Election 2004: votes signal 'a different day in Colorado'.

• Author: George, Mary

Tom Clark remembers waking up in a panic on Election Day. Within 24 hours, his job as director of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. was going to get even tougher--or a lot easier. "I hadn't been afraid until Tuesday, but when I woke up Tuesday, I was afraid," Clark said.

"I woke up thinking what it would be like to wake up on Wednesday and have to go out there and tell people, 'Well, there's very little money available for roads, and if you can wait seven or eight years there might be transit, and all our public universities are privatized, and it'll cost you $25,000 a year to send a kid to college--but this is a great place.'"

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Election Day passed. So did Clark's worst-case scenario.

In a state that had climbed to second in the nation in job growth in 2001, then dove to 49th in 2003, Election Day offered several opportunities for Colorado to leapfrog back to the top.

Voters took advantage of most of them.

George W. Bush--the candidate of Colorado business--won the presidency. As long as the national recovery holds up, observers agree, Colorado's recovery will continue. And as long as Bush remains bullish on defense, that sector of Colorado's economy will benefit, too.

Locally, Front Range voters then approved two monumental taxes seen as "great-city" builders.

The $4.7-billion FasTracks package will upgrade regional transit and add 119 miles of new rail line. The extension to the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District tax, seen nationally as a model for funding museums and the arts, will continue collecting $35 million a year until 2012.

FasTracks and SCFD are sure bets for raising Colorado's business profile, but another election result has just as much hope pinned to it--and far less certainty. Colorado's state budget has been strangling in a noose of constitutionally dictated spending constraints. Now voters have registered their displeasure with a Republican-controlled General Assembly unable to untie the knot. They voted in a majority of Democrats.

"I see the change in the legislature as very positive, and I'm a Republican," said Lorraine Anderson, a retired small-business owner, an Arvada city-councilwoman, and chair of the Denver Regional Council of Governments. "We had gotten so polarized that nothing could be done (about the budget). In my opinion, that is why we are trailing behind all the other states in the recovery."

Starting this month, Democrats will control both Colorado's Senate and...