BY FREDA MIKLIN
GOVERNMENTAL REPORTER
Photo by Freda Miklin
As the final weeks of the campaign wind down, we sat down with GOP candidate for U.S. Senate Joe O’Dea to talk about the concerns he has heard from voters and what he hopes to accomplish for Colorado and the country if he is elected on November 8.
O’Dea told us that people he meets “want somebody who will show up. Especially in rural Colorado, people are concerned about the urban versus rural divide.” He went on, “They are worried about the economy. People are feeling insecure about their finances. They’re worried about inflation. We’ve seen 401Ks (retirement accounts) take a 22% hit this year. People who are retired are wondering if they will have to go back to work, and they are looking at “the $1.9 trillion that they (the current administration) dumped into the market” that is causing this inflation.”
The candidate continued, “The loudest voices I am hearing are talking about crime, especially auto theft in our state and the fentanyl epidemic…We lost 1,880 Coloradans last year to drug overdose. Everybody knows somebody who lost a son or daughter to fentanyl. My wife and I have friends who lost a 25-year-old daughter to this two years ago. What people are saying to us is, ‘Why isn’t this border shut down? Why aren’t we taking on these drug cartels that are causing this fentanyl problem? Michael Bennet (incumbent U.S. Senator that O’Dea is running against), what are you doing for us? Why won’t the federal government do anything?”
We wanted to know what a Senator O’Dea would do to address these issues and others. He told us, “The first bill that I’m going to run when I hit the U.S. Senate in January is going to be directed at closing this border. We need to take this money that they’ve approved with the Inflation Reduction Act–billions of dollars– we need to redirect that. Instead of growing a bureaucracy of IRS agents, let’s take that money, let’s redirect it to the border, let’s finish the wall (that former President Trump talked about building), which is what border patrol is asking us to do. Let’s put more border patrol down on the border to help secure… Right now…not only is the fentanyl coming across illegally over the Rio Grande where they don’t have people, it’s also coming through the ports because they don’t have enough people to man the ports.”
He continued, “In addition to that, we grow our police forces locally. We take some of those resources and devote them to the local cops.” O’Dea shared that Paul Pazen, chief of the Denver Police Department, told him that he was 250 officers short of a full staff. We asked if the shortage resulted from a lack of resources or a lack of applicants. O’Dea answered, “It’s both. He doesn’t have enough resources to pay the cops accordingly. We are going to need to raise the amount of money we pay our local police. They are signing up for an incredibly dangerous job. My dad was a 30-year veteran of the Denver Police Department, so I understand being a five or six-year-old boy and wondering if you dad is coming home from his job… It’s more dangerous today than it was 40 years ago. We need to provide them the resources they need so they can pay these people.”
Another area in which O’Dea plans to introduce legislation if elected in November is, “Re-establishing energy independence.” He added, “And I would like to see us be energy dominant. That means getting the red tape, getting government out of the way. I believe we need to reform our permitting…Wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear; good, clean American natural gas. All those energy sources are being hampered by permitting that’s taking way too long.”
With all the talk about energy independence, The Villager looked to Forbes.com to better understand the issue. On March 8, 2022, Forbes explained the term energy independence this way: “A correct accounting would be to add up all of our energy production (oil, natural gas, coal, renewables) and then subtract our net energy consumption. The U.S. is a net exporter of coal and natural gas, so it really comes down to the petroleum balance.” Forbes goes on to say that U.S. imports of oil began declining in 2005 due to hydraulic fracturing (a/k/a fracking) and continued until 2020 when we became a net exporter of oil, which continued into 2021, despite fluctuations in demand related to less activity during the height of the Covid pandemic. According to Forbes, as of six months ago, the U.S. remained a net exporter of oil, coal and natural gas, hence we are energy independent. Both Axios and FactCheck.org agreed with that position, as does the Washington Post, but the Washington Post points to the high prices we are paying at the pump and makes the point, “If we actually want to get energy costs down, if we want to completely insulate ourselves from global price shocks, what we ultimately need is the technological investments that keep energy cheap, reliable and clean. That means investing in renewables… encouraging consumers and businesses to transition to electric vehicles, stoves, and heat. And especially, developing better battery technology.”
O’Dea moved on to the topic of water, explaining that, “Colorado needs water storage worse than anything right now. We are facing a 22-year drought and we’re not ready to accept some of those very unpredictable rains that we’ve been getting as of late because we haven’t done a great job on water storage. My company just finished the work at Chatfield Reservoir a year and a half ago. That permit took 26 years to get through. All we did is add 12 feet to an existing dam. We reconfigured the entire park around it because it was 52 years old.”
He continued, “My company, CEI Constructors, is up in Granby right now. We’re rerouting the Colorado River around the Windy Gap area. They’ve known, since 20 years after Windy Gap was put into place, that it was killing the fish. That permit started in 1997. We just broke ground in June.”
The candidate took issue with the overall function of the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process, which was designed in 1969 to “identify environmental issues, comply with environmental regulations, and involve the public throughout the process.” NEPA is overseen by the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). In 2020, a new rule was issued that required a one-year evaluation period for environmental issues, but that was revised in 2021 and again in 2022 to expand the ability of federal agencies to complete these evaluations. The policy is currently in flux. According to O’Dea, “We’ve got to streamline that process to put some limits on the time frames. He explained, “Permit reform is something that I hope to help with when I get to Washington. My business has been standing at the permit counter for over 40 years so I understand all the dynamics of what these people are talking about.” O’Dea again talked about the importance of energy policy, focusing on making sure that plans are in place before coal plants are shut down throughout the country, something our state has been focused on consistently. Still, he made it clear that, “We owe it to our world to be efficient with emissions. If we were to take good clean American gas and export that to Asia, there are scientists that are saying that that technology could help to lower worldwide emissions by as much as 45% in just five years because of some of the dirty energy that they’re using both in India and Asia…. If we were to flood the European market with good, clean American gas, we could push this war (in Ukraine) into a place where Russia can’t finance it anymore.”
The last topic we covered with the candidate was water. He told us, “I believe that people would rather have a contractor negotiating the Colorado River Compact, as opposed to somebody who is not really around our state very much and doesn’t understand our water issues, and doesn’t understand the agricultural side of our water needs here in Colorado.”
On the personal side, we asked O’Dea how he was going to keep his commitment to stay true to Colorado and not become a Washington insider if he is elected. He told us he has no plans to live in Washington, that he would commute there to do the job, but would come home on weekends to be here with his family and friends. He added that he was “not afraid of his party,” pointing to his “more moderate view on abortion than the party line.”
Finally, O’Dea told The Villager that the first thing he will do after he is elected is sit down with Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper, who is a Democrat, and talk together about how they can work on the issues that are most important to our state.
fmiklin.villager@gmail.com