Changing constitution will be ’08 issue

DENVER - A bipartisan group of legislators is planning a statewide tour this summer to speak to voters about what could be one of the biggest issues of 2008: constitutional reform.

Democratic House Speaker Andrew Romanoff and veteran Republican Rep. Al White are among those pushing the idea that the state should make it harder to change its foundational document. Their goal is to find out how to do that in a way that’s acceptable to voters.

The idea received little discussion during the legislative session. White floated an amendment to require 60 percent approval for constitutional changes, but it died in a Senate committee.

Romanoff, D-Denver, argued that it made little movement because legislators knew they would have another year to get it right and wanted to ensure they could get the public to understand why it’s important.

“One of the reasons we didn’t pass the 60 percent threshold this year is because we didn’t have to,” he said.

Romanoff and others point out that Coloradans can change state laws with simple majority votes and say the constitution should be harder to amend. They point to the conflicting missions of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, a tax and spending limitation, and Amendment 23, which requires automatic annual spending increases for public schools.

Both constitutional provisions were approved by voters. Neither amendment received enough support to meet the 60 percent threshold suggested by Romanoff.

After a recession, Colorado found itself fiscally hamstrung by the two amendments, which could not be changed without another constitutional amendment. The result was Referendum C, the controversial budget cure approved by voters in 2005.

Meant to be a broad set of guidelines on how the state can be governed, the constitution has become a morass for minor laws and spending restrictions that belong in statutes, proponents argue. The Colorado Constitution now has three times the verbiage of the U.S. Constitution.

In the years after the initiative process became law in 1910, citizens and legislators flooded the ballot with successful measures. Such efforts slowed from the 1920s to about 1970, when interest picked up with the environmental movement, and tax-cutting groups jumped on the bandwagon in the 1980s.

The latest voter-approved measure with profound unintended consequences is Amendment 41, aimed at limiting lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers and other public employees.

When it was determined that the Amendment 41 ethics law passed in November prevented children of state workers from accepting scholarships, for example, legislators said there was nothing they could do about it.

Thus Romanoff’s road show, expected to hit Colorado Springs and other cities in June or July, was born.

White, R-Winter Park, suggested retrying his 60 percent threshold or asking voters to allow a constitutional convention. Romanoff said he can see asking voters for a timeout from a rule that limits initiatives to one subject in order to put a question on the ballot that involves fixing conflicting aspects of TABOR, Amendment 23 and the so-called Gallagher property-tax amendment.

Legislators want to give voters an incentive to offer initiatives that change state statute but not the Constitution, so that lawmakers can clean up problems or contradictions in the laws, said Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs. The incentive could involve placing a restriction on what could be changed by legislators in such referred measures, or lowering of the threshold of signatures needed to seek a statute change.

Dennis Polhill, who helped push the successful term-limits measure in the 1990s, argued that restricting residents’ ability to make laws is a hostile attempt to take power from the people. He’s worried the legislators want to trick voters into giving away their power.

“It’s hard now (to amend the constitution). Anybody who’s ever done it knows that it’s hard,” he said. “When they say they want to make it harder to amend, they mean they want to make it impossible.”