Backers of two proposed constitutional amendments to restrict oil and natural gas development said Wednesday they will not appeal the Colorado Secretary of State’s ruling of an insufficient number of qualified petition signatures to place the measures on the Nov. 8 general election ballot.

Secretary of State Wayne Williams announced the ruling on Aug. 29, and backers of amendments 75 and 78 had 30 days to appeal in Denver District Court. Suzanne Spiegel with Frack Free Colorado, one of the groups that had tried to gather the required number of petition signatures, said backers just didn’t have enough resources or time to mount a successful appeal.

“It’s a very cumbersome process and would require thousands of hours,” she said. “We have to find the people who signed the petitions, get them to sign an affidavit, get it notarized and then the other side can require them to appear in court.”

Spiegel added a 30-day time limit and the amount of money needed made a successful appeal “nearly impossible.”

Amendment 75 would have given local governments the authority to regulate energy development and fell nearly 20,000 projected signatures short of qualification, Williams said, while Amendment 78, which would have required a 2,500-foot setback around oil and gas operations, fell over 20,000 projected signatures short. Each needed 98,942 valid signatures from Colorado voters to make the ballot.

Backers had gone through the signatures questioned by Williams and believe they could verify enough to challenge his ruling, Spiegel said, but didn’t feel their efforts would succeed.

Spiegel said they planned to try to get the two measures, or something similar, on the 2018 election ballot. In the meantime, the groups planned to work to oppose Amendment 71, the Raise the Bar initiative that would make it more difficult to get proposed amendments on the state election ballot.

“It would make all future measures incredibly difficult to get on the ballot,” Spiegel stated. “So we’re going to be educating the electorate about who’s behind 71 and what it means to grassroots groups like ours.”

Backers noted in a news release that the main group established by the oil and gas industry to oppose amendments 75 and 78, and primarily funded by Anadarko Petroleum and Noble Energy, out-raised the main supporting group, Yes For Health and Safety Over Fracking, by a margin of 19-1. In recent weeks, the industry group transferred $1 million to support the Raise the Bar amendment.

“Make no mistake about it, Raise the Bar is an effort to prevent future initiatives designed to protect communities from fracking,” said Razz Gormley of Frack Free Colorado in the release. “This is corporate money, primarily from the oil and gas industry, being spent to take direct democracy away from citizens.”

Micah Parkin of 350 Colorado said in the release that Raise the Bar would make it “nearly impossible for ordinary Colorado people to participate in one of the last vestiges of direct democracy, the ballot initiative process. Raise the Bar is an attempt to eliminate legitimate grassroots movements that are powered by people by making qualifying for the ballot even more expensive and logistically cumbersome, leaving the process accessible only to extremely wealthy special interests and corporations, like the oil and gas industry.”