In today's Denver Post:Colorado State Fair champion Sen. Abel Tapia has spent eight years in the Capitol corralling money for the fiscally faltering enterprise while his engineering firm received nearly half a million dollars in fair contracts, records show. As the Pueblo Democrat rose to power atop an influential budgeting committee, so too rose the fortunes of his district's fair and the price tags on the contracts he received. Nothing known to be illegal happened in this case, and I'm not writing this to throw stones at Sen. Tapia. Rather than rehashing the details here, you can peruse the Post article. It just points to a problematic loophole in Colorado government ethics that needs to be resolved - because as the article points … [Read more...]