Tim Lewis Critiques Colorado's Archaic Government Services and Lack of Competition

What happens when the state government treats you like a captive audience with no exit strategy? You get a postcard.

That’s the central thesis of Tim Lewis’s opinion piece in the Vail Daily. He’s not talking about a vacation memory. He’s talking about the annual reminder from the state to renew your vehicle registration, delivered via snail mail, forcing you to log into a digital portal that feels like it was coded during the disco era.

Lewis uses that postcard as a metaphor for a broader failure in Colorado’s public sector: the lack of competition. If there’s no alternative to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Department of Revenue, why modernize? Why invest in user experience? The customer isn’t going anywhere.

He compares this stagnation to the private sector. Imagine if Amazon sent you a physical postcard every year reminding you to renew your Prime membership by manually typing in your credit card details. You’d laugh. Amazon would fix it before lunch. Instead, we get a system where "every single year... it never changes."

The piece pivots from mailers to mergers. Lewis finds it ironic that Colorado recently joined a lawsuit to block the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, arguing it would reduce competition and hike prices. From Lewis’s perspective, that’s a misdiagnosis. Competition in entertainment is robust. Between Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+, Hulu, and Apple TV, the consumer has more choices than ever. The real problem isn’t a lack of competitors; it’s choice paralysis. He notes that he now pays less for all those streaming services combined than he did for cable television a decade ago.

He points to Spirit Airlines as another example of misguided regulatory protectionism. Their merger was blocked over competition concerns despite the industry having hundreds of competitors. Spirit later shut down. Lewis argues that blocking the merger didn’t help competitiveness; it just removed a player.

The core frustration, however, is fiscal. Lewis notes that public education spending has risen dramatically faster than inflation over several decades, yet academic performance remains a concern. State fees have grown enormously. When he looks at where costs have outpaced inflation, the bulk of it is taxes, fees, and other government-imposed costs.

Meanwhile, our attorney general is busy protecting us from industries where consumers already have more choices than ever. But the services government itself provides — licensing, permitting, registrations — still feel unnecessarily archaic.

Lewis doesn’t offer a solution. He offers a critique. The postcard is a symbol of an organization that doesn’t need to compete for your business. It’s a reminder that while we worry about media monopolies, we’re stuck with a government that hasn’t updated its billing system since the 1980s.

For locals, the impact is simple. You pay more in fees. You spend more time on hold or clicking through outdated portals. And you get a piece of paper in the mail to remind you that you’re still stuck with the same old system.