Measuring the Impact of COTEL Intensity

A major characteristic of this analysis is the effort to capture variation in COTEL impact. An ideal intensity measure would capture three primary characteristics of any given county at time $t$:

1. The cumulative effect of overlapping policies;
2. The proliferation of locally derived exemptions from TABOR and the SLPTR; and,
3. The local dynamics that may trigger a breach in the ceilings imposed by the aforementioned legislation.

The indicator used in a previous iteration of this analysis was simply an ordinal score that captured only the first two characteristics. Effectively, the score added a point for each additional constraint. For example, all counties in 1987 would have possessed a score of two given the general application of the SPLTR and the Gallagher Amendment. The scores were subsequently modified by De-Brucing, which occured in 47 of 64 counties over the 1993-2009 period. If only one of the policies was exempted, only one point would be removed. In effect, it was a cumulative indicator function. The reason it has value in this paper is because it provided a clear view of variety policy application. Observe the score distribution by the year 2009.