Colorado voters crushed anti-tax activist Douglas Bruce’s so-called “Petition Rights Amendment” by a 78 percent to 22 percent margin in 1994 and 69 percent to 31 percent in 1996. Now two acolytes, Doug Campbell and Dennis Polhill, have renewed this broad-brush attack on representative government with an item on the Nov. 7 ballot. The third time is no charm, and voters should quash Amendment 38 as decisively as they rejected its precursors.
This initiative made headlines recently when Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez withdrew his support after belatedly discovering that the measure could threaten private property rights – a problem business groups first spotlighted 14 years ago.
Amendment 38’s problems begin with its virtually unlimited scope. Colorado’s constitution now reserves initiatives and referendums to home-rule cities and the state. Amendment 38 would extend them to “all districts,” ranging from county governments to fire districts, school boards, housing authorities, soil conservation districts, library districts, etc. Colorado has more than 1,500 such special districts, most small with volunteer boards that serve purely local needs. Thus, 38 would open the way to thousands of initiatives challenging any “legislative action” or “policy” adopted by such districts. Just to ensure chaos, the term “policy” is not defined in the amendment.
Amendment 38 also sets up timelines that would allow opponents of any local government action – for instance, a decision to build a new firehouse – to delay it by up to two years even if they lose the resulting election. Meanwhile, costs for the project could escalate. Project opponents would have as long as a year to circulate petitions and, since special elections are banned, it could be another year or more before the issue goes before the voters.
Amendment 38’s most confusing section says: “This section shall not apply to referendum petitions to reduce private property rights, such as zoning challenges, which petitions may still lawfully exist.” But in a letter to Bruce, Beauprez noted that limiting language refers only to referendums, not the citizen initiatives authorized elsewhere in Amendment 38, meaning “a de facto down-zoning could occur by way of initiative (after a land-use decision has been made) and the owner of the property would in fact to subjected to what amounts to a government ‘taking’ with no recourse.”
The more you read this confusing initiative, the less there is to like. Court and administrative review is so restricted as to be virtually nonexistent. Taxpayers would be required to pay for the printing and publicizing of petitions by special-interest groups. Colorado courts could be paralyzed by a flood of petition actions that Amendment 38 gives precedence over all other legal actions, including criminal trials and civil suits.
And the amendment offers virtually unlimited opportunities for lawyers to reap taxpayer funds by suing districts that attempt to review initiatives.
Amendment 38 isn’t about petition rights; it’s about petition wrongs. It was wrong for Colorado in 1994, wrong again in 1996 and it’s still wrong in 2006.
