WASHINGTON - As Republicans and Democrats vie for control of the House of Representatives this year, one race considered pivotal is for a newly created Congressional seat in Colorado.
The contest is important enough that each party's leadership picked the candidates in the race. For community banker Bob Beauprez, who owns and runs $319 million-asset Heritage Bank in Louisville, Colo., the recruiting to run for Colorado's 7th Congressional District began in February when Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, came to call.
"Tom Davis flew out here and personally recruited me. It was a pretty direct frontal assault," Mr. Beauprez said in an interview a week after he won the Aug. 13 four-way Republican primary with 38% of the vote.
Mr. Beauprez is not exactly a political neophyte. He was the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party until he threw his hat in the ring to run against Democrat Mike Feeley, an attorney and a former state senator. The new district they are fighting over is equal parts Democrat, Republican, and Independent, and the race is too close to call.
If elected, Mr. Beauprez wants to serve on the House Financial Services Committee.
"One would be most comfortable and most productive if you're in an environment you have some familiarity with," he said.
He has already gotten the nod from Republican leadership. During the recruiting session with Rep. Davis, Mr. Beauprez said, "we talked specifically about the financial services committee. Chairman Davis said it would be nice to have a banker on that committee."
Though Mr. Beauprez would be the panel's lowest-ranking member, his hands-on banking experience could catapult him into a senior statesmanlike role. That is what happened to freshman Sen. Jon Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee and former Goldman Sachs & Co. co-chairman.
Mr. Beauprez said his legislative priorities include bankruptcy overhaul, reductions in capital gains taxes and income tax rates, and deposit insurance reform.
"I have been a big proponent of increasing the base limit for FDIC insurance, and it ought to be indexed as well," Mr. Beauprez said in the interview. "I'd love to see [coverage levels] leapfrog forward to $200,000, but at a minimum we have to increase the baseline of $100,000 and then we've got to index it."
Mr. Beauprez, 53, got his start in community banking in 1989 after the sale of the cattle on the farm his Belgian-born grandfather established almost a century ago.
"After Bank One bought out our hometown bank," he said, "I saw the disappearance of hometown banks and thought there ought to be one. So we bought one" that was close to failure. He returned Heritage to financial health and expanded it to almost a dozen branches.
Mr. Beauprez earlier this year resigned as Heritage Bank's president to run for Congress. He would have to give up his Heritage board chairmanship if elected.
