Government Underground

In the Denver Post’s Friday, Sept 10 front page story “Sanctuary City?…”, Denver Assistant City Attorney David Broadwell is quoted as stating that “I don’t believe there is any empirical evidence to support that [Denver is a sanctuary city].” I suggest that Mr. Broadwell and Mayor Hickenlooper review the empirical evidence provided by the Colorado State Auditor’s “Performance Audit 2009” on the implementation of SB06-090 (or, if that’s too much work, just read on, as I’ve done it for you). Those who ignore the biased spin of the report’s conclusions which try to provide cover for Denver’s sanctuary policies, and dig into the data will find all the empirical evidence they need.

As an actuary, I am familiar with analyzing data. I looked at the audit report (available online) and discovered that the data indicates an extremely high probability that the Denver Police Department is not following the law.

Some jurisdictions, such as Denver, are served by two agencies. There is the Denver City Police and there is also the Denver (County) Sheriff’s Office. In order to keep from stepping on each other, these two entities effectively split their duties with the Denver City Police doing more of the police work and the Sheriff’s Department doing more of the administrative work such as running the jails, etc.

Denver’s apologists like to aggregate their reporting, claiming 2,088 ICE contacts in 2007. The breakdown was that 1,979 (95%) of the ICE contacts came from the Sheriff’s Department (i.e., the jail, which reports anyone who is foreign born to ICE) and only 109 (5%) of the contacts came from the Denver City Police.

Denver’s rationalization for this discrepancy, as reported in a Denver News Channel report on September 5, is that “Broadwell said Denver interprets the law as applying only to situations where someone is taken to jail for a criminal offense, not for minor infractions.” This is in direct violation to SB06-090 according to the state audit report. The state audit clearly demonstrates the responsibility of law enforcement officers to report an arrested suspect to ICE on page 7 of the report.

The 1,561 officers (2007 data) in the Denver Police Department arrest people for many more things other than minor infractions such as traffic offenses (have you ever been arrested, or only ticketed, for a minor traffic offense?) In 2007, Denver Police made 8,347 arrests (CBI crime data). Despite 8,347 arrests for criminal offenses in 2007, the Denver Police Department made only 109 reports to ICE.

The data from the state’s audit report clearly indicate a pattern of consistent violation of SB 06-090 by the Denver Police department. Denver truly is a sanctuary city.

The GAO has confirmed that we are WASTING $142,209,675 per year of our Colorado citizens’ money through the federal surface transportation program.

The GAO has identified Colorado as one of 27 “Donor” states that pay more in federal taxes and fees than they receive in federal-aid. No surprise there, since reports from ALEC show that Colorado gets $0.81 for every $1.00 we send to Washington.

The federal GAO published a report in March 2008 on ideas for restructuring the federal approach on surface transportation.  One of the ideas outlined was to “Turn Back” surface transportation programs and revenues to the states. Appendix III of the GAO report details the implications of this idea.

Bottom line: Turning back the surface transportation programs and revenues to Colorado would allow Colorado to manage these programs itself, without federal interference or funding, without the additional layer of federal government redundancy, spending the same amount of money as is currently being spent on surface transportation today and we would actually need to charge $.0457 less per gallon in taxes than the federal government is charging.

The fed tax is $0.184  per gallon. We only receive back from the federal government $0.1383 per gallon through current federal funding for surface transportation. We could either deliver the same programs we have today and charge Colorado citizens $0.0457 less per gallon for gas, or we could keep the additional $0.0457 per gallon of gas and use appropriately (reduce “fees”, enhance road maintenance, etc.) within the state’s constitutional limits, if any, for revenue attribution, etc.

To give you an idea of how much money this is, I looked at the state’s revenue from motor fuel in 2006-2007. It was $684,598,000. Doing a back of the envelope calculation assuming all gasoline (simplifying here) that would indicate that 3,111,809,091 gallons of gas were taxed in that year. 3,111,809,091 gallons x $0.0457 = $142,209,675 per year.

I think the GAO has come up with a good idea – perhaps we should take them up on it? This would be an excellent step toward reducing the unconstitutional burden that the federal government places upon the citizens of Colorado.