Rare full bipartisan agreement Monday worked to quash a bill aimed at expanding ballot initiative power for residents of unincorporated county areas and of special districts.

All nine members of the House State, Veterans and Military Affairs committee voted against House Bill 1071 introduced by Rep. JoAnn Windholz, R-Commerce City. Committee members said the bill seemed well intentioned but not fully developed, that it would cost counties hundreds of thousands of dollars to run special elections, likely tangle up county and state governance and hamper development.

Windholz told The Colorado Statesman that her bill came in response to an unsuccessful lawsuit by Adams County residents last year to eliminate a stormwater fee charged by the county.

“Those who live in the unincorporated parts of the count didn’t have a voice as to this fee, this ‘tax,’” she said. “All of the folks I talked to had no idea that, if you live in an unincorporated portion of the county, you could not have a voice in objecting to anything.”

“We’ll look at this again,” she said.

Fear that citizens could impede development makes sense, Windholz conceded, but she thought that those concerns had to be weighed against the obligation to ensure that every resident of the state could equally participate in the democratic process.

The bill had observers struggling to place it on the partisan and special-interest spectrum that has grown up around the state’s “direct democracy” initiative process.

Major political battles have been waged in recent years over the right of county and municipal residents to enact bans on oil and gas drilling through the initiative process. Windholz’s Adams County constituents have been engaged in fierce fights over hydraulic fracturing projects in recent months. A 20-well project proposed by Platteville-based Synergy Resources Corp. at the heart of bucolic and unincorporated Wadley Farms near Thornton has made headlines for months.

Although Republicans at the Capitol have staunchly opposed attempts to increase the kind of local power that can halt development, particularly oil and gas development, Windholz’s bill would seem to have given Wadley Farms residents — or residents of places like Wadley Farms — new power to oppose such projects.

The bill would have sent an initiative to county commissioners to approve if 5 percent of registered voters in unincorporated parts of the county signed the petition. If county commissioners didn’t adopt the measure after 20 days, the initiative would then be presented to voters during an election.

The idea resonated with several speakers at the hearing, including Phil Doe, a representative from Be The Change, a grassroots advocacy group for progressive causes.

But representatives from groups such as Colorado Counties, Inc., including Pat Ratliff, a lobbyist for the organization, railed against it in their testimony, saying it would fundamentally alter the role of county commissioners and dilute their authority.

Rep. Mike Foote, D-Lafayette, agreed that the kind of power the bill gave to small populations ran counter to the way government has been designed to function.

“The testimony that was most telling was about how you could have folks in the unincorporated area vote upon an interest that could affect the entire county and would outweigh the (voice of the) entire county,” he told the Statesman. “Our current system of county government is to weigh all of the interest on all of these issues and do what’s best for the county. If the elected (commissioners) make a decision that the majority of the folks in the county disagree with, the remedy of course is to put in new (commissioners), and I believe strongly in that system. This bill would provide an impediment to that system.”

Windholz is running this year for re-election in her swing district. Democrats see the seat as a prime target, especially in the wake of contentious comments Windholz made after the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs in November in which she blamed Planned Parenthood for the attack.

John Meyers, one of two Democrats running to unseat Windholz, said he agreed with her that the initiative process needed improvement, but he didn’t think her bill was took the right approach.

“Whether I’d want to do it for special taxing districts, I don’t know how we move forward with that until we address (the cost issue),” he said. “It seems like an unworkable price, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at options.”

—ramsey@coloradostatesman.com