"I do it because I believe it's right," Frazier said, adding that he's not interested in controversy for its own sake but he's also not worried about making people mad.

Frazier, a 30-year-old graduate of Columbia College and the Naval Cryptology School, was a fellow in the state and local government program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  He has lectured about U.S. local government in China and is a member of Engineers Without Borders, a nonprofit that matches volunteer engineers with developing communities throughout the world.

The North Carolina native is married with three children who attend The Academy at High Point, a charter school he helped establish two years ago.

Frazier was first elected to Aurora's city council in 2003. He ran his campaign largely through television ads, which was considered innovative in the city at the time, and has built a reputation for being fiscally conservative but willing to work for changes in the city's approach to problems, such as hiring more minority police officers. 

Last year, Frazier was one of two residents to file ballot language for a controversial "right-to-work" initiative.

The question, which would toughen the rules for establishing unions in the state, will appear on the November ballot.  The measure asks voters to prohibit employers from deducting union dues or their equivalent from wages.

Supporters say the change would give workers a much needed choice over whether they pay for union representation, while opponents say the measure is designed to effectively cripple the state's already weak unions.

Frazier said he doesn't dislike unions but wants employees to have a choice of whether they pay union dues or their equivalent for union representation - like a form of optional customer service.

"If the unions are providing value - that is they're getting better working conditions, they're providing better wages, they're getting health care for their workers and the workers see that value - the last thing they're going to want to do is stop paying into that union," Frazier said.

Some union supporters aren't buying it.

"You tell me that's not a backdoor way to drop the union, to silence the voice of the union, to union bust," said Randy Rester, president of the Aurora Fire Fighters Protective Association.

The fire union considers Frazier to be too friendly with city administration due to his ongoing support of changes that would give the police and fire chiefs more control in the hiring and promotions process.

Last year, the fire union interviewed all the candidates running for Frazier's seat on council, except Frazier, before endorsing another candidate.

But Frazier said he's a friend to the rank-and-file in Aurora and points to his successful efforts to increase the police department's recruiting budget and to increase city contributions to the pension funds of all its public safety officers.

Nonetheless, Frazier thinks pro-union groups are driving efforts to discredit him.  He accuses them of distorting a campaign contribution issue, turning it into the opens record complaint that he is scheduled to address tomorrow in Arapahoe County District Court and into a larger smear campaign.

In April 2007, Frazier voted to approve a $9 million contract between the city and Carollo Engineers, an Arizona engineering firm, as part of Aurora's $750 million Prairie Waters Project.

Earlier that month, a group of public policy and project management firms solicited other businesses, including Carollo, for campaign donations on Frazier's behalf.  Frazier contends that he didn't know Carollo was among those solicited at the time. 

Carollo employees responded by contributing almost $1,500 last year in a series of $99 donations to Frazier's campaign for a second term on Aurora's 11-member city council.

Aurora resident Foster Hines submitted an open records request in February to Frazier asking for copies of his correspondence and other dealings with Carollo.

Although Frazier said he's willing to work with Hines, he said he simply doesn't have the requested materials because he didn't correspond with the Carollo employees who donated to his campaign.

And according to City Attorney Charlie Richardson, the city, not Frazier, is the legal custodian of records, so Frazier was not required to respond.

Hines has since filed the request with the city, Richardson said. 

Richardson is seeking to dismiss a pending lawsuit filed by Hines over Frazier's failure to respond to his open records request.

Richardson also said that he's searched the city's database and will turn over four documents to the court Thursday, documents he hopes will resolve the matter.

"There's no smoking gun," Richardson said.

Any records beyond that are Frazier's private documents, and the city is defending his right not to turn over private documents on principal, Richardson said. 

Frazier says the accusation of effectively selling his vote makes no sense and ticks off reasons:

• The city council vote to award the contract was unanimous
  


• The donated money was not a substantial portion of his $80,000 re-election campaign
  


• He reported the campaign donations himself

Frazier and a number of current and former city leaders also argue that Frazier simply didn't have the pull to deliver the contract because Aurora's bidding process is controlled largely by staff.  Frazier doesn't even sit on the city's three-member water policy committee.

"Personally, I don't believe [Frazier and his fundraisers] were trying to hide a thing, and I don't believe the contributions could have influenced any decisions related to the Prairie Waters Project," said Tom Tobiassen, who is the chair of Aurora's Citizen's Water Advisory Committee and a Democrat who has known Frazier in both the private and public sector for years. 

"My feeling is that the originators of the negative ads are simply trying to discredit Ryan in an effort to derail his ballot effort. I believe it's dirty politics at it's best, which I hate," Tobiassen added.

Frazier is adamant that pro-union groups are driving a smear campaign against him because he's supporting "right-to-work."
Frazier is even the subject of a commercial
paid for by Protect Colorado's Future, a progressive group that opposes the "Right to Work" initiative. The commercial focuses on the donations Frazier accepted last year from Carollo.
But Frazier is confident he hasn't done anything wrong and says those accusing him of selling his vote are being dishonest.

"It was a total abduction of the truth and re-engineered into a pure smear campaign," he said.
The accusation led to Colorado Ethics Watch, which bills itself as a nonpartisan government watchdog, naming Frazier to its top ten most-corrupt politicians list.
Despite the public criticism, there's one thing Frazier's supporters and detractors agree on: The part-time politician's future looks bright.

"I think he's smart and intelligent and family oriented, and I think he's probably got a lot of motivation politically and will go on to other things beside (city) council," said former Aurora City Councilwoman Kathy Green, a Republican.

Frazier's youth, along with his charisma, are also considered valuable assets in his political future.

"Ryan has oratory skills that equal or surpass Barack Obama," said Bob LeGare, an Aurora Republican who donated to Frazier's re-election campaign. 

"I think Ryan has a lot of potential if he chooses to make politics his priority in life," added LeGare, also a former city councilman.

Frazier won't rule out any future possibilities, including making a bid for mayor in three years when term limits will force the city's current mayor, Ed Tauer, from office.  There's also a chance Frazier will run for congress.

"If I see a chance where I can actually lead, I would," Frazier said.

But for all the hue and cry, do efforts at the state level have a chance of success and at what cost do they exact from the larger  conservative movement in a watershed election year?
"States rights" has been the battle cry of modern-day social conservatives over the last 50 years to oppose everything from racial desegregation and gay marriage to gun control.

But no issue has raised culture warrior hackles more than abortion.

Less well-known than the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling on Webster v. Reproductive Health Services set the stage for a series of state skirmishes on restricting abortion and influencing public opinion through constitutional amendments, efforts that continue to this day.

Webster is a Missouri state law that restricts the use of state funding, employees and facilities to provide abortions.

However, the real test lies in the language. The law added a strict Christian construct to the preamble of the Missouri constitution -- that life begins at conception and therefore unborn children have protectable rights.

Now 20 years after Webster became law, a similar initiative is being attempted in Colorado through a proposed ballot measure to amend the state constitution:

Be it Enacted by the People of the State of Colorado:

SECTION 1.  Article II of the constitution of the state of Colorado is
amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION to read:

Section 31.  Person defined.  As used in sections 3, 6, and 25 of Article II of the state constitution, the terms "person" or "persons"
shall include any human being from the moment of fertilization.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, only Missouri has successfully added religiously inspired conception language to its constitution in an attempt to negatively sway public opinion on abortion. Despite decades of trying, no other state has succeeded with this controversial approach. Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, Oregon, Tennessee and South Carolina attempted either legislatively or via citizen initiative to codify personhood for fertilized eggs but every effort was soundly defeated, reports Dionne Scott of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

To Anita Allen, a University of Pennsylvania professor in both law and philosophy, states run into trouble with these efforts when they attempt to apply the conception language.

"The Court has emphasized that Roe v. Wade implies no limitation on the authority of a state to make a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion," says Allen. "The preamble can be read simply to express a value judgment. A state is free through a referendum, preamble or law to state that life begins at conception but they don't have the constitutional right to regulate abortion or any other practice."

Supporters of Colorado's proposed ballot measure argue on the Colorado for Equal Rights Web site that "the simplicity of the text of this initiative speaks for itself."

However, Allen, an expert on privacy laws and ethics, isn't convinced that the measure is not simply a ploy to avoid the much more difficult persuasion campaign against birth control, emergency contraception, in-vitro fertilization and, ultimately, abortion itself. That debate has largely been long lost in the court of public opinion. A November 2006 Ciruli Associates poll reported that 56 percent of Colorado voters are pro-choice, a figure on par with the rest of the nation.

Thus, it would appear Roe v. Wade isn't going anywhere soon.

"It's a strategy," says Allen, of the proposed amendment. "And certainly a moralist could say, 'I really want to believe that from the moment of conception life begins and that that life deserves some legal protection.'

"But there are huge numbers of fertilized eggs that don't ever implant and implanted eggs that spontaneously abort. Plus, it raises the whole question about eggs that are fertilized outside the human body."

It's those not-so-simple questions that has some longtime anti-abortion activist groups lending less-than-tepid support.

The Colorado Catholic Conference refuted statements by Colorado for Equal Rights that the state's three bishops endorsed the proposal, according to a February press account. Further, Jennifer Kraska, executive director of the conference, raised concerns about the ballot group's structure, finances and tactics in she wholly dismissed any possibility of support by the Catholic Church.

Also notably absent is Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs-based multi-million dollar ministry and catalyst for much of the evangelical culture wars over the last three decades.

The prime backers of the ballot measure, namely American Right to Life Action, have a long and ugly history of calling out its putative allies. One spat last year resulted in National Right to Life yanking the charter of the state affiliate for attacking Rev. James Dobson in newspaper ads for not being anti-abortion enough. From the ashes of Colorado Right to Life rose the hard core American Right to Life Action, which is heavily engaged in petition-circulating efforts for the group Colorado for Equal Rights.

The splintering of what one would assume are allied groups over this ballot measure comes as no surprise to Clemson political science professor Laura Olson, an expert on religion and politics.

"Colorado is a real locus of religious right activism," states Olson. "There's lot of folks who are conservative evangelicals -- you would think that this is a core issue. If this initiative is having trouble getting support, I think it's a real commentary on how evangelicals are a lot more politically diverse than they're given credit for being. This is not the kind of tactic that a lot of people are going to sign on to, quite literally."

And that dissension among the ranks of conservative evangelical Christian and Catholic leadership leads to a whole host of questions -- namely, what if this thing does pass, then what?

Olson believes that the end point -- a total restriction on abortion -- isn't the real goal no matter how clever the political strategy may be to push for zygote civil rights.

"One of the things about the abortion issue more than any of the other culture wars issues that's been so interesting is that both sides get so fired up," she says. "But I don't think either side wants things to change in any real perceptible way. It's a mobilizing tool."

And high-intensity fundraising and voter turnout is what fertilized-egg activists will be doing leading up to the November election.

But beyond the boots-on-the-ground tactics, Olson raises an interesting analogy in the national 2004 push to pass state Defense of Marriage Acts (DOMA) as a strategy to for getting re-election support for President Bush from anti-gay marriage, religiously motivated voters." It was the perfect get-out-the-vote strategy for conservative candidates/causes up and down the ticket by pairing an important federal race with a red-meat state ballot measure for the GOP faithful to gnaw on.

So in the context of the "fertilized egg as a person" amendment, if the Colorado Secretary of State approves the measure for the ballot this year, will those highly motivated "values voters" sit out the presidential election or will they if not enthusiastically, at least consistently, pull the lever for the GOP's presumptive nominee, Sen. John McCain, a candidate who has had a great deal of difficulty making inroads with the conservative religious right?

Which seemingly puts the spotlight squarely on Colorado this cycle -- a traditional political swing state with a boisterous evangelical activist movement countered by an equally raucous libertarianesque civil liberties streak. Couple those forces with what is likely to be a very close 2008 presidential election, in addition to several other highly partisan state races and ballot measures, that will have the hard-core politicos salivating in the voting booth.

Read Colorado Confidential's continuing coverage on this controversial ballot measure.

Almost a year and a half has passed since the inmates were first transferred to the privately run North Fork Correctional Facility in Oklahoma.

"We didn't have the bed space in Colorado at the time we transferred the inmates out of state, and now we have expanded bed space here in Colorado," said department spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti, who noted that 120 inmates are being transferred today.

All remaining inmates are expected to be transferred from Oklahoma in the next four weeks.

"When returned, some will go to state facilities and some will go to private facilities. They'll all be back in Colorado," Sanguinetti said.

In October, state lawmakers and department officials toured the Oklahoma facility amid inmate claims of slow mail, unreliable phone service and problems experienced by visiting family members.

"It's a big hardship on the families to get over to Oklahoma to visit their loved ones," said Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, after the tour. "I would say the general population probably doesn't have much empathy for such a situation simply because the idea of 'They committed a crime, they got to do their time.'"

The University of Colorado graduate who occasionally skied on the Pro Mogul Tour wasn't big on controversy back in the day, but he didn't need to be. The competition was the eternally optimistic weekly Vail Trail, with the motto "Vail's Greatest Newspaper" beneath its flag.

Pavelich for the most part squelched locally generated opinion pieces, relegating the Vail Daily's commentary section to syndicated columnists and one time pulling a front-page story about a Vail ski executive stuffing the ballot box of a ski magazine reader survey.

The strategy worked, the paper thrived, and in 1993 he sold it along with the Summit Daily News to Reno-based Swift for untold millions (estimated by several sources as between $6 million and $8 million, although Pavelich to this day will neither confirm nor deny).

The Vail Daily in 2008, according to several sources with intimate knowledge of the company, is now a small-town paper with a big-time revenue stream (estimated at more than $12 million a year). It's part of a chain of corporate papers spread across the Central Rockies from Winter Park to Aspen.

Pavelich, in the meantime, took his money and headed west to the Bay Area, where he launched several successful free dailies, including the San Francisco Daily, which he still owns. But he always kept a house in the Vail Valley, in the posh gated community of Arrowhead, and even started the free Denver Daily News a few years back.

At a time when most newspaper publishers are downsizing, pulling back or shutting down, Pavelich - J.P. to everyone who still knows him in the Vail area - is expanding. In addition to the Mountaineer, he's launching a new free daily in Palo Alto, Calif., where he already started one paper then sold it to media giant Knight Ridder in 2005.

In California as well, Pavelich and his partners will compete with his former progeny, the Palo Alto Daily News, which he co-founded in 1995 with current Aspen Daily News owner Dave Danforth (who later unsuccessfully sued Pavelich for allegedly killing news story that might anger advertisers).

I first met J.P. in 1991 in the parking lot of Arapahoe Basin ski area, in an area known as the Beach. My brother and I sold Pavelich and his staff at the Summit Daily News a dozen or so cups and let them drink off our keg of beer.

Fresh out of J-school at Metro State College in Denver, I offered my services, and his first question in a later interview was not whether I could break the big stories or badger an uncooperative source into submission, but just how good a skier I was.

My tenure at the Vail Daily (1991-95 and again briefly in '97) was more like working for a college paper than reporting for my college paper had been, but J.P. sounds a little more serious these days. He's hired a former Vail Trail and Vail Daily reporter and editor named Stephen Lloyd Wood as the first editor of the Mountaineer, and he'll likely bring a decidedly conservative bent to the paper.

I hired Wood away from the Associated Press New Mexico bureau when I was editor of the Vail Trail after leaving the Daily, and he was a proud Republican back then. Pavelich has also hired self-proclaimed conservative and former clergyman Randy Wyrick, who worked for years at the Vail Daily, served briefly as editor of the Vail Trail and helped Pavelich found the Summit Daily News in Summit County. But Pavelich says his paper won't take political sides.

"I hate to label it," he said. "I think we're just going to try to cover the news and get the thorough story and people can judge for themselves."

But don't think it's going to be all news and no play. Pavelich had this requirement in a job post for his new paper on www.journalismjobs.com: "Tenacity and strong leadership skills are needed. It would also be convenient if you can appreciate living in one of the world's finest resort communities. Some people don't."

Pavelich's Vail Mountaineer, whose name is dedicated, he said, to the 10th Mountain Division soldiers who trained near Leadville and founded Vail, will launch with 5,000 copies by the end of its first week in mid-June and then bump up to 10,000 copies by July. He expects it will only be between 12 and 16 pages the first few weeks.

"We're not going to come out with an overwhelming product," Pavelich said. "We're going to come out with a small, well-produced newspaper."

And while all but one resort, Arapahoe Basin, has called it quits for the season and therefore no resorts are keeping track of snowfall totals, there have been a number of major winter storms in the past month, including one the last two days that could dump up to another foot at Vail.

They have a name for April and May in the mountains, when the snow is falling fast and furious above 7,000 feet and the lifts have been silent and swinging in the wind for weeks: It's called mud season. Only this year the mud has been covered by lots and lots of snow.

That wasn't the case back in October and November, when snowmaking systems statewide were working overtime to suck up fresh Rocky Mountain stream water and blow faux snow on a few runs under sunny, 60-degree skies.

They have a name, too, for those overcrowded strips of icy manmade snow that barely qualify as skiing: the white ribbon of death. That ghoulish term took on a little more meaning this past ski season, with the state setting a new record for skier deaths at 17.

Some ski industry executives question off the record the wisdom of making such a huge marketing deal out of being the first state in the nation to open for ski business each season. When it doesn't happen, or opening dates are delayed as they were this past season, the industry looks bad.

Vail pushed back its opening day from Nov. 16 to Nov. 21 this past season because there was virtually no snow. Then in early December the jet stream dipped over the state, and storm after storm plastered Colorado's high country for months on end.

Arapahoe Basin on Oct. 10 was the first resort in the state to offer snow riding - the earliest opening in its 61-year history - but for nearly two months the conditions were high and mostly dry. Now A-Basin is still open with a 59-inch packed base and five inches of new snow as of this morning, but most people on Colorado's Front Range have moved on to golf and cycling season.

"Yesterday was 70 degrees [in Denver], so a lot of people think about moving on to the next sport or activity," said Nick Bohnenkamp, spokesman for Colorado Ski Country USA, an industry trade group. "I see where you're coming from with early-season conditions versus late-season conditions, but it boils down a lot to supply and demand."

And in late fall there tends to be a lot of pent-up demand. Some industry insiders say that's the result of marketing efforts aimed at stirring up interest at a time of year when the mountains are often in the grips of Indian summer. The proliferation of snowmaking systems since the 1980s has bolstered the expectation of early openings.

"There's a lot of publicity behind that race [to open early], and it gets the word out that Colorado is open for skiing or riding, so whether it's A-basin or Loveland or whoever opens first, it really helps the state as a whole," Bohnenkamp said. "It gets people thinking about skiing."

But Ryan Bidwell, whose Durango-based environmental group, Colorado Wild, heads up the Ski Area Citizens Coalition, said that race is a bit contrived.

"Snowmaking is one of the most energy-intensive things that ski resorts do in terms of the amount of electricity and water use during a time of year when there doesn't tend to be a lot of excess water around in the late fall, so it is an environmental concern," Bidwell said. "And it is just sort of a race from a marketing perspective to see who can open first or get the most terrain open first to steal some of those early-season-skier days."

But most Colorado ski resorts operate on federal land under special-use permits from the U.S. Forest Service. Those permits often call for resorts to shut down by certain dates in late April or early May.

"There is a reason that the Forest Service requests that ski areas close when they do, and that's so that as wildlife starts moving back up into the mountains, they have some reprieve from heavy recreational use during the springtime," Bidwell said.

A few resorts, such as Aspen Highlands, were able to stay open a couple of extra weekends because of the still-deep snowpack, but Vail had to shut down when it did because there simply weren't enough workers to keep things going.

So while a glance out the window reveals a scene straight out of January, most snow riders have visions of mountain bikes dancing through their heads, and their skis will stay mothballed till mid-October.

Read Colorado Confidential's continuing coverage on the "egg as a person" ballot measure.