The Title Board will hear objections to 14 measures that received ballot titles last week, nine of which pertain to regulation of oil and gas development.

Timothy Steven Howard took issue with five similar proposals, Initiatives 307-311, that would replace the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission with a new, independent board to regulate the extraction industry. The board would need to establish safe setback distances from wells and would be prohibited from weakening certain environmental and safety rules. Local governments would also have authority over regulation.

Howard argued that there are multiple subjects to the measures besides the stated goal of replacing the COGCC. He identified a new veto power for the independent board over other agencies’ rules and the limiting of local jurisdictions’ regulatory powers as other purposes buried within the initiatives.

The proposals provide the independent board with approval power over certain rules that the air quality, water quality, state health and solid waste regulators create. “The expertise, judgment, and missions” of those four boards, Howard wrote, “will be subservient to the Independent Board. The wholesale shift of authority from state agencies charged with protecting public health, air quality, drinking water quality, and radioactive and hazardous waste disposal to the Independent Board is an unlawful second subject.”

Howard also observed that the initiatives would limit local governments’ authority over oil and gas to the topics of setback distances, flow lines, air quality, plugging of wells, and training for industry employees. He concluded that this was a narrowing of localities’ current powers, and as such, was a second subject.

“Voters would be surprised to learn that the initiative that abolishes the COGCC also severely curtails the ability of local governments to regulate oil and gas development within their jurisdictions,” Howard wrote.

Howard objected to two related measures, Initiatives 312-313, that would prohibit the COGCC or its successor body from weakening its own regulations or those of the Air Quality Control Commission. Pointing out that one rulemaking board has no authority over another, Howard deemed this attempt at expanding jurisdiction beyond what the law allows to be a second subject.

Two other initiatives, 300-301, would give localities the ability to assume COGCC’s authority over oil and gas operations if they choose and require economic impact analyses for proposed COGCC rules, respectively. Howard objected to both.

He pointed out that Initiative 300 also denied municipalities and counties the ability to enact moratoriums, which Howard felt was a second and contrary subject to the local control proposal. For 301, Howard wrote that the ballot title should enumerate all of the factors that an economic impact report would include.

Initiatives 316-318 would eliminate the political parties’ caucus and assembly process for placing candidates on primary ballots for offices other than the presidency. Celeste Landry objected to each on the grounds that the measures’ true purpose was to reduce the number of candidates on primary ballots. Writing that voters will “grow weary of signature gatherers” if every candidate must petition onto the ballot, Landry believed the effect would be to limit competitive contests.

Landry also claimed an unfairness, if not mathematical impossibility, of petitioning onto the ballot in certain counties. She wrote that in Rio Blanco County, the Democratic Party has fewer than the 275 active voters needed to sign a candidate’s primary ballot petition for county commissioner. (The secretary of state’s office shows 278 registered Democrats as of January 2019.)

“The titles set by the Title Board do not fairly express the initiative’s intent to effectively prohibit a major political party from placing a candidate on its primary ballot,” she wrote.

Brett Rutledge and Joyce R. Kelly objected to Initiative 314, which seeks to prohibit excessive confinement conditions for farm animals. They allege that the ballot title omits several key features about enforcement and penalties, while words like “confinement” and “adequate space” unfairly gin up voter sympathy and should be stricken.

Finally, Anna Jo Haynes asked for rehearing of Initiative 315, which would divert tobacco tax revenue and tobacco master settlement money to fund preschool programming. In her interpretation, the measure goes beyond that one subject: it also creates a tax on tobacco-derived nicotine vapor products and denies revenue to localities that ban tobacco or nicotine.

“A key purpose of the single subject requirement is to guard against ‘uninformed voting caused by items concealed within a lengthy or complex proposal,'” Haynes cautioned.