The Raise the Bar campaign is not the David and Goliath story its backers are trying to say it is, and voters should be wary.
The campaign’s effort to pass Amendment 71, which would make it nearly impossible to amend Colorado’s constitution, has done an excellent job of presenting itself as a well-intentioned drive by Coloradans to stop out-of-state special interests from cluttering up our rule book.
Mailers, billboards and TV commercials have featured prominent elected officials who support the change. Some mailers are convincingly designed to look like a message from your next-door neighbor, who in grass-roots style, wants to encourage you to vote for Amendment 71.
But the campaign and the cause are the antithesis of grass roots.
The real muscle behind Raise the Bar is coming from the oil and gas industry, and we worry that fact is getting lost in the shuffle. The industry began amassing a war chest in an issue committee called Protecting Colorado’s Environment, Economy and Energy Independence back in 2014, when environmental groups began threatening to put local control and other industry-damaging questions on the ballot. The intent behind that $13.7 million arsenal was to guard against the passage of those measures.
And for good reason. We’ve stood with the oil and gas industry against such initiatives that would demand unreasonable regulation of hydraulic fracturing, a relatively well-regulated and effective method for extracting the natural resources needed to run this country. And certainly, those feared initiatives have support from out-of-state special interests.
After those measures failed to make the ballot — under our current amendment process — there was all that money left to spend. Why not spend it to permanently protect against another round of local control, even if doing so changed Colorado’s historic use of the initiative process to keep state lawmakers in check? Raise the Bar has so far spent $3.4 million, much of which came from energy companies. Last Friday, those companies pumped an additional $600,000 into the drive. And more could be on the way.
Every ballot issue gets funding from special interests — the opposition groups to Amendment 71 have raised about $645,000 in large part from big unions like the National Education Association and the Colorado AFL-CIO.
And we agree that Colorado’s constitution is a mess. It’s undeniable there are laws that tie the hands of our elected officials doing their best to represent us.
But we worry the effort was co-opted somewhere along the way and so we’re flagging for voters the money behind the movement so they can make an informed decision.
Raise the Bar was born from a series of conversations about making the state a better place. Participants in the Building a Better Colorado movement indicated strong support for both raising the percent of voter approval required to amend the constitution and requiring a geographic distribution of signatures to put the issue to voters. Daniel L. Ritchie, the philanthropist behind the movement, noted “when in our divisive politics do so many from such different perspectives come together? What’s happening with Raise the Bar is special.”
But the way those those strictures have been fashioned creates a barrier to our amendment process that only the deepest pockets could surpass, and we continue to argue that it goes too far.
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