The future of natural gas, tax rates, trans acceptance, drug policy, how people vote and more may hang in the electoral balance in November as Coloradans face a longer ballot than usual.
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Up to 15 questions, either referred by the state legislature or more commonly initiated by outside groups through statewide petitions, could end up on the ballot — each capable of creating new state priorities, stamping new mandates into law, making binding declarations about Colorado values or remaking fundamental parts of state governance.
That number would be a modern record for questions put before voters. It’s the latest ballot measure crush of such a scale in the last two decades, according to the secretary of state’s office, with a few past even-year elections — when federal and state races tend to draw more participation — featuring as many as 14 state ballot questions. But the average number in that time has been 10.
Many measures heading for this fall’s ballot will stir fierce fights between opponents and proponents. All will fight for oxygen in an electoral season headlined by the contest over the governor’s office and flooded with money in a battle over congressional seats that could determine the balance of power in Washington, D.C.
And each will be a test for an electorate tasked with Colorado-style direct democracy, in which voters have a chance to overrule, affirm or sidestep the state’s elected representatives altogether.
“It’s a legitimate part of the political discourse of Colorado, and it’s just as legitimate as the legislature is in the ability to create laws,” said Michael Fields, the head of the conservative advocacy organization Advance Colorado and a superuser of the initiative process.
But as legitimate as the process is for making laws — indeed, it’s necessary for things like raising taxes or changing the state constitution — it’s also not the same thing as the legislative process, said Phil Chen, a University of Denver political science professor.
Lawmaking via ballot box comes with its own challenges and burdens for voters, especially as they’re weighing measures that could have broader implications than the direct question being asked.
“People think of it as the legislating process,” Chen said. “But it doesn’t really look like the legislating process.”
Citizen initiatives as a ‘backstop’ to the legislature
This year, the state’s voters will likely be asked to weigh in on eight proposed changes to the Colorado Constitution and seven that would change state law. Several of the measures are undergoing signature review by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, with the final say still weeks away — including on a major income tax rewrite that has the potential to become the marquee ballot battle.
Citizen initiatives that have qualified for the ballot propose changes to state law that include:
- Increased criminal penalties for the possession or sale of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
- Life in prison for the human trafficking of a minor.
- A ban on transgender youth from playing on sports teams not aligned with their biological sex.
- A ban on gender-affirming surgery for people younger than 18.
Proposed constitutional changes that have qualified for the ballot include:
- A requirement that law enforcement notify federal immigration officials when an immigrant without proper legal status is charged with a violent crime.
- The establishment of a right to use natural gas for cooking and heating.
- A mandate that all taxes and fees collected for motor vehicles and gas be spent on roads.
Other measures are still awaiting final approval by the secretary of state:
- A proposal that would move Colorado to a graduated income tax system in which high earners pay a higher tax rate, marking a big change in tax policy.
- A cap on the state’s income tax rate.
- A requirement that sales taxes on sporting goods be earmarked for conservation efforts.
- A mandate for additional voter verification for mail-in ballots.
- A ban on congressional redistricting outside the typical once-a-decade census cycle.
- The creation of a constitutional right to hunt and fish.
- A requirement that ballot questions be written at an 8th grade reading level.
A proposal that would raise the amount of tax money the state can keep under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights — known as raising the TABOR cap — was placed on the ballot by legislators last spring. That extra money, which normally would be returned through refunds or another way, would be mandated to go to education.
Other outside initiatives proposed this year didn’t make the ballot, including ones geared toward allowing an extra round of congressional redistricting in 2028 to give Democrats a shot at winning more of the state’s U.S. House seats. Part of a national effort by Democrats to blunt Republicans in a mid-decade redistricting battle, the attempt here was halted in late June by the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled the measures violated a single-subject rule.
Many of the citizen initiatives that did make the ballot came in direct response to things the legislature had either passed or rejected in recent years.
The severity of fentanyl penalties, for example, was a session-defining debate in 2022 as lawmakers grappled with balancing rehabilitation and public health in light of the rising scourge of synthetic opiates.
Protections for trans people and children have also been a perennial push in recent years, as have efforts to push back on federal immigration enforcement in Colorado.
But as Colorado has turned reliably blue over the past decade, with Democrats winning large legislative majorities, the ballot box has proven to be the best place for conservative policies to gain traction.
Fields and Advance Colorado have successfully pushed to earmark money for law enforcement and to pass more stringent sentences for people convicted of violent crimes. Voters also overwhelmingly approved income tax cuts in 2022 and 2020.
This year, the group is playing a mix of offense and defense. It is backing the natural gas measure, which would protect access to that fuel source as Colorado officials push for more renewable energy. It is aiming to block the graduated income tax measure by running the proposed income tax cap. The group is also backing the fentanyl measure and the immigration enforcement measure, among others.
“The assumption from legislators is (the people) voted for us, so they agree with all of our policy positions,” Fields said of Democrats’ mindset. “And we just know that’s not the case. The backstop to that is our citizens’ initiatives. That’s why we’re seeing that used more and more, because there is that disconnect.”
Many of the proposals, from Fields and others, tackle complex policy that can have second- and third-level effects that aren’t necessarily apparent on first blush, said Chen, the University of Denver professor.
In the legislature, the debate around fentanyl, for example, often turned to concerns about sweeping people with addiction into broad categories of drug-dealing and whether harsher penalties would actually result in fewer people with addictions.
To hear it from opponents of the proposed graduated income tax measure, that question is not just about whether wealthier people should pay more; it also expands to whether businesses will relocate to Colorado or stay here — and the resulting economic impact of those decisions.
If any of those proposals were to move through the legislature, they would come with multiple committee hearings — likely with hours and hours of testimony from advocates, opponents, nitpickers and people who would be directly affected by the policy changes. Lawmakers would have chances to offer amendments, ask questions and weigh in at several steps along the way.
Chen said the initiative process, by contrast, in effect loops voters in for the last possible up-or-down vote on what is often a morally charged, but complex, policy.
Regular people, who are busy with their own lives, simply don’t have time or access to the wide variety of expert opinions and analysis that lawmakers do. They can’t offer amendments or signal degrees of support. It’s not that people aren’t capable of careful considerations, Chen said, but the logistics are simply different from the legislative process.
Colorado does hedge against such challenges some, with its Blue Book offering pro-and-con analysis of the measures in the weeks between ballots being mailed to voters and Election Day. But it’s still not the same thing as person-to-person discussions, he said.
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“This is ultimately the issue we run into with initiatives and referenda,” Chen said. “At least in Colorado, many of them are very complex policy positions, and then they are also moral or social issues.”
A statement of values — or tying the hands of experts?
One initiative in particular taps into the dynamic of asserting a statement of values as a policy preference: the constitutional right to hunt and fish.
The initiative was brought by the International Order of T. Roosevelt, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit group named after Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s 26th president. Its declared aims are to preserve the “North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” or the principle that wildlife is a public trust — including the right to hunt and fish.
To that end, the organization has been on a national push to write those protections into state constitutions. This year, Colorado is on the list with Initiative 302. (That initiative, like all others approved or pending, will be renumbered once the ballot is certified in the next month.)
The proposal would amend the state constitution to say that “hunting and fishing are the preferred means of responsibly managing fish and wildlife populations.” The language also specifies that the amendment would not authorize any trespassing or infringement on property rights, or limit state authority to regulate hunting and fishing or wildlife management, if a new law is “necessary for sound scientific wildlife conservation and management.”
Backers of the proposal say recent attempts at the state Capitol and at the ballot box to limit the hunting of bobcats and mountain lions, along with a failed bill to move away from using hunting and fishing as the state’s primary tool for wildlife management, show the need for the amendment.
Luke Hilgemann, the CEO of T. Roosevelt Action, which is backing the measure, characterized the proposal as taking an “offensive position” against those efforts — and as a chance to enshrine the heritage of hunting and fishing in the state constitution.
The measure’s backers have made similar successful pushes in dozens of other states.
“Not only is (this amendment codifying) the will of the people as the law of the land, but it prohibits additional attempts at eroding those rights in the future,” Hilgemann said.
He’s adamant that the proposal would still allow science to steer the wildlife management conversation; the amendment would just be a bulwark against rhetoric and politics, he said.
But what Hilgemann sees as Colorado codifying its values, opponents see as tying the hands of decision-makers — and moving the ever-shifting public policy debate on ecology away from experts from different backgrounds and into courtrooms.
“It narrows what the legislature can even do. It narrows what the wildlife commission can do,” said Michelle Lute, the executive director at Wildlife for All, which is opposing the measure. “… These types of constitutional amendments often lead to new legal questions, not fewer.”
‘Our voters are our tax policymakers’
Organizations can spend $1 million just to qualify for the ballot. They need to hire lawyers to draft the language and argue before the Title Board, the administrative body that approves initiatives, and they typically hire firms to gather petition signatures from registered voters.
An initiative proposing a change to state law requires nearly 125,000 signatures; a proposed constitutional amendment also requires that signatures come from at least 2% of voters in each of the state’s 35 Senate districts.
Backers of Initiative 195, a proposed constitutional amendment that would move from a flat to a graduated income tax structure in the state, turned to volunteers for signature gathering — and ultimately delivered their estimated 163,000 entries in the last hours before the deadline to qualify for the ballot. The coalition of progressive and liberal groups supporting the measure, led by the Bell Policy Center, did need to hire petition-gatherers for the final push but estimates that two out of every three petitions were filled with the help of volunteers.
On Monday, supporters marched from the Bell Policy Center in downtown Denver to the secretary of state’s office, chanting and cheering that they’d made the cut-off. As the final banker’s boxes were loaded with petitions ahead of the drop-off, Bell President Chris deGruy Kennedy joked, “Today, I feel great. Yesterday, I was a nervous wreck.”
Now the state is reviewing those signatures to make sure enough are valid.
If approved by voters in November, the initiative would make for perhaps the most sweeping change to Colorado tax policy since voters passed the TABOR Amendment in 1992. Among TABOR’s biggest changes were a requirement that tax increases go on the ballot and limits on how quickly government revenue can grow.
TABOR also locked in the state’s flat tax setup, which means every Coloradan pays the same percentage of their income to the state each year.
Opponents of that system argue wealthier Coloradans benefit disproportionately from it because they have more disposable income, to the detriment of the social safety net and public goods. This proposal would raise the tax rate on filers making $500,000 or more per year from the current flat 4.4% to 8.4%, while lowering the rate for filers making less than $100,000 per year to as low as 3.7% for the bottom bracket.
The net effect would bring an estimated $2.7 billion into state coffers for spending on areas like education, early childcare and healthcare.
The question stands apart from most recent tax ballot measures, which largely pertained to either keeping money collected over the TABOR cap or outright tax cuts. If it qualifies for the ballot, Fields — from Advance Colorado and an opponent of any tax increase — predicts it will be “the biggest battle of the year.”
Since TABOR requires that any tax increase go to voters for approval, the ballot is the end-all, be-all of tax policy that brings in more money.
DeGruy Kennedy and others behind the measure hope the front-end stress of getting enough signatures will pay dividends during the home stretch of the election season. Each of the more than 1,000 people who volunteered is invested — and, supporters hope, will advocate for the need for the change in their own communities.
“It is such a grassroots thing,” said Lisa Weil, the executive director of education advocacy group Great Education Colorado, a backer of the measure. “People find such joy in having something positive and concrete to do — to give the voters an opportunity to vote their values.
“That’s the thing: Our voters are our tax policymakers (in Colorado), but they can only make policy if it’s put in front of them. And this was hard as hell to do.”
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