talk about the campaign and many other activities going on.  Good morning, Skip.

CANDIDATE (HD-50) ART “SKIP” CARLSON:  Good morning, Tom and Nancy.   Bless your pea-pickin’ little hearts.

[laughter]

CARLSON:  It is good to be here.  What a great morning in Colorado!  You know, the only thing better would [be] a little bit of rain.

LUCERO:  You know, as I was coming in, I heard about the two feet being dropped over Louisiana because of Isaac and I thought to myself, if we could only have an inch of that two feet of rain.

CARLSON:  Maybe they could socialize rain.

[laughter]

LUCERO:  Redistribute the rain.

CARLSON:  Redistribute rain—would that not be a good idea?  Let’s go send a plane down there and bring some of this up.  That –

LUCERO:  And the sun, and the wind, and then the solar –

CARLSON:  Oh, we don’t want to [re]distribute our sun!  Three hundred and forty-some days of sun in Greeley—who else has that?

LUCERO:  Are you running for the State House or the Chamber of Commerce?

[laughter]

CARLSON:  Well, my family has been here since 1876, but I am running for the State House.

LUCERO:  Nice.  So, Skip, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.  Who is Skip Carlson, and why are you running for the State House?  And – it’s House District 50.  What are the boundaries of House District 50?

CARLSON:  House District 50 is basically half of Greeley, all of Evans, and all of Garden City, and about 4 people in the rural LaSalle district.  So, it’s an interesting district, and a great district.  And a little about myself, I as appointed by Governor Love [to] our Commission on Children and Youth, and by Governor Lamm to the Policy Holders’ Advisory Group to the division of Workmen’s Comp.  I was on the Judicial Review Committee up here, so I’ve been active in politics for many, many years.  And Tom has seen me at many state conventions and many things like that.  I’ve been involved in the community, rather significantly.  [I’ve] been helping with the Stampede for about eighteen years, and my wife Ida and I ran the 9HealthFair for a number of years.  And just very active in the community.  I’m  right now vice-president of Zach’s Legacy Foundation, where we give away money to families who have children with cancer.

LUCERO:  Nice.

CARLSON:  If they have a child with cancer in treatment, and that child is in the hospital, wouldn’t it be terrible in the morning to have to get up and say, “Do I go see my child?  Or do I go to work and save my home?”  So, we pay for their home.

HOST NANCY RUMFELT:  That’s really great.

CARLSON:  We’ll pay their mortgage, we’ll pay all of their ongoing expenses, pat them on the back, and say, “Go be with your child.”  So, that’s what we do.  That’s a good Republican – a person who has a big heart and tries to give things away and help out the community.  But, I have been very, very involved in the community and why [did I chose to run?]  Well, I’ve been interested in that for a long time, but one of the main reasons I ran is the lady, who happened to be a client of mine, a couple of years ago came into my office and she said, “Skip, I’m going to have to [inaudible] insurance on my car.”  And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Well, I’m on Social Security.”  You understand, they don’t have any extra money, and she said, “Now I have to go pay this fee for the environmental test.  And then I have to pay this other fee for my car.    Last year, my license plates cost me about thirty-five dollars.  This year it is going to cost me a hundred-and-some, and I can’t afford it.”  So she said, “I waited for a month, trying to save it up, and then I called and found out I had another twenty-five dollar fee for waiting for a month!”

RUMFELT:  The late fee.

CARLSON:  So she said, “I just can’t.”  So, you know, being that hard-hearted Republican, I dug in my pocket, I said, “Here’s the money to go get the environment test done, and I’ll pay your late fee.”  And unfortunately, she went down to get the environmental test done – she runs a tank full of gas through that car, or she did, a month.  What a terrible polluter!  But it didn’t pass down there.  And they said, “If you put $750 into this and then come back and then even if it fails—“  And with tears in her eyes, she said, “Skip, would you do something about this?”  That’s when I decided to run.   When we’re taking cars away from our people on Social Security and taking one of those last vestiges of independence away from them, tripling their cost for license plates, — and my license plates went up, of course, on the vehicles that I have.  And I have several clients – I’ve got some doctor clients, some lawyer clients – just some successful people.  And I asked one of my clients who happens to have four nice cars, and I said, “How much did your payment go up?”   And he said – and we figured it out, “Oh, about 8 percent.”  Eight percent to three hundred percent.  What if some of these guys in the Democrat side of the State House got up in the morning and somebody said, “You paid $10,000 dollars in taxes last year, but because we want to call it a fee, we’re going to charge you $30,000, all right?”  That hits them – that hits — that fee for the license plates and so forth for my Social Security people hit them as hard as that would hit for us.

LUCERO:  Yeah.

CARLSON:  That’s why I’m running.

RUMFELT:  So would one of your focuses be working to repeal FASTER?  To–

CARLSON:  Absolutely!  I mean, if it’s going to be a tax, let’s make it a tax!

RUMFELT:  And to also repeal, like, House Bill – I think it was 12-91, that put in place a
lot of this [inaudible] in the House that the quality of air, and the emissions, and there was couple other bills like that, too.

CARLSON:  Yeah, we want quality of air.  We want all of those things.  We want that and we had even one of the Democratic legislators from Fort Collins – yeah, Greeley doesn’t need to be involved in this.  Let Greeley get out of the test, and our own representative, Dave Young, and I’ll say his name because I know Dave.  Dave doesn’t know – Dave, if you’re out there, I’m Skip Carlson and I’m the guy running against you.

[Anecdote about meeting a constituent who told Skip that Dave Young had been by, knocking on her door, and when she asked Dave who he was running against, he didn’t know.]

CARLSON:  Yeah, absolutely, we need – do we need additional taxes?  Unlike a lot of Republicans, I think we do want some things.  We just have to be careful.  First of all, let’s make sure we are spending our taxes correctly.  Then, let’s fix the infrastructure that needs to be fixed now, so that our children don’t have to pay for it later.  We’re real worried about this big, huge debt that the national government is putting on us and our children having to pay for it.  The same kind of thing holds true on infrastructure here.  If I don’t fix that bridge now, and [it] costs two million dollars, am I going to send that down to my child to fix five years from now at ten million dollars?  A good conservative says, “Two million now is a lot better than ten million later.”

LUCERO:  Well, answer me this question, Skip, because I want to make sure I heard you correctly.  You want to repeal the fees that were passed – Nancy went through the list – FASTER, and what Democrats did with the Dirty Dozen a couple of years ago.  We do have budget shortfalls in the state, but we’re required to balance the budget every year—

CARLSON:  Absolutely.

LUCERO:  So the state legislature is required to prioritize on spending.  Your number one priority is to figure out how to prioritize, how we get the [in]efficiencies out of government.  And at that point, after you’re done going through it, you’re unsatisfied that we have the resources necessary, you would support raising taxes?

CARLSON:  Oh, yeah!  I mean, this is — that’s business.  I’m in business.

LUCERO:  Okay.

CARLSON:  I ran my business, you’ve run a business.  You get up to a certain point and you say, “Okay, business has gone so far with this.  Do I have to increase my investment for my business to go even higher, to become even better?”  And you say, “I can spend this now, and it will cost me a lot less than spending it later.”  We have to, however, be very, very careful about that—very diligent about it and see to it that we don’t have the waste before, to start with.  But you may—you made one thing, you made a statement that a lot of people make, and  a lot of people make, and that is [as a constituent might say to their representative], “Your number one thing is to go down there and do–“.   No.  You know what my number one thing is, Tom?

LUCERO:  What’s that?

CARLSON:  According to this little thing I have in my hand – it’s called the Constitution.  I’ve given more of these away than anybody, probab—any individual in town.  I’ve given them about four thousand of them away, and I’ve ordered another two thousand.  This says in here, my responsibility is to be the representative of the people in my district.

LUCERO:  Yes.

CARLSON:  So my number one responsibility is represent the people in my district.  I’m to be a servant.  Am I running for an office?  No.  I’m asking the people in my district [to] hire me as their representative and to speak for them.  And that’s my number one job.  And then, after that, it’s to check all of those things , make sure that we’re spending our money correctly, make sure that things are being put in place correctly, so that we’re getting the most bang for our buck.  And that is what we really need.  We don’t need the people down there saying [with affected accent],  “I’m a representative!   I’m one of the most powerful people in this state!”  No.

LUCERO:  [laughs] I’ve got a –

CARLSON:  I’m a representative.  I represent Jose, I represent Jane.  I represent all of them.

LUCERO:  I’ve got a buddy down there who’s a lobbyist who’s got a great saying. He says, “I don’t talk to any freshman legislator until they’re thinking they’ve been elected president of the United States.”

RUMFELT:  [laughter]  That’s good!

LUCERO:  [laughing]  They do have that ego! Well, Skip, we’ve got about three minutes left.  Let’s hit – you’ve got a couple of events coming up here over the weekend and over the next couple of weeks.  Why don’t you give our listeners a little bit about where you are going to be this weekend so that if they want to catch you in person, they can do that, and they can track you down and they want to talk to you, they can do that as well.

CARLSON:  The best way to get ahold of me is to just go to skipcarlson.com.  It will be on there, because I’m going to be all over the place.  But, this next Monday, Labor Day, we’re going to be at all of the various parks in House District 50.  We’re going to start with Kiwanis Park, Sunrise Park, East Memorial, the parks in Evans, Lathan Pa—all the various parks.  And we’re going to give away ice cream just as an End of Summer celebration.  And we’re going to do that and talk to people in all of those parks.  And then we’re going to end up in Glen Myr. and if we have ice cream left, we’re going to give away ice cream there.  And I think we will.  We’re—we’re going to—it’s just to go out and talk with all of the people in House District 50, see what they want and hand them a little cup of ice cream.  Also, on Tuesday, the 4^th, we’re going to have a fundraiser at Randy’s Bar and Grill.  Frank McNulty and Ryan Call, the president chairman of the Colorado Republican Party are going to be up here.  And that’s a fundraiser for me.  And tickets for that are fifty dollars a seat.  Egh, I don’t like that, but it’s – that’s—

RUMFELT:  You’ve got to raise money!

LUCERO:  You have to raise money! If you want to win, you need money!

CARLSON:  I know, Tom!  I hate this part!  I hate it, I hate it, but that’s the way it is.  So, I’m telling you what, I’ve got an extra seat.  And if whoever calls in first, I’ll give them one of the my seats at my table.  You’re fifty dollar ticket is on me!

LUCERO:  Right now.

CARLSON:  Right now!

LUCERO:  So, for the first caller –

CARLSON:  You call in!  You’re a Democrat, I don’t care if you are!  If you’re from House District 50, that’s all.

LUCERO:  Caller number one, at 353-1310 or 877-353-1310, will get an opportunity to sit next to Skip Carlson Tuesday night –

CARLSON:  Tuesday morning.

LUCERO:  Tuesday morning, my apo—

CARLSON:  Seven a.m. to eight-thirty.   Seven a.m. to eight-thirty.   We’re going to have bacon, we’re going to have grits.  Can you imagine that?  Grits and bacon?

LUCERO:  Grits and bacon. You got to love it.  Speaker of the House Frank McNulty, State Republican Chairman Ryan Call will be there.  It will be your opportunity to mingle not only with Skip Carlson but Speaker of the House Frank McNulty and Chairman Ryan Call.  Give us  call.  Seven a.m., Tuesday morning, 353-1310, 877-353-1310 for your opportunity to join Skip, Ryan, and Frank.  Skip, in the last minute that we have left, final thoughts you want to share with listeners.

CARLSON:  Well, my final thoughts is, “What is my number one priority in House District 50?”  To represent, well, the people of House District 50, to be honest with them, and to go down there and if it’s a tax, I’m going to tell you it’s a tax.  If it’s a fee, I’m not going to do it.  Let’s just do that.  And let’s get it done.  We’ve got a great House District here, we’ve got a great town.  My family has been here since 1870.  Let’s keep it going.  We need more water.  We need all of the things.  That’s what we’re about.  But I’m about representing people.

LUCERO:  Excellent.  Thank you very much –

RUMFELT:  Thank you.

LUCERO:  –for joining us.  Skip Carlson, candidate House District 5.  You can find him at skipcarlson.com This is AM Colorado, Newstalk 1310 KFKA, with your hosts Tom and Nancy.  Now over to Joe, with a look at sports.