First term Owens was elected as the 40th Governor of Colorado in the 1998 governor's race, when he defeated
Democratic opponent
Gail Schoettler by 8,300 votes (less than one percent of ballots cast). When he was inaugurated on January 12, 1999, Owens became Colorado's first Republican governor in 24 years. His platform was three pronged:
cut taxes, repair Colorado's aging
infrastructure, and continue
school accountability reforms.
Tax cuts Upon entering office, Owens worked with a legislature controlled by his own Republican party to push through the largest tax cut package in state history, amounting to $1 billion in rate cuts to the
sales,
personal-income, and
capital-gains taxes. Owens also championed, and eventually won, the elimination of the state's
marriage penalty. By 2006, the Owens administration estimated the overall tax cuts pushed through during his administration was around $3.6 billion. In the summer of 2002, when the
Hayman Fire and Coal Seam Fire ravaged much of Western Colorado, Owens made perhaps the first major press faux-pas of his tenure. Responding to a reporter's question following an aerial tour of the fires ("What does it look like up there?"), Owens said "It looks as if all of Colorado is burning today".{{cite news |url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E5D6103CF935A25755C0A9649C8B63 In November 2003, Colorado voters rejected Owens’ water storage initiative,
Referendum A, by 67% to 33%. The referendum failed to win a single county in the state, as opponents successfully savaged the measure as a "blank check". Owens would later joke, "it takes a particularly adept Governor to lose a water referendum in the face of a 300-year drought." While the initiative was supported by most Colorado newspapers and business groups, it was opposed by the environmental community and many on Colorado's Western Slope who feared it would lead to the Front Range using more Western Slope water. Leading up to the 2004 primary, Owens caused some controversy in the Republican Party by announcing support for
Bob Schaffer's run to replace retiring
U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, but then endorsing
Pete Coors when Coors later announced his entry two days later. Democrat
Bill Ritter was
elected in November 2006 to replace the term-limited Owens.
Referendum C In 2005, Owens faced what former governor
Dick Lamm termed "the test of his time." Conflicting budget measures in Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), which caps government spending, and the voter-endorsed Amendment 23, which mandates increases in education funding) combined with a nationwide recession to leave Colorado's budget 17% below 2001 levels. A "glitch", as Owens termed it, in TABOR prevented the budget from rebounding once the recession reversed. Owens angered some conservatives by working with moderate Republican and Democratic legislators to craft and endorse what became known as Referendum C, essentially a 5-year timeout from TABOR's spending restrictions. National conservative leaders such as
Grover Norquist and
Dick Armey publicly criticized the measure and Owens’ support thereof. Referendum C passed with 52% of the vote in November 2005. While it was endorsed by every major newspaper in the state as well as the state Chamber of Commerce, it was nevertheless controversial. Owens served as Vice Chair and Chair of the
Republican Governors Association, and was elected by his colleagues as chair of the Western Governors Association. He debated public policy in person including well publicized debates with Democratic Chair Howard Dean on the Patriot Act before the ACLU National Convention in San Francisco; with Dr. Larry Summers at the Aspen Institute; with former Illinois Governor George Ryan on the death penalty at Michigan State University; with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero on the Patriot Act at Northwestern State University; and with Justice
Adrian Hardiman, the former Chief Justice of the Irish Supreme Court on the death penalty at the
University College Dublin, Ireland. Owens was a regular participant and panelist at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, appearing in 2005 on a panel debating U.S. foreign policy with Senators
Joe Biden and
Chris Dodd. ==Post-political career==