Candidate Interview: Jeff Bridges — CO State Treasurer

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• Transcript

  Hi, my name is Jeff Bridges. I am the Democratic nominee for State Treasurer. Yeah, I think the Treasurer’s office can be the most impactful office in the state over the next 4 to 8 years, and the reason is that the treasurer manages billions of dollars, and right now those dollars are spread all across the country. They are in Wall Street in Washington, in mortgage backed securities. And I’m running to bring those dollars home and put them to work here in Colorado. I’ve been on the budget committee for the last four years. I’ve chaired that committee, and I have a Master’s Degree in Divinity. And you may wonder why that’s a qualification for this office. The answer is that I’ve always said the budget is a moral document, and it puts in black and white dollars and cents exactly what we value and how much we value it. And the same is true for our investments, because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And as I mentioned, that treasure right now is all across the country. It’s time we bring it home, put it to work. Solving Colorado’s problems, bringing down the cost of housing, utilities, investing in infrastructure in Colorado companies that is aligning our investments with our values. And that is why I’m running. Your money. So we actually there’s something called the Unclaimed Property Trust Fund here in Colorado for if you like, overpaid a Comcast bill and they never sent you the check back abandoned bank accounts things like that. These are literally your dollars. So they aren’t the tax dollars. You know the main treasury pool you pay your taxes in between when we pay state employees and send money out to school districts, that sits in the treasury pool. That’s the billions I’m talking about. These are dollars that literally are your dollars. We are the temporary custodians of them. And right now you have to like, go to a website, come into the office, discover that you have these dollars. We are not doing enough to proactively return money back to Coloradans that belongs to them. I’ll make that a priority as treasurer. I think I mentioned this in my opening. Right. We have a cost of living crisis here in the state and reorienting the office so that we are investing those dollars back here into the state, we got to put those dollars to work solving the crises that we have. There are huge opportunities to do that in the Treasury pool. There are also opportunities to do that with some other funds that the state treasurer manages to ensure that teachers can afford to live in the communities that they work as well. It means working with local banks, with credit unions, with folks across the state to leverage the dollars that we bring to make sure we’re having the biggest possible impact means working with cities and counties to invest in their bonds and their infrastructure, instead of just sending money out to Washington, D.C. There’s huge opportunity in this office addressing the cost of living crisis is the number one opportunity here. And frankly, if you’re running for office and you’re not putting the cost of living crisis front and center. What are you doing? Why are you running for office? Every every elected official should be using every lever they have to to solve this. This crisis that we have here in Colorado. So my my local government friends will not like this, but I think housing I don’t think we went far enough. And I think there are some ways in which the bills we passed maybe went too far. But the main thing that I think we’re missing from this is permitting the amount of time that it takes for folks who are just trying to build homes for people to, to get through these asinine permitting processes, that time is money. And it is in addition to the high interest rates that folks are paying, which I think the Treasurer’s office can do something to help that is driving cost. That is literally dollars out of the pockets of Coloradans that are trying to afford a home. And so if we can bring down the timeline on those permitting processes, we can bring down the cost for people across the state. I that is, we didn’t fight hard enough there. I was, one of the voices for local government on this. There’s some things that we did that I think worked. That one was a big miss. Besides the fact that the economists in our state are predicting a recession is like a 50-50 possibility. I think on top of that, you’ve got the the AI bubble. If it is a bubble, we have no idea what’s going to happen with that. The good news is that the treasurer is constitutionally limited to invest only in debt. So we don’t have any any exposure on the stock market really not in the Treasury pool. And I think that’s a good thing. That limits a lot of the risk in the current economy. But I’d say the bigger risk to go back to, you know, my opening statement here is the opportunity cost. If we continue to simply invest in Wall Street, Washington, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, helping folks across the country own homes and not helping Coloradans own homes, the opportunity cost of that, I think, is the biggest real risk here in the next few years. We got to put those dollars to work here in Colorado. The PERA Is a promise that we have made to teachers, snowplow drivers, state employees. We this is a promise and we have to keep that promise. We are on a path to full funding. I think that’s that’s really important to know. The legislature passed a bill that I think put the burden too much onto employees and retirees. I think the state had more of a responsibility to fill there, since it was the state that actually spent down a lot of those dollars, which happened before I was there. Governor Bill Owens did that because we were at the TABOR cap. But TABOR cap is a totally different conversation. For PERA we need we need to stay on track. We are on our way to full funding. I think once we get to somewhere around like 80, 85%, we have an obligation to start doing more to increase those cost of living adjustments. Those have been held really low. And I think we because we’re on such a positive path, because the legislature has shown so much dedication to supporting PERA over the last four years. The Budget Committee, I served on put more money into PERA than any budget committee in the history of the state. I’m extremely proud of that. So I think we just need to make sure we keep doing, keep executing the plan that we have to get to full funding. Housing policy. Right. This is this is cost of living is the number one challenge that we face as a state. And really, if we aren’t pulling every lever that we have to address it, like what are we doing? This is cost of living is high across the country. There’s no question it is uniquely high in Colorado, and housing prices are uniquely high in Colorado and especially in our rural resort communities. I mean, you look at it, housing prices in Cortez, in the change they’ve had over the last ten years, you are seeing housing out of control across the entire state, and we need a statewide solution to it. I think we need some more bold leadership from the Governor’s office on this. We need more bold action from the legislature and the whole reason I am running for treasurer, to make sure there is bold action being taken with the billions of dollars that this office can invest directly into solving that affordability crisis and making housing more affordable. I have a two and a half year old son, and I he is just he’s a little crazy right now. I mean, two and a half. He’s he’s got big feelings because he doesn’t want the egg on the same plate with his pancakes. And you know, he’s he’s just he’s so much joy that he brings into to my life and my brilliant wife Anne Marie’s life. That is that is the far more important part of my life. And apologies in advance to the people of Colorado, my family will always come first. It is where I get my joy. It is. It is what keeps me grounded in this work. It’s what reminds me that we need to be fighting. We need to be doing everything we can to make sure that families across the state have the same opportunities to succeed as we have enjoyed here in our home.