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Romanoff shifts gears for reform
Romanoff shifts gears for reformLacking GOP support, he turns to petition route for TABOR effort
May 5, 2008By Joe Hanel | Herald Denver Bureau
DENVER - A top Democrat has given up looking for Republican support in the Legislature for a major rewrite of two constitutional amendments.
Instead, Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff will work with outside groups to gather 76,000 citizen signatures to put his idea on the November ballot, he said in an interview Sunday.
Romanoff wants to repeal parts of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, which limits how much revenue the state can collect, and Amendment 23, which requires increasing amounts to be spent on education. Together, the two guarantee the K-12 education budget will eat into other state programs during a recession.
All 60 Democrats in the Legislature backed his plan, Romanoff said. But he still needed four Republicans in both the House and Senate. As of Sunday, he was "a few votes short in each chamber," he said.
"People didn't want to buck their party leadership. They didn't want to risk a primary," Romanoff said.
Rep. Ellen Roberts of Durango was one of three Republicans to publicly support the idea. But outside the Legislature, a number of Republicans have backed the idea, including Attorney General John Suthers, former Speaker of the House Doug Dean and former Senate President Tom Norton.
"The good news is the support for this plan is growing outside the Capitol, even if it's stagnant inside the Capitol," Romanoff said. "I think we're going to have a broad coalition to take this forward to November."
Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien has signed on as a supporter, Romanoff said Friday. But Gov. Bill Ritter has not fully backed the idea, even though he stood behind Romanoff last month at a news conference when the bill was introduced.
Romanoff had the option to go to the ballot because his allies filed paperwork to start a campaign on April 25, minutes before the deadline expired. But he kept searching for GOP support throughout the last week. The Legislature can put a question on the ballot with a two-thirds vote.
His proposal repeals the revenue limits of TABOR and the spending requirements of Amendment 23. It preserves TABOR's most famous part - the ability of voters to approve or deny any tax increase. But it would end the TABOR rebates that Colorado voters used to get in better economic times. Taxpayers haven't seen a rebate in nearly a decade, and they voted to give up the rebates for five years in 2005's Referendum C.
Roberts said she wasn't surprised that Romanoff is choosing the petition route. She's hoping to promote the conversation this summer throughout her Southwest Colorado district.
"Probably at every town-hall meeting I have, I will be bringing it up," she said.
Roberts isn't sure what part, if any, she will play in the ballot campaign. This week, she's focused on her own constitutional reform, which is still alive in the Legislature.
She's a co-sponsor of Senate Concurrent Resolution 3, which would make it harder to get constitutional amendments on the ballot through the petition process - exactly the process Romanoff is now counting on.
SCR 3 raises the number of signatures to make the ballot and requires campaigns to gather signatures from each of the state's seven congressional districts.
Roberts has championed the geographic distribution requirement, but environmental groups are lobbying against it. The House started to debate the idea Friday afternoon, but it adjourned for the weekend before voting. Representatives are expected to resume their debate today.
The resolution already cleared the Senate with more than the required two-thirds vote. But if it stalls in the House, Roberts and her allies have no backup plan. No one has filed the paperwork to run the campaign by citizen petition.
Legislators must finish their annual session by Wednesday. Anything that hasn't passed by midnight Wednesday automatically dies.
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