Trail to the governor's office: treasurer Mike Coffman hasn't decided, but he's still cast as candidate.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Pricing for Profit

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"He's followed Bill Owens into the House, he's followed Bill Owens into the Senate, and he's followed Bill Owens into the Treasurer's Office," said Brian Vogt, leaving one more natural step for State Treasurer Mike Coffman to follow.

Vogt is the president of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce, an acquaintance of Coffman's who has worked with the treasurer when Coffman was a state representative in Aurora and then a state senator who represented much of the area that is now the city of Centennial. Yet Vogt acted a bit surprised to be asked about Coffman's chances of succeeding Owens in the governor's office.

Coffman himself said in an interview in August that it was still "too early for me to make a decision on that." Yet the news since, that congressman Scott McInnis would not run again for his seat in the U.S. House, and instant speculation that McInnis was preparing to run for governor in 2006, cast Coffman in the same news reports as a probable rival for the Republican nomination.

"It's certainly an option," Coffman said of a race for chief executive of the state. "The issue now that I'm confronted with," he says, standing in shirt sleeves in his unadorned Capitol office, "is I just see a vacuum out there in terms of somebody wanting to tackle the issues involving Colorado's long-term financial stability, from the standpoint of state government.

"If we do nothing," he added, "I think we're headed on a real collision course."

Pretty much anyone you talk to about Mike Coffman will say that he's not one to do nothing. And that means Coffman, 48, has a tough election to face even before he might begin a run for governor. "If we can go to the ballot in 2004 and voters will accept some changes, then we can prevent the collision from occurring," he said. He's talking about asking voters to change a trio of constitutional amendments--the Gallagher Amendment, which limits residential property taxes; the TABOR Amendment, Douglas Bruce's 10-year-old Taxpayers' Bill of Rights that limits state spending and prohibits raising taxes without a vote of the people: and Amendment 23, passed in 2000, which guarantees increased school spending for the rest of the decade.

"The interaction of these three," Coffman said, "is absolutely killing us."

He means killing state government--all the tax-supported services that distinguish one state from another: public school education, higher education, Medicaid (health care for the poor...