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Denver Lawyer Aims To Bring Down TABOR

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Aug 3, 2009 9:48 am US/Mountain

Denver Lawyer Aims To Bring Down TABOR

Reporting
Howard Nathan
DENVER (CBS4) ― Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights is about to get tested in the courts.

Denver attorney Herb Fenster says TABOR has changed Colorado from a representative democracy into a direct democracy and that, he says, is against the U.S. Constitution.

Fenster is fighting for more education funding through taxation. He says it's better to leave matters of taxation in the hands of the state Legislature.

"It most decidedly is not better to have the people at large decide questions of taxation and the reason for that is they lack the expertise to make good decisions about taxation. That's why we have legislatures," Fenster said.

"The state still has the power to tax, it just has to get the consent of the governed," said Douglas Bruce, the former state senator and author of TABOR. "That's what the Declaration of Independence was about when this country was founded."

Fenster says that with TABOR the Legislature's ability to help education through taxation is compromised, damaging everything from elementary schools to the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Pen Pfiffner, a former state lawmaker, disagrees.

"If more money is needed for education then it's the hard job of the Legislature to say we know we need to reprioritize within the budget the citizens have given us," he said.

Pfiffner said TABOR has also kept Colorado from avoiding the "chaos" in places like California where excessive spending has led to major state budget problems.

"There are 48 other states besides California that don't have TABOR and none of them look like California, so I think that's a very feeble excuse for not permitting the Legislature to do its most fundamental job which is to tax," Fenster said.

Fenster plans to file his lawsuit with the federal court in Denver in late September or afterwards. A decision could come in January.

TABOR is already being challenged by a state committee.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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