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Larimer County commissioner Lew Gaiter hoping to be Colorado's next Republican governor

Posted at 9:30 AM, May 14, 2017
and last updated 2017-05-15 13:36:11-04

DENVER -- Lew Gaiter entered Colorado politics seven years ago when he was selected to complete someone else’s term as a commissioner for northern Larimer County.

Now the Republican says he sees many opportunities for Colorado, the state he’s hoping to lead as governor.

“I think one of the big opportunities is learning to work together. We have a lot of people in elected office who really want to do the very best for the State of Colorado,” Gaiter told Mitch Jelniker on this week’s Politics Unplugged“Our challenge is that sometimes reasonable people disagree and sometimes we get locked in those disagreements and those create chasms for us.”

Gaiter feels there are sometimes big differences between the state’s booming metro areas and rural areas he feels are often lagging behind when it comes to economic growth.

“The Gallagher Amendment is a classic example of something that is happening with the statewide property assessment rate being up. It’s forced a reassessment of the tax assessment rate,” he said, adding that the reasons for that are way too technical. 

“The bottom line the number that is used to determine what your property taxes are is determined statewide and it’s based on property values in the industry and how things go state wide. Denver is driving that. When you get to areas like La Junta or southern or even northern Colorado, those property values aren’t doing the same thing they are in Denver and what happens is you have some counties that have potentially looked at a negative result in their property taxes from two years ago.”

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Politics Unplugged airs Sundays at 4:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Denver7.