Face The State Staff Report
During his last term as Speaker of the House, Andrew Romanoff, D-Denver, was one of Colorado's most ardent foes of the petition rights process. Having now served his his last day at the gavel, however, he has announced that he is hitting the streets with petitions, seeking signatures for a proposed ballot initiative.
The announcement comes after Romanoff's legislative colleagues shot down his plan earlier this year to ask voters to overrule the state's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights to support a similar proposal to the one he is now championing before voters. As currently designed, the proposal would allow the state to keep any and all excess tax revenue that would have otherwise been refunded under TABOR. With the proposal now repackaged as an initiative, Romanoff is calling it the Colorado Savings Account for Education.
At the same time that Romanoff seeks support for his initiative, he is still championing his "Constitutional Reform Road Show," most recently appearing in Westminster with fellow lawmakers on June 27th to discuss ways to make it more difficult to amend Colorado's constitution. An unsuccessful legislative proposal during this year's session sought to raise the number of signatures required to get an initiative on the ballot. Currently, initiative backers must get more than 76,000 valid signatures to have a proposed amendment approved for a vote. Most campaigns seek to gather more than 120,000 as a way to protect against incomplete invalid signatures.
In 2006, Romanoff was a lead opponent of the Petition Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have streamlined the initiative process. The initiative was soundly defeated by voters after a shoe-string campaign failed to gain momentum. Romanoff argued against the proposal, saying that it was already too easy to amend the state constitution.
“Romanoff is a young guy and he is learning,” said Dennis Polhill, one of the lead backers of 2006's PRA. “The thing we can learn from observing these events is the importance of the initiative process and the inconsistency is a product of his ignorance about the initiative process.”
Approved by voters in 1992, TABOR requires Colorado citizens to approve any measure leading to an increase in government revenue. Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter is currently challenging a lawsuit to his controversial property-tax increase after a district court judge found that it violated TABOR. Romanoff says he supports Ritter's plan regardless of the lower court’s decision and is optimistic the state Supreme Court will approve the tax increase.
Romanoff's current initiative effort comes after a similar successful 2005 measure by legislators that was advertised as a way to fund education. Referendum C, backed by then-Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, was a five-year time out from TABOR restrictions to account for funding mandates brought on by Amendment 23, a school finance amendment passed in 2000 requiring that funding for K-12 education be tied to enrollment plus inflationary increases.
Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, called the Romanoff’s actions hypocritical.
"This is just typical, 'do as I say, not as I do,'" said Brophy. "I thought all we needed was $3.4 billion from Ref. C and everything would just fine. Now it turns out we have $6.2 billion and it's still not enough."
Since last summer, Romanoff's listening tour has been promoted as a way to meet with citizens across the state during a series of town-hall meetings to discuss means and ways to protect the state from too many constitutional amendments. On a transcript posted on his Web site, Romanoff has likened the Colorado constitution to a “cookbook," saying “It’s hard to argue that the Colorado constitution is superior” to the U.S. constitution, which he called “a thing of beauty.”
Calls to Romanoff for an interview were not returned.
Opponents of Romanoff's current initiative are skeptical of his ability to gather the necessary 76,000 valid signatures before an August 4th deadline.
“It's going to be pretty tough," said Polhill. "It depends how well he's organized. Money talks, so if he has enough money behind him it might be possible. I sure wouldn't want to be trying to do it. You need 100,000 signatures in a month, that's 25,000 a week. That's pretty daunting.”