BY FREDA MIKLIN
GOVERNMENTAL REPORTER
On October 4, HD 37 candidate Paul Archer sat down with us to talk about why he believes that he is the best qualified candidate for the job. The Villager also reached out to the other candidate in the race, Rubey Dickson, but she declined to be interviewed.
State House District 37 includes west Centennial, all of Greenwood Village, and Foxfield. After the 2021 redistricting, its 60,269 active voters are 45% unaffiliated and 44% are split evenly between the Republicans and the Democrats. The remaining 11% are affiliated with smaller parties.
Archer told us that his “breadth of experience,” consisting of 44 years in the business world, including 17 years as the owner of Automated Business Technologies (ABT), an office equipment retailer in Centennial makes him the most qualified candidate for the job. Prior to purchasing ABT, Archer “worked for Fortune 500 companies” as well as small businesses. He stressed the importance of providing excellent service to his customers at ABT because, “When the things that we support break, they are out of business.”
As a member of the Colorado general assembly, Archer would work to improve Colorado’s sales tax system, which is more complicated than most because 70 of the state’s 97 home rule cities collect their own sales tax separately from the state sales tax. It is an issue he has worked on as an individual for many years. Last year, the state implemented a new Sales and Use Tax System (SUTS) that is an online portal through which merchants can file and pay collected sales taxes to all home rule cities who have elected to participate in it (approximately 58 and counting). Archer believes, “It has to be so good that everybody wants to use it, and we need to continue to invest in it so it gets there.”
He is also interested in health care, explaining, “The Affordable Care Act promised three things. Reducing cost was the first and it has failed miserably at that.” Archer told us that all his employees get their health insurance through Connect for Health Colorado (CHC), the state’s official health insurance marketplace, since, “I don’t have a group health plan because I don’t believe in group health plans.” He did allow that, “The only good thing that came from the Affordable Care Act is that it enables the individual insurance market without pre-existing conditions being excluded.” Conceding that the cost of insurance through CHC has actually gone down for the 5% of the population in this state who use it (the other 95% are in group plans through their employers, Medicare or Medicaid), Archer pointed out that the actual cost is higher but is subsidized by the state, so it is a “cost transfer” from the state’s taxpayers to the individual policyholders.
If he is elected, Archer plans to, “Introduce legislation that creates a market in health care,” because right now, “We fundamentally don’t have a market in health care.” He continued, “I would introduce legislation to create market behavior in the health care system. When people start to behave like consumers, businesses start to behave like competitive businesses, and costs fall out of the system like crazy.” This would also positively impact the larger group health care markets, he believes, but it would require “federal waivers” from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
On the issue of crime, which Archer told us he hears constantly from residents he meets, he believes that cities are unable to fill the many open positions for police officers because they need to “reverse qualified immunity,” referring to the 2017 Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity law that requires political subdivisions of the state to fully indemnify their employees who are successfully sued for violating someone’s constitutions rights, except in the case where “the officer’s employer (usually the city council, in the case of a police officer) determines the officer did not act upon a good faith and reasonable belief that the action was lawful.” It is only in that circumstance where the officer “is personally liable for five percent of the judgment or $25,000, whichever is less,” if he or she is financially able to pay it. Otherwise, “the officer’s employer satisfies the whole judgment.”
Archer told us, “We’re down 200 officers in Denver, we’re down 70 officers in Aurora, we’re down 30 officers in Arapahoe County, we’re down 60 officers in Lakewood,” proving that law enforcement has become a less popular job, regardless of the reason.
The candidate is extremely concerned about housing, telling us that Colorado “has the fourth or fifth most expensive housing market in the country.” He noted that, “we are 195,000 housing units short, across the state,” thus housing should perhaps be viewed as “a matter of statewide concern” that should be addressed regionally to provide the necessary tools to tackle the “anti-growth policies of some cities” that allow them to avoid being “part of the solution.”
On the subject of water, Archer said that, “85% of all water used in Colorado is used for agriculture, 7 ½% goes to residences, and 7 ½ % goes to businesses, so, if we think we are going to solve our water challenges by rationing water to residences and businesses, that’s a myth. We need to use technologies to call to make our agricultural water use far more efficient.”
Archer shared that he supports TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) because, “It’s the one thing that keeps us from being California.”
fmiklin.villager@gmail.com