Memo to Owens: Gallagher must go.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Gallagher Amendment

IT'S TIME THE GOVERNOR OF COLORADO asks voters to repeal the Gallagher Amendment, a provision of the Colorado Constitution that, along with the Tax Payers Bill of Rights, TABOR, is strangling Colorado government.

Gov. Bill Owens has until Sept. 7. He needs to call the legislature into a special session before then and have it refer a measure to the Nov. 2 ballot that would repeal the 22- year-old limit on residential property taxes.

By doing so, Owens probably would be saving the state's higher education system; he would open the doors of Colorado to businesses throughout the country who might reconsider relocating here; and he would be showing the people of Colorado that their welfare is more important to him than his longstanding political philosophy, a special brand of Republicanism that countenances no tax increases.

But the governor needs to repudiate that philosophy, at least temporarily. The future of his state is at stake, and here's why.

The state legislature failed during the first four months of this year to come up with a solution to the stranglehold that three conflicting constitutional amendments passed by voters have affected on state government.

The Gallagher Amendment, which lowers all residential property taxes in favor of maintaining higher property taxes on businesses, is one very important thread tangled up in that knot. TABOR, which limits government spending and tax increases, and requires a vote of the people to approve a tax increase, is the second thread. And Amendment 23, passed in 2000 to force certain levels of state funding of public schools for 10 years, is the third.

Part of the reason the legislature failed to come up with a solution for the state's budget crisis is that legislators as well as other political leaders in the state refused to consider Gallagher a part of the knot that needed untying.

The reason they would not consider it was because Amendment 32, a proposed partial repeal of Gallagher that voters considered in 2003...