Coffman: more than a money man.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Mike Coffman

THROUGHOUT MY 30 YEARS-PLUS IN JOURNALISM, WHEN I COULD, I HAVE TRIED to avoid, like a plague, my personally covering anything that had to do with public education or mental-health services.

I've learned from experience that covering mental-health issues can make you crazy, and that covering public education can literally put you to sleep. I confess I've nodded off at a couple of meetings.

But it was State Treasurer Mike Coffman's intervention in the St. Vrain Valley School District's financial crisis last December that raised Coffman's profile a notch in my political eye. He's a potential candidate for governor in 2006.

When I interviewed Coffman for a feature profile of him in this issue, starting on page 20, he admitted that much of the "treasurer's stuff" he was talking about--revenue projections, constitutional spending limits, voters' demands to reduce taxes and at the same time increase education spending--can make the eyes of whole audiences glaze over.

But a kid's education is another thing.

Coffman, although he doesn't have children himself, knew it was another thing, a bigger thing, when he went to bat for the kids of St. Vrain, who had nothing at all to do with creating a nearly $14 million mid-school-year deficit that almost shut down their schools.

Yet Coffman knew, too, that it was those 21,500 children who would have borne the price of an interrupted school year.

The state treasurer becomes involved in school finance because, through the office, the state lends school districts throughout Colorado millions of dollars interest free so the districts have enough money from January through spring to pay teachers and other school-district employees. It used to be that the schools got their cut of a county's property taxes in early spring, and that money paid the bills for that school year and the beginning of the next. But the state changed the dates of all Colorado school districts' fiscal year in the early 1990s, creating a shortage of cash flow that the interest-free loans now bridge.

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But St. Vrain finance officials called Coffman last November and said they had run out of money altogether. The officials, who no longer work at the district, said funds were running short but they didn't want to talk about that...