Think Radio: Larry Don Suckla

(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from an interview on a current episode of Think Radio, a Gunnison Country Times podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to the entire conversation, follow the link below.)

Larry Don Suckla is the Republican candidate to represent Colorado’s House District 58, which includes Gunnison County.

What made you choose to enter politics?

I really don't want to do this job, to be honest with you. But I feel like it's necessary to do the job seeing the way that our country is going and the state in general, and I'd like to see some changes made. I was successful as a [Montezuma County] commissioner because I looked at all of my constituents as a part of my family, and I saw where they were having troubles, and I thought I could do a good job in government. That's why I became a commissioner.

You’ve identified private property rights as one of your priorities if elected. Why is that issue important to you?

I grew up on a ranch that my grandfather put together. He started with nothing and kept buying ranches, selling ranches … So I grew up with great appreciation for being in the middle of nowhere. … And that made me a very independent thinker, I believe, the way I was raised. But one thing that caught my eye was somebody came down, a biologist, and they said, “Well, we know there's no bald eagles down here, but we're going to search for some nests anyway, and my granddad said, “No bald eagles? I can take you to 20 nests right now. And what that taught me was that people that are sitting in an office don't really [know] what it's really like to be on the land, unless you're right there living it every day. That's why private property rights are so important to me. 

Water is another item in your list of priorities. What do you hope to accomplish to protect Western Slope water if elected?

I believe that the Upper Basin states [Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico] should have control of Lake Powell. I believe that if that was the case, we might have 60% capacity sitting today at Lake Powell, and then, where all of our winter vegetables are grown, which is the Imperial Valley and Yuma, Arizona, when they need more water for their vegetables, Colorado can sell the water out of Lake Powell and the Upper Basin — the Upper Basin in general, all four states — then they can take that money from the extra water they sold, which was theirs in the beginning, and they can use it for infrastructure in the four states, so that we can conserve more water, we can improve our water projects.

Affordable housing is a top priority for people in Gunnison County. Do you see anything that can be done by the legislature to take some pressure off?

I own a real estate company, my wife and I do, in Cortez, Colorado, as well as other businesses. There is no such thing today as affordable housing. Let me repeat what I just said. There is no such thing today as affordable housing. A developer comes in, [and] the way they make their money is they buy the land by the acre, and they sell it by the lot. You buy whiskey by the barrel, and you sell it by the shot. So you have to have affordable land to have affordable housing. And it's the government that actually is causing part of this problem. The infrastructure is so costly to put in the electric lines, to put in the water lines, put in the sewer connection, and the fees that you have to pay the counties. The solution to affordable housing has got to be, in my opinion, where you already have housing. So there's no affordable land in Denver. There's no affordable land in Gunnison. What there is, though, and I don't know about Gunnison, but there's parts of the community that are run down, that are drug infested. Every HUD foreclosure needs to be bought up for affordable housing, to create affordable housing. Every bank repo and these communities that are run down, that's where the developers need to go, [where] they've already got the infrastructure in place. 

In your letter announcing your candidacy, you promise to address what you say are “bad laws” that have passed in recent years. What’s an example of that?

I live in Olathe part of the time. We're a large farming community and we have migrants come over from Mexico, and they work for five or six months, and then they go back home. Great program. These are some of the only workers that want to do that type of work, and they're happy to do it. So our state legislators passed a law that after 56 hours, depending on your employees, how many you have, they get time and a half. … The workers hate it and the employers hate it. They want to work every day. They want to make as much money as possible, and then they want to go home to their families, and they want to hang out with their families for seven months and do it all over again the next year. So what the employers are doing, because it's cost prohibitive to them, is after 56 hours, they're not working on Sundays, and the workers can't stand it. They don't have anything to do anyway. They're over here in a foreign country. They want to work seven days a week. That law needs to be repealed, and ag needs to be exempt again from that law.

To listen to the whole conversation, click here.

(Alan Wartes can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or publisher@gunnisontimes.com.)