For the past several years, the Independence Institute has named a Californian of the Year, a satirical “honor” for the person it believes is most responsible for trying to make Colorado more like California.
In 2022, the Institute couldn’t pick a single winner, so it chose co-winners: Robert Kenney, president of Xcel Energy-Colorado, and Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office. According to the Institute, Kenney has Colorado’s government in his pocket despite only having started his job in June, and Toor leads the pack of government officials who help Kenney make money off the backs of Coloradans by creating environmental regulations that cost people money.
Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, says that voting members of the Californian of the Year Academy split the vote for the two. “They feed off one another,” he says. “That’s the whole point of it: Xcel’s truly perverse relationship with the green for green environmental movement. There are a lot of environmentalists out there who truly believe in what they’re doing, and they don’t realize that they’re being useful, useful tools to this crony monopoly.”
See the full article by Catie Cheshire, December 7, 2022