Ad #3: Protect
by Ken Salazar for U.S. Senate
The Denver Post
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Ad sponsor: Salazar for Senate
Producer: Mandy Grunwald
Type: Defense
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ken Salazar put up this ad to counter charges by an outside nonprofit group that said Salazar was soft on polluters.
Americans for Job Security started running ads last week saying Salazar, as head of the state Department of Natural Resources, did not stop the Summitville mine from polluting the area and then as attorney general settled for a fraction of the cleanup costs. Salazar says the ad is false on several fronts. He says he got the most he could from responsible parties and notes that he was not at the department when the problems with Summitville started.
Salazar's ad does not directly address the charges by Americans for Job Security but touts his work on open-space and water-rights issues. It is unknown how much money Salazar will spend on the ad, which started running statewide Thursday.
Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters put out a commercial Friday calling the Americans for Job Security ad a "slur." The environmental group, citing many of the same sources Salazar used, said the ad will run on four stations in the Denver area but would not give the cost.
Salazar faces Republican Pete Coors in the Nov. 2 general election. The Salazar campaign ad is analyzed below.
Claim: "He won the longest jail term against an environmental polluter in our history."
Fact: Salazar obtained a 17-year prison term for a California businessman for illegally dumping dry-cleaning waste. It exceeded a 1999 sentence then believed to be the longest.
Claim: "Wrote the law to create Great Outdoors Colorado."
Fact: Salazar wrote legislation that, if it had passed, would have set up money to fund open space, parks and recreation. After the legislature killed the bill, a private group took it up as a constitutional amendment.
Salazar couldn't participate in his official capacity in the initiative but worked on it on his own time, said Will Shafroth, GOCO's first director.
GOCO supporters largely adopted Salazar's legislation for the proposed amendment. Salazar served nearly a year as GOCO chairman before leaving state government for private practice.
Claim: "Protected Colorado's water from out-of-state interests."
Fact: Salazar cites his work protecting Colorado from a dispute between Kansas and Nebraska over Republican River water and other disputes on the Arkansas River. He negotiated a partial settlement of a Kansas River dispute.
A court-appointed official reduced damages Kansas won in the dispute. The amount was cut from $52.8 million to $28.9 million two years ago, but the reduced amount was still a record penalty at the time.
State Rep. Diane Hoppe, a Sterling Republican familiar with water issues, said she supports Coors but concedes that Salazar has fought hard for water rights. "He worked pretty hard on water issues," she said.
