Building a Better Colorado is a coalition of civic leaders, led by former University of Denver Chancellor Dan Ritchie, trying to help Coloradans understand and ultimately undo the conflicting revenue and spending provisions in Colorado's constitution.
These provisions, all approved by voters, include the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), which limits state revenue and requires a vote of the people to raise taxes or issue general obligation debt; the Gallagher Amendment, which artificially skews the property tax burden toward commercial properties and away from agricultural and residential property; and Amendment 23, which requires spending increases on education whether or not the state can afford them.
Together, these three provisions and other laws have mandated state expenditures that increase faster than the allowed rate of state revenue growth, even in a strong recovery and with sustained job growth. The result is what Building a Better Colorado leadership calls "a fiscal Gordian knot" that cannot be undone with a single constitutional amendment.
With an eye toward avoiding future tangles like the one we're in now, Building a Better Colorado wants voters also to consider overhauling the rules for getting constitutional amendments on the ballot and passing them.
Right now it's halftime for the Building a Better Colorado effort, which has held a series of town meetings across the state. Commendably, the organization has worked very hard to reach beyond the metro area. Only six of its first 21 meetings were held in the Denver metro area, and only nine of 31 are planned. After 21 community "summits" from the Western Slope to Westminster and online input from thousands of visitors to its website, betterco.org, the organization has taken a break. Another 12 meetings are planned for the next four weeks.
The harder work begins next year when Building a Better Colorado actually begins to advocate for the most likely-to-succeed solutions that have come forward, and to develop a strategy for getting those ideas before Colorado voters.

"Grass-tops"

Last month, we sat in on two of the meetings — one in Denver on Nov. 16 and one in Westminster on Nov. 23. Building a Better Colorado acknowledges that these community meetings were a "grass-tops," not a grass-roots, affair. We sat around tables with groups of engaged citizens, including a number of elected officials, trying to be thoughtful about Colorado's future.
But we also came away wondering how the average voter will respond to a series of initiatives that would likely involve spending more money and restricting how our laws get amended.
There was a broad consensus among the engaged participants for making significant tweaks to TABOR to provide for future growth. Specifically, more than 80 percent of the almost 1,800 participants have supported allowing the state to keep revenue it collects under the Hospital Provider Fee and spend it, rather than refunding that revenue to the citizens. One participant in Westminster called it a "no-brainer," and her comment had broad support.
There is also strong support for changes to our constitutional amendment process. Among them:
• Requiring petition signatures from different geographic areas for proposed initiated constitutional amendments.
• Requiring a super-majority (vote) to adopt future constitutional amendments but continue to allow a simple majority for fixes to amendments that were previously adopted.
• Requiring more signatures for proposed constitutional amendments versus changes in state statutes.
We also found some contradictions. Colorado voters seem to like being a test bed for democracy in the 21st century, but they are keenly aware that hastily passed constitutional amendments can have vast unintended consequence in the future.
They are also fearful of handing too much power to the legislature, yet they are also aware that laws often have to be tweaked to respond to changing circumstances.
And they would like to tighten the process for getting measures onto the ballot but are fearful of rules that would make it tougher for grassroots efforts to make change and easier for special interests to push a single agenda.
Next year's elections will likely be extremely volatile in our swing state. We know the electorate is angry and anxious, and candidates are succeeding by playing to those feelings. With a highly competitive Senate race and with Colorado potentially being once again the decisive state in the Electoral College vote for president, we can all expect a torrent of political advertisements, name-calling and invective.

Challenges ahead

The 2016 election cycle makes the challenges for Building a Better Colorado even greater. Among them:
• Reaching out to less engaged voters and connecting with them. Beyond polling, focus groups and their online site, it will likely take an innovative social media strategy to translate grass tops into grassroots.
• Convincing voters that government should be trusted with more money. Since the passage of TABOR in 1992, Colorado voters have tended to approve tax increases when it is clear what they will get in exchange, and to disapprove of tax increases where it is not clear what they would get in exchange. In Westminster (but also in Denver) we picked up more than a bit of skepticism about whether unshackling spending curbs would really result in better schools and more roads.
• Translating the data it collects into actual ballot proposals that are clear and easily grasped by voters.
Building a Better Colorado has a big job ahead in persuading angry, anxious Colorado voters to part with more of their money and change the Wild West attitude toward constitutional amendments. It may not be impossible, but it will be an uphill battle. One key is to tie spending increases to specific outcomes that the people are willing to pay for. Another may be engaging more of the electorate in a discussion about our state's future.