The Colorado Conservation Voters Campaign Fund unveiled a new television campaign Monday to counter a Western Skies Coalition ad that inaccurately portrayed State Sen. Shawn Mitchell (R-Broomfield) as a champion of renewable energy.
The ad features a gloomy-looking Mitchell with a wind turbine in the background that creaks to a halt and one by one loses its blades as a narrator cites Mitchell’s four “no” votes on the renewable energy standard that finally passed in 2007, as well as opposition to efficiency measures.
“There are few in the Legislature with a worse record than Sen. Mitchell when it comes to support for clean energy,” Colorado Conservation Voters Campaign Fund executive director Carrie Doyle said in a release.
Doyle points to the $140,000 ad buy by a Virginia corporation, Western Skies, which has an office in Littleton and was registered with the Colorado Secretary of State by Sean Tonner of the conservative consulting group Phase Line Strategies.
Tonner is a former chief of staff for Republican Gov. Bill Owens, who is a former oil and gas lobbyist and is listed on the executive board of the Western Skies Coalition, as detailed in a series of stories on the group by the Colorado Independent last week.
