A proposed growth limitation constitutional amendment to submit to Colorado voters in 2018 was found to not meet the state’s single-subject requirement by the Secretary of State‘s title review board Wednesday, Dec. 7.

The backer of the proposed ballot measure, Daniel Hayes of Golden, has seven days to file a motion for a rehearing and submit a revised measure to address the board’s objection. That centered around Hayes’s inclusion of a sentence that reads, “At least 30 percent of the housing subject to the limitation shall be affordable housing and affordable senior housing.”

Hayes, who authored the City of Golden‘s growth limitation measure 21 years ago, said he included the wording to avoid a growth limit from leading to the construction of “mansions” at the exclusion of other types of housing.

“The argument you hear with growth limits is it only leads to the construction of expensive homes and I wanted to be sure to control that,” he told the board. “This would require affordable housing be built so poor people are addressed.”

The board – composed of officials from the Colorado Legislative Council, Attorney General’s Office and the Secretary of State’s Office – also questioned the proposal’s ban on issuing building permits between the November 2018 election and the amendment’s effective date of Jan. 1, 2019. Hayes said that was designed to avoid a building permit “feeding frenzy” similar to the one Golden experienced when it’s growth limitation was approved.

“Between the election and the first of the year, we had about a 5 percent growth rate with a glut of permits issued,” he said. “The counties, the cities and towns that want to address their growth need time to decide how they want to proceed.”

Hayes’s proposed amendment would limit privately owned residential development in the seven-county Denver metro area, plus El Paso, Larimer and Weld counties, to no more than 1 percent growth per year in 2019 and 2020.

“I wanted to let the counties that have the fastest growth take a 2-year breather, then they can decide how they want to limit growth as they see fit,” Golden said.

Growth limitations could be amended or repealed by initiative or referendum beginning in 2021. The proposal would also allow residents of any other municipality or county in Colorado to petition to put growth limitation measures on their local ballots.

Hayes told the Denver Business Journal last month that he planned to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Amendment 71 on the grounds it would be nearly impossible to meet the amendment’s 55 percent approval threshold to pass a constitutional amendment. Amendment 71 also requires 5 percent of a proposed amendment’s petition signatures to be gathered from the 35 state senate districts in Colorado.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Colorado’s population grew 8.5 percent between 2010 and 2015, reaching nearly 5.5 million people. That growth rate was one of the fastest in the country, with studies showing about two-thirds of the growth due to people moving to Colorado and not state residents’ birth and death rates.