In Colorado, Rifle Is The Center Of The Universe

October 5th, 2006 at 06:59am Post Staff 43

Rifle, Colorado, is named for the weapon that won the old West, but it’s also the place where gubernatorial candidates Bill Ritter and Bob Beauprez had their own public shootout over the hot-button New West issues of immigration and natural gas development.

In the Rifle High School auditorium Wednesday, Beauprez, a Republican, says his Democratic opponent is on the hook for plea-bargaining 152 cases of illegal immigration and allowing the detainees to avoid deportation.

"They're aliens," Beauprez said. "They committed a crime. Get them out of here."

Ritter took his shots by claim Beauprez is one of the Congressional "dirty dozen" as voted by the League of Conservation Voters. Beauprez’s response: use mineral severance taxes and public and private and funding to improve wild habitat in other locations where energy has upset the natural order of things. He also called the conservation group a "left-leaning group that always targets Republicans in vulnerable districts and says they're bad on the environment."

"You can't change migration patterns," Ritter responded, “just because you tell elk to go to a different place.”

"I consider myself every bit an environmentalist,” Beauprez said, “and a real one.”

"We need to understand the energy economy absolutely needs to go forward," Ritter said. "But it should go forward in a responsible way."

Beauprez also had to answer for voting to cut the funding on the Natural Renewable Energy Laboratory outside Denver before President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech about the United States’s “addiction to oil.”

Beauprez spent the afternoon in Englewood with the President.

Entry Filed under: Environment, Politics, Immigration, Basalt, Snowmass, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Aspen, El Jebel, Colorado, Crested Butte, Steamboat Springs, Pitkin County, Rifle, Silt, Garfield County, Eagle County