Redemption through the state amphibian
Written by Riki Parikh on February 29th, 2012 at 5:31 pm in Speeches
In 1985, a young Mike Johnston joined his sixth grade classmates to lobby state legislators to name the Colorado hairstreak butterfly as the state insect. Alas, the state legislature voted against their proposal, a defeat that young Mike Johnston has not forgotten.
This year, Senator Johnston is helping another group of students achieve what his class could not. He and Senator Joyce Foster are co-sponsoring a bill to make the Western Tiger salamandar as the state amphibian.
On the Senate floor yesterday, he urged his colleagues to vote in favor of the HB 12-1147, so the students were not defeated the way he was 27 years ago. (They gave it initial approval)
“I would ask for an ‘aye’ vote because we don’t want to crush these young children the way I was crushed when I was a child.”
The Denver Post‘s Lynn Bartels tracked down the hairstreak butterfly proposal:
Oh, and as for the hairstreak butterfly, another generation of kids succeeded in 2006 in getting it named the state insect.
