Opinion: Ballot issue 2Q risks our democracy’s health


2Q is by far the most dangerous measure that I’ve ever seen the city put on the ballot. Please vote “No” on 2Q!
2Q’s ballot title — which says that it removes some of the Charter’s conflicting requirements and obsolete provisions, and clarifies referendum and initiative requirements — makes it sound like it’s just housekeeping. But 2Q creates huge uncertainty for the municipal initiative process, and so will destroy this valuable aspect of direct democracy in Boulder.
Initiatives are done because the citizens are not satisfied with the current city laws, or because they see an issue that has not been addressed by existing legislation. So initiatives are necessarily somewhat adversarial to the local power structure.Therefore, it is critical that the rules be clear and unambiguous, not add unnecessary delays, and not be subject to the discretion of the city staff or the City Council.
Currently, Boulder’s municipal initiative process is carefully laid out in the Charter and works quite well. A good example is Boulder’s campaign finance laws, put in place by citizens in 1999 in an attempt to avoid big money taking over Boulder politics — a legitimate fear, as we can see in this year’s campaigns. But 2Q would discard many of the Charter rules, and the resulting uncertainty could affect everyone, from developers who want to eliminate some land-use regulations, to environmentalists who want to increase protection for some endangered species on open space.
2Q eliminates the current well-designed, functional process, and substitutes the granting of arbitrary powers to the city manager to set the rules and the timing for everything from how long the review of the draft ballot format and language will take, to how long the city clerk can take to count the signatures. And even the timing of setting these rules is left to the city manager’s discretion, so long as they are set before state law’s timing kicks in. Thus, citizens who want to do an initiative have no idea when they will need to start in order to get on the next election’s ballot.And they may find out later that, despite their best efforts, the city manager’s rulings have delayed them for a full election cycle.
Worse, 2Q provides uncertain recourse, because the city manager also can set rules for the protest process, and the relationship between the manager’s rules and state law is unclear. Also, there is no possibility of appealing to the City Council over some arbitrary ruling — the city manager’s power is absolute. And the city manager can change the rules from one initiative to the next. All this forces the petitioners to depend on the city manager’s good will, rather than the clarity of the Charter.
Fortunately, 2Q does not apply to petitioning for Charter amendments. That process is regulated by state law, not by 2Q’s proposed changes. But the last time this was done — the 2016 three-term limit — the city staff created confusion by applying the state law that regulates local initiatives, not charter amendments, to the format of the petitions. And this is not the first time that city staff has failed to follow state law; it also happened in 2015 regarding the timing of the ballot title setting. No amount of legislation will fix bad staff work, only a council that is willing to hold the city staff accountable. Clearly, this did not happen with 2Q.
2Q also prevents citizens from forcing a special election to take place. So even if 90 percent of Boulder citizens signed a petition to try to set up an immediate vote to pass a law of critical importance, under 2Q there is no guarantee that this would happen in a timely fashion.
The one current rule that needs serious fixing is the 5 percent signature requirement for initiatives. Currently, this 5 percent is based on the number of “registered voters.” But because of federal laws designed to prevent people from being prematurely removed from the voter rolls, this number has become grossly inflated. For 2016, Boulder, a university town of about 107,000 total residents including students, had about 93,000 “registered voters,” but only 72,700 “active voters,” of whom only about 66,000 actually voted.
Clearly, the city needs to tie the 5 percent signature requirement to a real number, like how many citizens voted in the last secretary-of-state election, the number the state uses. But, no surprise, 2Q fails to address this legitimate issue, and so doesn’t fix the one real obstacle to direct democracy — having to gather so many thousands of extra signatures.

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