Colorado oil and drilling
A drilling derrick silhouetted by the setting sun in Daconon on Wednesday evening, May 28, 2014. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)
A ballot initiative that would have given communities sweeping powers over oil drilling and other industrial activity was pulled Monday for a lack of supporting signatures, sponsors said.
Initiative 75 would have added the so-called Community Rights Amendment to the state constitution, but to get it on the ballot required 86,105 valid signatures — a rule of thumb is that 125,000 signatures need to be gathered to meet the requirement.
"With just nine weeks to get 125,000 signatures and lacking hundreds of thousands in funding, we knew we faced an uphill battle for 2014," the sponsors said in a statement. "We took a tally this week and now know that we're going to be well short of where we need to be."
Tom Groover, director of the Colorado Community Rights Network, which backed the initiative, called the withdrawal "disappointing, but we aren't giving up on the issue."
The Community Rights Amendment was the most sweeping of those proposed for the ballot to address concerns about a lack of local control over oil and gas drilling. Under the amendment a community could ban just about any industrial activity it found objectionable.
Signatures are being collected by another campaign committee, Coloradans for Safe and Clean Energy, on two ballot measures.
Initiative 88 would mandate a 2,000-foot setback from homes for drilling rigs. Initiative 89 would place an environmental bill of rights in the state constitution.
"We started out with 19 radical measures to ban oil and gas drilling in Colorado. One by one, they have fallen by the wayside," Dan Hopkins, a spokesman for Coloradans for Responsible Reform, which is opposing the ballot measure, said in a statement. "We won't be surprised if 88 and 89 also fall short of the number of required signatures to get on the ballot."
Mara Sheldon, a spokeswoman for Coloradans for Safe and Clean Energy, said the committee is "well on the way" to getting the required signatures.
"Coloradans are clearly ready for a balance between common sense protections for our families and responsible energy development going forward," Sheldon said.