Mandy Connell Show, Patrick Neville, January 29, 2020
Station: KOA, 850 am
Show: Mandy Connell Show
Guests: Neville, Patrick
Date: January 29, 2020
Topics: 2020 Legislative session, public option, budget, transportation, sales tax on cars, Electric Vehicles, EVs, Comprehensive Sex Education, Education,
HOST MANDY CONNELL [00:00:17] Welcome to the 2 o’clock hour. I am here with the man who gave me my new Twitter handle. That’s right. It’s true. Currently, my Twitter handle is “Mandy ‘No New Pogo Stick Lanes’ Connell.:” Oh! Are you not plugged in? Dave, can you get his headphones plugged in for him please? Because at the beginning of the legislative — that was right before the beginning of trhe legislative session, House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, when talking about transportation, said, “We don’t need any more new pogo stick lanes!” And I thought that was downright genius! Genius, because we don’t! Patrick Neville, welcome to the show.
COLORADO HOUSE MINORITY LEADER, PATRICK NEVILLE [00:00:52] Hey, thanks for having me.
CONNELL [00:00:52] Well, thanks for saying yes. And I want to say this one more time, because I always get grief, and they say, “You never have the Democrats on your show!” We invite them, and they say, “No.” We are re-inviting them via e-mail, and when they say ‘no’ — and they always say ‘no’ nicely, I should be clear. It’s not like they go, “You jerk! We’re not –.” They say ‘no’ very nicely. But we’re going to publish those refusals on our blog from now on. So, we can’t make them come on. I invited House Minority Leader Neville on, and he graciously accepted. So come on, and we’re at least going to get the Republican view of the legislature, and I hate to point out because it’s a painful truth, you guys have so few numbers right now that it’s almost impossible to stop whatever the Democrats want in the legislature. And there’s a 0% chance that Jared Polis is going to veto anything. Let me start by saying, what is that like going into work, knowing that — honestly– the deck is stacked against you from the very first day?
NEVILLE [00:01:55] Yeah, sometimes it can be difficult. So there’s a lot of different bills that we still propose knowing that they’re not going to make it through. And part of the reasoning behind that. You know, like I have a bill that got rid of gun free zones and K through 12 schools. Feel passionate about that. I still run that. And Newt is not going to pass. But we want to show the voters what we’d stand for if we were in power. So we still do that. But it does get frustrating that, yeah, you basically know that they have the all the all the votes stacked against you and you. I started off the session basically with a mantra of let’s do no harm. They didn’t ever. And last session, the last us a generation. How can we give people a break and actually not do any harm this session? So we’re looking a lot of defense. There’s a lot of big, big policy ideas that they have coming forward that are, quite frankly, really scary that we might actually be able to peel off enough votes to stop. And so that’s kind of our major focus is let’s not totally turn Colorado into California. Let’s still be Colorado proud and free.
CONNELL [00:02:45] So but you guys did bring some suggestions. You guys, Republicans have been talking about education quite a bit and education took a very contentious turn in the last legislative session, and one of the things that I will tell you, I mean, I’m a mom of a 10 year old, so I am around other elementary school age parents. And I have not heard people talk about a state policy more than I have heard about the sex education policy that was passed last year. And a lot of parents are incredibly upset that a school cannot make a decision to teach a different curriculum regardless of, you know, whether they want to or not. And essentially what the legislature did in the last session, if you didn’t pay attention, they said you have to teach a curriculum that covers a lot of very controversial subjects. And if you don’t teach our curriculum, you cannot teach sex education, which is insane. You can’t even teach basic biological sex education now without teaching about gay sex and transgender and gender dysmorphia and everything else, you have to. It’s just like the whole thing or nothing. And that’s a lot of people are really salty about that still.
NEVILLE [00:03:56] Yes. And so are we. So we actually put forward a package of 24 different educational bills. And all of them are really focused and centered on empowering the parents and the students, not just the administration. So there’s bills like things, you know, allowing 529 accounts to actually be spent on K through 12 education as well as higher education. There’s other bills to allow for parents to be notified about concurrent enrollment opportunities so they can actually leave high school with two years of their college already finished, which quite frankly to me is a much better way to solve this so-called student debt pressure. We have let’s actually get them through the first two years while they’re in high school. Other bills to just simply notify the parents and easy ways through online what the curriculum is. So the parents can actually research the curriculum.
CONNELL [00:04:38] And that bill, by the way, was a direct response to the sex ed curriculum. And it’s been sent to a kill committee, right?
NEVILLE [00:04:44] That’s correct. And a lot of these have. I mean, just some simple, commonsense bills. We even have some one bill out there that would give highly effective teachers a two thousand dollar bonus with the pot of money that comes from the states are not raising taxes. But if we truly want to reward good teachers, let’s let’s do it through a bonus. Let’s not just pass it to the administration. And they doled out to their new Facebook administrator or whatever they have. Let’s reward good teachers. We’re not against that.
HOST MANDY CONNELL [00:05:07] So, you know, we’ve got all these things on the table. What are we really looking at in this legislative session? Everyone, all the pundits, all the reporters that I follow are saying they don’t expect a lot of action, controversial action in this legislative session. And I would say it’s because everybody’s going to have to go back and run for reelection, at least in the House and many in the Senate. And nobody wants to have to bring up those things that are that are controversial. What do you expect to be kind of the big ticket items that come out of this?
NEVILLE [00:05:38] Well, the big things we’re looking out for is making sure that the will of the voters is actually upheld. So we saw the voters overwhelmingly defeat ceases when we want to make sure that they don’t try to come back through some different scheme and call a gas tax a gas fee and try to bypass the voters. So that’s when those big things that we’re we’re keeping an eye out on the next big battle that I see, that’s going to be a huge battle in the state. That’s probably the really most scary thing that I see is this public option that they’re talking about. Right. And that’s one of those ones that I think we actually do have some Democrats support against it. But the governor who really wants this thing and quite frankly, a lot of the Democrats owe their political success or their political careers to Jared Polis. And if he wants it, it’s going to be tough for them to say no. But I think we have a shot at killing it.
CONNELL [00:06:19] Well, let me ask you this, because we have a very we have a wonderful thing in the taxpayer’s bill of Rights that government can’t just randomly raise taxes on us if they want to. How in the world do you put together a public option when three other states that I know of, very liberal states, very small states, tried to come up with it and said, we can’t. It’s too expensive. One of the big Vermont.
NEVILLE [00:06:42] That’s right. You know, this is something the voters actually voted on with Amendment 69 as they voted against single payer. But all of the Democrats strategy is trying to lead towards single payer or at least the jury pool strategy is. So you trying to put this public option on the market. It would be sold in the current Colorado health exchange market as what they’re billing is just a different option to compete with the private insurance companies. The difference is the public option can tell a hospital you must offer this service at this price and you must take our insurance plan. So it’s conscription. It’s not voluntary. And quite frankly, the private insurance plans aren’t and be able to compete eventually. So they’re going to fold under and then the hospitals are gonna have to shift all their costs to the employer plans, which are eventually going to fold under. And then before you know it, all we have is one option left. And that’s the state option. And I would give it a matter of two to three years, I think, to let would happen if we were to pass that public option. And the worst part, too, about this, too, that we don’t even mention, is that if you tie this to Medicare reimbursement rates that the hospitals get, oh, that’s bad. Doctors aren’t profitable. You’re gonna see our best and brightest doctors leave the state right away.
CONNELL [00:07:41] Well, people a lot of people don’t understand the way Medicare distorts the health care market by underpaying for certain services. An easy example to understand, there was a vaccination and I had a conversation with a doctor about this in Florida. There was a vaccination that was covered by Medicare, but it was covered below the doctors cost for the shot. But in order to continue taking Medicare patients, he had to offer that shot. It was part of the services that they required. So what he ended up doing was this shot was like 60 dollars. His cost. And it was roughly that Medicare reimbursed 45. So if he had a private care patient, he would charge that private care patient 80 dollars. So it distorts the market for everybody else. To your point earlier, at some point it becomes too expensive for, say, I hurt media to offer insurance in the state of Colorado because that market distortion from the public option then creates health care costs that are ridiculous. And why would any corporation say it, when they could shovel everyone onto a public option that under pays for everything? That’s what I clarified that that objection.
NEVILLE [00:08:46] Yes, that’s a great clarification. And then on top of that, they have a bill out there that’s going to try to shut down the medical cost sharing service plans. So things like Medicare or your faith community medical sharing plans that quite frankly, a lot of, you know, private business owners rely on that instead of the insurance market, because why would they shut that down? Well, quite frankly, what I’m saying is they just don’t want any competition. So they’re they’re also adding other mandates. That’s going to increase the private cost of health insurance. There’s several different bills. They’re kind of piecemeal and altogether might be. Well, we’re just trying to mandate they offer HIV prevention or mandate that they offer colorectal screening as part of their health plan. But every time we had a mandate that’s increasing the cost of care market and Republicans are saying let’s let’s go a different direction. Let’s actually bring some trip pricing transparency at the point of sale into the market system. That’s kind of what President Trump has done, too, with his administration moves. And then we’d actually have price convergence in the market where people could actually compare prices at different hospitals and actually shop around. And then what would really be great is hospitals would actually start shopping their own prices and being competitive with each other and they would actually drive down cost.
CONNELL [00:09:48] I did an interview with a guy years ago and I can ever remember his name, but he wrote a really fascinating article. He was a former hospital administrator and he said, look, you could do two things right now that would change health care forever. And one of them is force hospitals to publish their costs. That’s that’s happened now. That’s a mandate by the Trump administration. But the second part is and nobody had nobody gets to pay less than that published price. So you can’t have somebody negotiating for a deep discount. You can’t have Medicare negotiating for a deep discount. That is the lowest that a hospital can charge for that service. And he said those two things alone would make it so we could actually inject some market forces into the system and allow people who were having elective surgery to do a little shopping around. And I mean, there’s ways to make that work. Have you gotten any indication how they think they’re going to pay for this public option, which obviously they’ve not studied the actual cost of?
NEVILLE [00:10:44] Well, the way they’re actually starting it is just adding it as a plan on to the market, the current health exchange market. So people would actually have to go in and voluntarily for the first couple of years while there’s other still plans out there and accept that plan and then pay whatever rate they’re charging for that plan. But once they’re the only game in town, guess what? They can charge people whatever they want. And it would be a fee, not a tax. So they’d get a ride around the taxpayer bill of rights. And then next thing you know, we have single payer in Colorado.
CONNELL [00:11:09] But ultimately that money, if they set up this state run private insurance, that that portion that’s going to be paying the claims on this insurance. Where’s that money coming from?
NEVILLE [00:11:22] Will it come from the actual public option plans. So people that are signing up and paying for it, which they’re going to come out and say –.
CONNELL [00:11:28] No, that’s not going to work. I mean, otherwise every insurance company would accept it because they’re obviously going to accept everyone, right? Yes. I mean, you can accept everyone. So if you accept someone who’s on a very expensive plan because they have a lot of health issues. They’re gonna cost way more than their premiums. I mean, government doesn’t run insurance companies well. It’s why they hired private companies to run Medicare, does it? No one pay attention to this. I mean, this is just stupid. Well, you’re in my world.
NEVILLE [00:11:55] It’s a simple way for them to get around the taxpayer bill of rights because it’s not a tax. And then eventually, after all the other companies are gone, they can charge whatever they want to. The average citizen in our health care industry is going to be destroyed in Colorado.
CONNELL [00:12:07] What are the what’s the word on the street about the budget right now?
NEVILLE [00:12:11] Well, it’s bigger than it’s ever been. It is and has been year after year. So the word on the budget right now is the Democrats have already overspent 100 million dollars on the balanced budget as they go through the JVC process. So they’re gonna have to already do some some trimming, but that’s that’s trimming off of what they’re currently forecasting. I want to make sure people understand that, because it drives me crazy. When you were down the capital and and we’ll say we need more money for roads and bridges. And they say, well, what would you cut? We don’t cut anything. We’re still getting more money than we have for every other program across the state. It’s not a cut. So governments, the only way the only industry out there that budgets in a way that says, well, gosh, last year I got 100 hundred dollars. This year I asked for one hundred and twenty, but I’m only get one hundred fifteen. So I got cut five dollars.
CONNELL [00:12:54] Right. Right. Yeah. That’s pretty nifty. Let’s talk about transportation for a second. I happen to think transportation is an issue that people are reaching a boiling point on. I mean I can open up the phones and talk about the roads and we can have full phones for three hours and people just pissed off because if they live in a rural area, they haven’t had service in forever. If they live in Denver, they’re stuck in traffic half the time. And all we hear talk about from Jared Polis and the U.S. DOT executive director Shoshanna Lew is that we need to get people out of cars because our driving our cars is inconvenient and they want to put more people in multi-modal transportation and build more pogo stick lanes. So I know that the Republicans have come forth with a with a with a move to say, look, we need more general fund dollars and transportation. But what is going to happen with transportation this year, if anything?
NEVILLE [00:13:47] Well, I think we’re going to try to do what we’ve done every year and try to put more general fund dollars into the budgets. Basically grown general fund budgets grown basically a billion dollars year after year. And we have put less and less money in transportation year over year. So that the only here that we had actually had substantial amount, I think was 2018. We put four hundred million dollars in transportation money. Last year we only put three hundred. So if we’re going to but of course the Democrats would never say we cut transportation bright and a million dollars. Well, back to my previous point. I mean, this year, I think we’re going to argue for more of that. And then there’s Senator Lundin and Representative Carver. Have a bill out there that I think is really good common sense solution to this. If you look at the overall sales tax in Colorado, about 10 percent of the sales tax that’s collected is actually results from vehicle auto sales. So why don’t we take that 10 percent, fence it off and put that transportation year after year?
CONNELL [00:14:37] Oh, that’d be fantastic. So what does that number look like? I mean, have you seen the actual breakdowns of what that number might look like, say, in last year’s budget?
NEVILLE [00:14:43] It’s pretty significant. I think it’s I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to quote the exact numbers, but it would get us to a significant amount where we’d actually be investing some some decent dollars year after year. I mean, we’ve we’ve put forward some different programs like bonding for two billion dollars. Part of the problem with that is if you do that, you run out of there’s only so many contractors to work on, so many projects. Right. So we really need to make sure that we have a general fund commitment year after year so that we can actually start building this out because the Democrats have ignored ignored the transportation problem for the last decade at least, and probably save in the decade before or, you know, in the early 90s, it was ignored, too. And Owens administration had to come in and kind of fix it in the 2000s and then they’ve ignored it since. So we’re just we need concrete and pavement. That’s quite frankly, what’s going to solve the problem.
CONNELL [00:15:22] There has been a series done in the Cherry Creek Glendale newspaper about C Dot and the leadership at C DOD and some of the design build changes, the changes that were made in the law in 2013 that have essentially led to two massive conglomerates out there, not Colorado based conglomerates being awarded pretty much every contract for every state project. Is that something that we can revisit? Because they’re not being rewarded. They’re not being awarded on a low bid process. They’re being awarded on a design build process which favors these two massive conglomerates. And we’ve pretty much locked out Colorado businesses from being able to even bid on these projects. Is that something we can look at? Because I got to tell you. Does anybody feel like design build is working at the intersection of 470 and and 25 down here down south? Because I don’t feel like it is that jobs over big over budget and behind a year now. So it’s not working. Whatever the intention was.
NEVILLE [00:16:21] That’s right. And another problem you have with that, too, is the move to design build, which makes the contractors actually have to do the designing and the building. But then we still have this. You got engineers in there. So I’m quite for I don’t know what the what are they doing? Our job is they’re probably just adding more red tape to the contractors. And another thing we need to look at doing two and a lot of this wouldn’t even take laws. This just could be fixed within the administration is actually cutting these projects into different segments. So you could actually have some more smaller vendors competing for these projects. So you take a look at the gap. There’s several different miles. But if you were able to compete them, you know, cut them into segments and put those out different segments, you might get more bids in. But that is part of the problem, right? There’s really only two people that qualify under the current structure,.
CONNELL [00:17:02] And that’s crap. So, I mean, that’s something that I would love to see addressed. We’re talking with House Minority Leader Patrick Devil. Can you stick around for for one more segment?
NEVILLE [00:17:09] You bet.
CONNELL [00:17:09] All right. We’re going to be back with him to. Continue our conversation.
[00:17:18] [commercial break].
CONNELL [00:17:19] [,,,] I’ve got. House Minority Leader Patrick Neville on today, we’re talking about the Colorado legislative session and you want to take some calls. I told him, I go, “These people seem reasonable.” Let’s see here. OK. Here we go. Eric, you’re on with with Patrick Neville. What’s on your mind?
CALLER ERIC [00:17:39] So I am very reasonable. So, Patrick, I actually want to make a suggestion on something that would make every Democrat in the state explode. You know, if I go out and buy a Tesla. I could drive one hundred thousand miles this year. I pay fifty dollars in gas tax or the equivalent there up in only thirty dollars. And that fifty goes to the roads. I’d love to see the state legislature. I think a Republican should introduce this to make easy a fair pay the equivalent of a gas tax to the roads. Basically the equivalent of what their class segment would be.
CONNELL [00:18:18] What you’re trying to say is that electric vehicles should pay their fair share.
NEVILLE [00:18:22] Well, I wouldn’t actually, Erica, actually add to that, too. He didn’t even mention the 5000 dollar tax credit that they get when they buy the vehicle.
CONNELL [00:18:28] Well, I will I a thousand dollar car. You need that five grand back. I mean, come on, don’t be unreasonable here.
CALLER ERIC [00:18:36] And here’s the thing is, I know some Uber and Lyft drivers who are driving, E.D., who last year drove around 45000 miles and paid 50 bucks.
NEVILLE [00:18:44] Yeah, that’s right. And actually, they’re really they’re a lot heavier and actually more damaging on the roads as well. So we we have do have people that are running bills on that. I think Senator Vicki Marbles run a bill to get rid of the tax credit. And that’s actually one of the discussions moving forward is what can we do to actually make sure that they’re paying some sort of user fee that covers their costs for the use of the roads like every other vehicle does with when they pay the gas tax.
CALLER ERIC [00:19:08] Yeah, I think that would be a great idea. And every time I suggested that and various things, the people who love the Eevee connected, oh, we already pay more. And it’s like, no, you don’t understand how actors work. Registration fees work.
CONNELL [00:19:22] Eric, great– great suggestion. I appreciate that. Thank you. And it should be called the “end the rich subsidies” because, you know, if you’re driving a Tesla, you’re not poor.
NEVILLE [00:19:32] That’s right. Yeah. The people that are buying. Yeah. Aren’t near to the five hour tax.
CONNELL [00:19:36] Exactly. So end subsidies for the rich. You call it “the end subsidies for the rich bill” and the dare Democrats to vote against it. I’m just sayin because see, this is why I’m not a politician. I’m too passive aggressive. I would never make it. It would be terrible. Jerry, you’re on with Patrick Neville. What’s on your mind?
CALLER JERRY [00:19:53] I’ve got a question, you know, these bills, they pass all the gambling and the gas tax. The liquor tax, and they always say that the money’s going to go towards schools and public roads. Well, either somebody is not doing their math vacation, right. Or we’re spending way too much because it seems like a lot of projects, as you talked earlier, are budget is out to companies that don’t live in the state. You know, you had a comment a little bit ago about health insurance. I mean, things are getting so overrated in cost values that, you know, we have an issue up here to try. And I’m a contractor up here at Evergreen and trying to get the right people to work. People that want to work. I mean, there’s an issue here that seems to be building and building. And I don’t know what the answers are. But, you know, we try to live within your means that don’t overspend the way I was raised. But I don’t know what the answers are. But they keep promising all these scenes and we don’t see that even happening that I can see. So those are my thoughts.
NEVILLE [00:20:58] Well, Jerry, I think you’re right. If you take a look at, you know, especially like the marijuana that was passed, I think they said the first 40 million would go to schools. It does through the best program. But then a lot of it it goes to other different programs that are supposedly used to combat underage marijuana usage or you know what it is. Whatever reason they come up with the one of the big things I think we also have a big problem with in the state is the regulatory burden that keeps getting hammered on people like yourself. But then also state agencies, you look at their talk with the man who during the break about the prevailing wage bill that they did last year and how that’s actually increased the cost to do a project, a road project in the state. And then if you take a look at health care costs, there is a huge, huge problem with regular regulations in the health care field where you got private family doctors. They’re probably spending at least 30 percent of their costs just complying with regulations. And that’s time away from their patients, time away from them actually doing what they should be doing.
CONNELL [00:21:51] Or even worse, they’re selling their practices to giant hospital conglomerates. And we’re going to see a consolidation that sucks. I’m already dealing with that with my primary care physician because he he essentially said what you just said, like, OK, do I want to see patients or do I want to deal with all of the regulations that come along, the red tape that I have to deal with and the insurance that I have to deal with when I can offload that to a major hospital conglomerate, which then eventually narrows down our options in Colorado. So does that answer your question, Jerry?
CALLER JERRY [00:22:23] Yes, it does. It just you know, the cost of things. I went through a situation a year ago thinking, well, it kind of had a slight heart attack and I didn’t know what it was. I kept on working. So I went to the hospital later that day, put me in overnight, got out the next day at about 330. They ran several tests on the treadmill, blah, blah, blah. And that whole bill from the insurance company was over thirty dollars. And I’m thinking, this is ridiculous. So, I mean, it did the cost have gotten way out of control. I don’t know if a lot of it has to do with the parents that are going on, which I think part of it is true. Home people, I deal with them every day. And the price of materials are shot up through the roof. So you just you know, we’re going to get torn if these costs keep going up. I’ve got contractor friends up here that people look at it and they. We don’t want to build right now. It’s just way too expensive. And there are some that can’t afford and they do. So there’s the issue out there. And I just hope someday we get to the bottom of it where, you know, you can pay people. To what they’re working for, afford to health insurance. You know, it’s just it’s out of control, is it?
CONNELL [00:23:33] Oh, I appreciate the phone call. To Jerry’s that he just made. I was talking to a contractor maybe a month ago and he said the exact same thing. He said it is too expensive to buy build a home in Colorado because the regulatory structure is so expensive in and of itself and that a huge chunk of the house, the cost of a new house and of course, it’s embedded in the cost of the house. You as a consumer does not necessarily know this. A huge chunk of that is dealing with regulatory structure, dealing with permitting deal with processes, dealing with government. And he said he does not work in the new home field. He works in the remodeling field. And he said the regulatory structure is the best thing ever for my business because I can afford to remodel. I can’t afford to build a new home. That doesn’t bode well for us, especially in the metro when housing is at a premium right now. I mean that, you know.
NEVILLE [00:24:26] Yeah, that’s exactly right. You know, when you look take a look at you. You know, you mentioned that roads are one of the major issues we have in Colorado. But the other I think big issue out there is the cost of living. If you take a look at it, just a little simple things. Take a look at childcare, for instance. Child childcare costs through the state of Colorado have nearly double the number one. I was had my first kid. We had the best awesome, awesome facility we could find. And I think I paid a hundred dollars a month now for my my my youngest my youngest kid who’s now four. I think I pay over like fourteen hundred dollars a month. And if you take a look at it and you actually delve deep into it, it’s because a bill that they passed in 2013, they added from that bill that passed, they added 2000 pages of regulations on the child care industry. And so my where I send my daughter for childcare, she actually they actually had to employ one person full time, basically just to comply with the state regulations. I’m talking like little things like you’re not even allowed to have coats touch each other on the coat rack. So what I mean is it’s just so ridiculous stuff that you would never think of. And it’s all that’s being passed onto the consumer. And that’s so there’s several different examples, whether it’s housing or whether it’s cars and where this regulatory structure is just increasing the cost living in the state.
CONNELL [00:25:32] We haven’t even talked about the fact that the chickens are coming home to roost on SB 161, the oil and gas bill that was passed, even though the people of Colorado had soundly rejected the exact same bill almost at the ballot box before the legislative session. Is there any blowback happening yet? Because I’m getting both anecdotal and news stories that say Colorado has been named and no investment state by many in the industry. People are being laid off. People are reap re there. They’re, you know, moving their oil and gas industry to Texas and other places. Is any of that being discussed at the capital right now?
NEVILLE [00:26:13] Oh, yes, quite a bit. And I just even that the permitting process has become so cumbersome that we’re not seeing any new well permits happening and we’re seeing real layoffs. I mean, I think WHITING had a huge layoff in the state. Halliburton had a huge layoff on the West Slope. These are real people. I mean, these are real friends of mine that I’ve seen that actually have gotten laid off because of the Democrat policies.
CONNELL [00:26:31] But obviously, the Democrats are not necessarily concerned. That’s what they will do something about.
NEVILLE [00:26:38] That’s what kind of seems to be the case. And one of the things, too, is when you do something like that to an industry, you gotta understand, too, that I know where I live in Douglas County in Castle Rock. I actually my home is heated through natural gas. And so now one of the things we’re gonna see to it is natural gas prices increasing because we’re not doing any energy development and they’re not getting that secondary byproduct that actually heats people’s homes. Right. It’s not only our own gas prices are going to you know, your car gasoline prices are going raise. It’s going to cost you more to heat your energy into. So it’s just all these different little policies. We need to hold the Democrats accountable because it’s their policies. They’re increasing the cost of living.
CONNELL [00:27:09] I would love if you could just make a point of pointing out that the sex ed bill was passed and we were told it was absolutely necessary to take away local control on that issue. And yet all I heard was we’re giving local control back, local control as important as when it came to oil and gas. So that’s you can’t talk out of both side your mouth on that one.
NEVILLE [00:27:29] Right. And they said it was local control, but we’re not actually seeing that actually happen. Local Weld County can’t do exactly whatever they want. And so, yeah, it’s it’s one of those things they always like to hit that local control man mantra. But I always get skeptical whenever I hear local control, because to me, local control is my wife and I’m making a decision about our family at the kitchen table. It’s local control, not some other government entity making a decision for us.
CONNELL [00:27:53] Well, good luck in this legislative session. I mean, I like I said, we started out this this conversation by pointing out that Republicans are wildly outnumbered in the House and the Senate in terms of being able to effectively stop any of this stuff. I’m I’m sure hoping that conversations are taking place at the party level of a cohesive strategy for the next election cycle to maybe make back some of that lost ground.
NEVILLE [00:28:20] Oh, yeah, without a doubt. A lot of changes remain. A lot of. But I also want to tell folks that we really need their help, too, because we don’t have the numbers inside the capital. But if we get the numbers outside of the. Inside the capital, in testimony and hearings and things of that nature, it does make a big difference and that’s what actually gives us a shot to stop some of these ruinous policies.
HOST MANDY CONNELL [00:28:36] So you need people to go up there and testify about the negative impact of some of these things that are being bandied about.
NEVILLE [00:28:40] That’s correct. We need. We need him up there. We knew that’s when the media picks up on these issues and that’s where they start talking about it. And that’s what really keeps the Democrats in check somewhat.
CONNELL [00:28:49] All right. That is House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, who has graciously decided to stick around for of the day.
