Richard Lamm, a former Colorado governor who successfully fought to stop the 1976 Winter Olympics from being held in Colorado even though they had been awarded to the state, died July 29 at a Denver hospital. He was 85.
Mr. Lamm served three terms as a Democratic governor from 1975 to 1987. As a state lawmaker and environmental activist, he campaigned against having Denver host the 1976 Winter Games, arguing that the Olympics would be too costly and would damage the environment. Colorado voters rejected spending state funds on the Games, and they were relocated to Innsbruck, Austria.
Denver voters later passed an initiative requiring voter approval for any future Olympic Games. Mr. Lamm once said he was treated as a “pariah” by the business community because of his opposition but that he feared the Olympics would be economically and environmentally devastating.
His legacy also includes a landmark abortion rights law and state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. The proposed amendment eventually fell several states short of full ratification. He also appointed the first woman to the state’s Supreme Court.
“Gov. Lamm took on tough issues, and he never shied away from civil political discourse and embraced collaboration,” Democratic Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement.
Richard Douglas Lamm was born on Aug. 3, 1935, in Madison, Wis. His father was a coal company executive, and Mr. Lamm attended high school in Pittsburgh.
He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1957, then served in the Army before receiving a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961. In 1962 he became an attorney for the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Commission, and from 1965 to 1974 had his own law practice.
He and his wife, the former Dorothy “Dottie” Vennard, married in 1963. Dottie Lamm is a women’s rights activist and a former Denver Post columnist and was the 1998 Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, only to lose to Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
Mr. Lamm served as a state representative from 1966 to 1974 before becoming governor. He was elected to three terms, before Colorado restricted governors to two terms in office.
He ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate nomination to replace Sen. Tim Wirth in 1990. In 1996, he sought the presidential nomination for the Reform Party, losing to Ross Perot of Texas.
Mr. Lamm swept into Colorado politics as a John F. Kennedy idealist but years later came to be nicknamed “Governor Gloom,” a realist focused on the nation’s future. As a legislator, he pushed through one of the first pre-Roe v. Wade state laws loosening restrictions on abortion. It became a national model.
“I decided that would probably be the end of my career, but it just seemed to me outrageous that you would force unwilling women to have unwanted children,” Mr. Lamm told the Associated Press in 1996. “I just can’t not fight for what I believe in.”
He spent much of his last term as governor writing and speaking on the fiscal irresponsibility of his generation and what he called the need to rein in immigration and curtail entitlement programs such as Social Security. He opposed the death penalty as governor but endorsed it after leaving office.
“Over the 12 years he was governor, he became more conservative, and I think the reason he became more conservative was because he learned the realities of governing and the realities of financially managing a government,” Nancy Dick, Lamm’s lieutenant governor during his last two terms, recalled at the time.
Mr. Lamm initially had the benefit of a Democratic House to help him pass legislation focusing on land use, equal rights, mining severance taxes and growth management. But a Republican wave overtook the legislature two years into his administration. From then on, he battled two hostile chambers.
After leaving politics, Mr. Lamm served as executive director of the University of Denver’s Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues and co-wrote several books.
Survivors include his wife; two children; two brothers; and four grandchildren.
— Associated Press
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